Surgeon General Warns About Parenting
As if we needed to give people more reasons to not have children
Parenting can be very stressful. While this is not a new concept, the U.S. Surgeon General considers it enough of a “problem” to make it his warning for 2024.
Titled “Parents Under Pressure,” the advisory states that while child-rearing brings joy to caregivers, it also carries much anxiety and worry. “Over the past decade, parents have been consistently more likely to report experiencing high levels of stress compared to other adults.”
Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy further explained the reasons behind his warning in a New York Times op-ed. “A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults who reported the same,” he wrote.
A number of things are concerning about this warning and the surgeon general’s comments. First, the comparison of “parents” to “other adults.” The birthrate in the United States continues to drop. According to an article in The Week, the decline is so steep that we can’t replace the population. The same thing is happening in nearly 200 countries around the world. "These future trends in fertility rates and live births will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganizing societies,” said Natalia V Bhattacharjee, co-lead author of a study about worldwide birthrates.
If you were already on the fence about having children, would reading that your stress level would skyrocket if you became a parent convince you otherwise? Wouldn’t you rather stay with the less-stressed “other adults”?
And here’s more ammo for that choice: “In a 2021 survey, approximately 65% of parents and guardians, and 77% of single parents in particular, experienced loneliness, compared to 55% of non-parents. Furthermore, 42% of parents who experienced loneliness always felt left out compared to 24% of non-parents who experienced loneliness.”
That dovetails into another curious part of the warning: the idea that parents feel no way of escaping the stressors that come with parenting.
Some stressors are naturally hard to overcome. Financial struggles, for example, are a significant source of concern for families. The surgeon general’s warning states: “In particular, parents living in poverty often worry about fulfilling their children's basic needs and the resulting stress can negatively affect their mental health, parenting capabilities, and their children‘s mental health.” Dr. Murthy is correct in noting that parents should be able to have “time off to be with a sick child, affordable child care, access to reliable mental health care,” and other resources.
Some stressors, however, come with the parenting territory. “Evidence suggests that demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep and parental leisure time.” If you asked a parent 40 years ago if they had the same quality time with their partner as they did when they were childless, you’d likely have gotten the same answer as today. While many households back then had only one person working outside of the home, there was still a parent working inside the home. And that work was often more labor-intensive than it is today. Scrubbing floors on hands and knees. Ironing every last piece of material in the house. Sewing dresses, pants and shirts. Social norms at the time dictated that type of work be done, and adding in childcare heightened the stress level.
Another detail noted in the advisory is portrayed negatively: “While parents and caregivers are working more, they are also spending more time engaging in primary child care than before. This care includes physical care, education-related activities, reading to/with children, and playing/doing hobbies with children, among other activities.”
Isn’t that actually a good thing? People of a certain age talk about how their parents sent them out to play in the morning and didn’t expect them back inside until dinnertime. While that created immense freedom for children, it did nothing to strengthen the parent-child bond. Now with parents being more involved in their child’s day-to-day activities, opportunities exist to be involved in many ways. Nevertheless, it is included in the myriad reasons why today’s parents experience so much stress.
Dr. Murthy notes that a big stressor for parents is “widespread fear about the future.” This also is nothing new. Plenty of parents through the years have lain awake wondering if their child would successfully navigate the world as an adult.
Of course, new stressors have emerged over the last few years, gun violence in schools and cyberbullying being two of the biggest. Parents can rightfully feel helpless about such issues, and that can take a mental and emotional toll on them and their children.
Dr. Murthy offers solutions to overcoming the stress of parenting to protect the well-being of caregivers and children. These include expanding government programs like universal preschool and child income tax credits, employee initiatives such as training managers on stress management and work-life balance, and community involvement to foster connections between caregivers and address common feelings of stress or loneliness. These are all noteworthy suggestions.
The underlying message throughout the surgeon general’s advisory, however, is that parenting is a noble job but also terrible enough for the country to send out a huge warning label to anyone considering the role. The theme contradicts Dr. Murthy’s call to “fundamentally (shift) how we value parenting, recognizing that the work of raising a child is crucial to the health and well-being of all society.” It’s almost as if he’s saying that parenting is valuable, but don’t sign onto the responsibility until we have all the safety nets in place.
Here’s the reality: You can wait and plan and believe you have everything exactly where it needs to be for you to have children, and life will still hit you with challenges. You could be transferred for your job and have to uproot your family across the country. Your partner could be deployed, leaving you to raise your children alone for some time. A child could get sick and need lengthy medical treatment. Your partner could get sick and be unable to help in child-rearing. A child could face learning challenges. Then there are the commonplace challenges that can feel like huge hurdles when raising children: a last-minute school project, a broken washing machine, a possible case of strep throat.
How do caregivers get through it? They find their inner strength. They rely on family and friends (and sometimes strangers) for help. They concentrate on the good and try to minimize the bad and how it affects their family. These aren’t tactics that the government can provide. They aren’t new strategies, either. It’s how parents have coped for years and years.
Parenting is stressful. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. It can be heartbreaking. It’s also rewarding, fulfilling, humbling, empowering and a blessing. Not only is it a meaningful endeavor, it is necessary for society.
Surgeon general warnings in the past have encouraged people to stop doing things, like smoking. Here’s hoping this warning will do no such thing.
I agree with you that this warning could promote more childless couples!
Nowadays, many employees are working remotely so I would think that their work schedule is better by being at home!?
I think this SG was looking for something to warn about and thought this is a good one. I am rolling my eyes. The problem is that people don’t want responsibility and want a care-free life—it’s all about me—mentality. A healthy society embraces children, families, but that has been eroding from a sneaky agenda that has infiltrated every institution. The Amish, the Orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics keep forming large families and interestingly, most of these children are well behaved and help take care of their younger siblings. They are our models and our hope. Life is not easy, but we must enjoy the good and hard experiences that parenting entails. Seeing your children grown and managing on their own should be a parents’ best reward.