Today’s parents: ‘Exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind’

In his recent advisory on parents’ mental health, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek M. Murthy, said out loud what many parents might have only furtively admitted: Parenting today is too hard and stressful.

Of course, there have always been concerns about families’ well-being. And while some of today’s parents’ fears are newer – cellphones, school shootings, fentanyl – parents have always worried about their children.

So why has parental stress risen to the level of a rare surgeon general’s warning about an urgent public health issue – putting it in the same category as cigarettes and AIDS?

It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy – that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.

This parenting style is known as intensive parenting. But we may have reached a point, the surgeon general and other experts suggest, where intensive parenting has become too intense for parents.

Parents spend greater shares of their money on their children than parents did a generation ago, especially for extracurricular activities like sports or tutoring. They spend more time actively engaged with them, reading or on the floor playing.

Parents blame themselves when they fear they don’t measure up. The surgeon general called out an intense culture of comparison, exacerbated by the internet.

“Chasing these unreasonable expectations has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out and perpetually behind,” Murthy wrote in his advisory, issued in late August.

The increased demands of raising children, combined with responsibilities like paid work and elder care, have come at the expense of mental health, leisure time, sleep and time alone or with a spouse.

Murthy said a pro-family America would require a cultural change – one that envisioned parenting as a societal good, and therefore the responsibility of the whole society.

That could mean parenting a little less intensively, he suggested. Friends, relatives and after-school programs could help care for children. Parents should make time for themselves, he said, to do activities that bring them joy or improve their health, without feeling guilt that they’re spending time away from their children.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.