The parents are not alright: Part 2
The parents are not alright: Part 2
Parents are struggling with stress and pressure, not just because of our mindset, but because of major structural issues affecting how we raise kids in the US today.
Last time, I wrote about the new US Surgeon General’s advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents. Parental stress is so intense that our government is finally paying attention! I shared a few perspectives from my Stoic-inspired parenting approach in my previous post.
This time, as promised, I’ll explore some of the structural issues that parents are facing that are making it so hard to raise our kids in the US today. I’m no expert, but I have a few thoughts, having lived this mom life for 19 years now (I write in shock!). In addition to shifting our own mindsets in important ways, real change out there in the world could make a huge difference. The stress is real!
A few of the structural problems
Let’s talk about just a few of the things that need to structurally shift to enable parents to be less stressed. Parents need tangible help raising our children. We require support for our mental health, and access to affordable mental health care. We need to feel less alone, but not through broadcasts on social media—through real social connections. Also, not surprisingly: We need money (see my post about our expensive American lives).
On to the first item: Help. It’s hard to get help as a parent. I was super fortunate to have help and support from my mom, but not everyone benefits from that. As a whole, we have lost the “village” of folks that people in the old days relied on to assist with raising kids.
When my kids were babies, I joined a mothers’ club to try to find some of that, and it did help with the loneliness, but I still felt uncomfortable asking other people to do things for me or step in and take care of my children for me. It just isn’t something that’s part of the norm these days for most of us; we don’t really believe in sharing the load. Is it because we don’t trust each other? Or are we simply too busy to help?
The elephant in the room
When it comes to help, the massive “elephant in the room” for parents is childcare. It’s an enormous expense—it can be up to $19,000 A MONTH for a single infant in a childcare center. Check out the data in this blog post published just a week ago from the US Department of Labor:
While the cost of child care varies on a number of dimensions, it is typically untenable for families, sometimes costing almost one-fifth of a family’s annual income for just one child, which is more than the cost of rent across the 100 largest U.S. metro areas. Monthly childcare prices in 2018, adjusted to 2024 dollars, ranged from about $5,940 per school-age child in a home-based setting (8% of median family income) to $19,040 for infants in a center (19.3% of a family’s median income). Research suggests that some mothers forego employment due to the high cost of child care, which in turn has implications for both a family’s financial security and the health of the broader economy.
I was one of those mothers: I left a full-time office-based role after my first child was born to become a consultant and contractor, with more flexible hours and at-home work. Later, I returned to full-time employment when my kids were old enough to get care at preschools and schools. It did set me back in terms of certain opportunities. But I knew childcare would be unaffordable given the kind of work I was doing in the area where I was living. I was lucky to be able to have the option to work less and spend more time with my kids, though I still endured significant financial constraints when they were small. But clearly, creating a system to provide parents with quality, affordable care choices would be an absolutely critical way to support moms and dads when their children are small.
If you’re in the US and watched the vice presidential debate, you might have noticed that the moderators asked about childcare—a first, as far as I know. Both candidates agreed that more needs to be done. In fact, they launched into an "extended discussion” of it, according to The New York Times, which framed the issue this way:
The core problem in the sector is that the fees most parents can afford to pay do not cover the cost of doing business for providers, with money left over for profit. And one reason tuition at American child-care centers is so burdensome is that unlike most other developed nations, the U.S. government generally does not subsidize the cost. That has put care providers among the lowest-paid workers in the American economy.
“You can’t expect the most important people in our lives to take care of our children or our parents to get paid the least amount of money,” Mr. Walz said.
Advocates for mothers such as Reshma Saujani, CEO/founder of Moms First, have helped raise the issue of affordable childcare to the forefront of the national discussion. The group also pushes for progress on paid family leave (still not mandated nationally in the US) and equal pay for moms—other super important issues for mothers and caregivers.
Community involvement and social connection
I think that getting more community involvement in child-rearing should also be a goal, which could also help build social connection and alleviate the loneliness of parents. The Surgeon General’s Advisory calls for communities and schools to
Create opportunities to cultivate supportive social connections among parents and caregivers. Social connection can decrease the negative effects of stress. Opportunities for fostering social connection include reimagining public spaces, including public libraries, faith-based organizations, schools, laundromats, barbershops and other places, as social infrastructure for parents and caregivers. Programs should be tailored to accommodate the schedules and needs of parents and caregivers, ensuring they can actively participate and engage with one another, within and across generations (i.e., among parents with children in similar or different life stages).
I love the ideas above, but it has to be more than just “story hour at the library”—we need some kind of helping exchange with each other that involves actual sharing of the load. I saw some of that happening during school shutdowns in the pandemic, when people formed pods for homeschooling and childcare, but I think we’re back to “every mom for herself” again now.
Adding fire to the flames, parents’ time is already scarce because our jobs are typically very demanding. To make enough money to afford to pay for our family’s needs, save for our kids’ college, and plan ahead for our eventual retirement, we have to take on professional roles that often suck us dry. Lots of parents work more than one job and/or long hours. Many parents I know feel that they cannot cut back their work hours, and yet they are torn about how little time they have with their young kids.
Government credits and tax breaks for parents are really valuable, and would definitely help many, many parents. Pandemic-era aid helped lots of families make ends meet. And then it stopped, and poverty rose. According to the Wall Street Journal, homelessness in the US has gone up about 10% this year, setting a new record. Without some kind of larger structural shift addressing the gap between economic “winners and losers” in our society rife with income inequality, it’s hard to know how to relieve parents’ larger stresses about their own and their kids’ economic futures.
Mental health support and care
The Surgeon General’s Advisory makes the point that parental mental health is critical to their children’s well-being, and that it is not in good shape. If parents’ mental health falls apart, it has a huge impact on kids. We all know how difficult it is to access mental health care in the US today—it is expensive, often not covered or not adequately covered by insurance, and it is widely variable in quality and access. Here’s what the advisory urges US national and local governments to do about it:
Ensure parents and caregivers have access to comprehensive and affordable high-quality mental health care. This includes strengthening public and private insurance coverage of mental health care, continuing and expanding enrollment promotion efforts, ensuring adequate payment for mental health services, enforcing parity laws, investing in innovative payment models that integrate mental health care and primary care, supporting telehealth options for delivery of care, and expanding the mental health workforce and community-based mental health care options….
How is this going to happen? I have not yet seen willingness to make these changes. And the situation is really not working for most people, both for parents and kids. In most health care situations (mental and physical) that I’m encountering in the US today, the lack of access to good care or followup from medical professionals is palpable. When I go to my doctors’ office, I feel like a number rather than a human with actual care needs—and that number is sitting next to a dollar sign. I have to struggle just to get a call back from my doctor if I have a concern, and good luck getting an appointment that’s not 2 months out!
One example of the unaffordability of care in the mental health care space: our local medical facility is currently charging $555 for a single, hour-long mental health counselor/therapist visit for anyone whose insurance plan doesn’t cover that type of care (even if you have general health insurance). How is this possible? I’m just going to leave that question there.
What about social media?
In terms of online dangers to our kids, another major stressor for parents, Murthy recommends “making social media safer” to take some of the burden off parents trying to protect their kids online. Needless to say, there are complex commercial interests and lobbyists working on this topic. Interestingly, a couple weeks after the advisory, Instagram announced new protections for kids on its platform. The platform will place those under 18 into “teen accounts” that have certain restrictions on content and prompts them to take breaks. However, teens aged 16 - 17 will be able to turn off those protections themselves! (Those 13 - 15 will need parent approval to do so.) One side note: Many teens have signed up with accounts by giving a fake age, so for them, it won’t likely matter at all. And overall, it’s just a small step, from what I see. Numerous states have also filed suits against social media companies to try to get them to take more responsibility for what kids/teens are exposed to online.
There’s an upside to social media for parents and kids: It lets us connect with others so we won’t feel so alone. It helps folks with a huge range of interests, hobbies, or questions meet each other online and share ideas and support. Yet it is also a cesspool (for a humorous, cynical, and profane take on what you find online, listen to Bo Burnham’s Welcome to the Internet).
Part of that mess is the extreme toxic social comparison that drives our kids crazy and harms their self image in lots of ways, as well as exposes them to cyberbullying. Parents, too, can feel negative emotions when confronted with either the perfect surfaces of others’ lives online, or the frequent ads being pushed on us for services to purchase to help “optimize our kids’ success” (SAT tutoring, anyone?).
There’s much more that could be said, but I’ll end with this: Parents, too, could consider taking an Internet/social media break. Maybe this could be a way to recover our village rather than continue to amplify the panopticon of social stress from comparing ourselves and our choices with our peers. For example, I’ve tried to limit my social media posts about my kids’ achievements. Surely something huge like high school graduation merits an announcement to the folks I’m connected with online…. But in general, adding to the situation of toxic comparison online is not helping anyone. When it feels right, I share the things I’m proud of with my family and friends in phone calls, video chats, emails, over coffee or lunch, and in DMs or text messages filled with happy emojis. In other words, I prefer to talk about my kids’ progress with my village, person-to-person, rather than in online broadcasts.
This is just scratching the surface of what needs to change to really support parents in our chaotic world. Going forward, I’m looking for ways to take micro-steps. Look at who you’re voting for or supporting politically or what you’re advocating for, for example. And maybe we could find pathways to rebuilding the support network that we all, as parents and as humans, badly need to promote our well-being and our ability to raise kids with love and care rather than stress and anxiety. If you have ideas, please share in the comments.