Is Parent Stress Breaking News?
Three Clinical Psychologists Discuss the Surgeon General’s New Advisory
Hello! I’m delighted to bring you something that’s a little different than my usual Substack newsletter posts. I have my psychologist/burnout specialist hat on, and came together with my two colleagues, friends, and fellow psychologists/moms and to discuss the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on parent stress. Hope you enjoy reading our thoughts!
As you have likely heard, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, recently issued a new advisory on parental stress. This has made a big splash in the news media and parenting circles.
We are here with a hot take on the breaking news of the advisory. Well, not that “hot” – the advisory was released on August 28th. We planned to collaborate on a response within days of the advisory, but because we’re parents precariously balancing all of our roles (and sometimes falling out of balance), it took us almost a month to pull this together, which seems quite fitting!
Who are “we?” We’re three clinical psychologists with overlapping areas of specialization in parenting, burnout, and working parenthood, who share a mission to help parents cope with stress. We’ve each written books in our specific areas of expertise:
Emily Edlynn, PhD is the author of the book Autonomy Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent, Confident Children, and the Parent Smarter, Not Harder Substack newsletter.
Yael Schonbrun, PhD is the author of Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection (When Everything Feels Like Too Much), and an expert on working parenthood. She also writes the Relational Riffs Substack newsletter.
Debbie Sorensen, PhD is the author of ACT for Burnout: Recharge, Reconnect, and Transform Burnout with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and an expert on chronic stress and burnout - including parental burnout. She writes on Substack too!
The three of us are also moms - with eight kids between the three of us - who juggle the demands of parenthood with many other roles. As good friends and colleagues, we lean on each other for emotional support and for the wisdom each of us brings to the table. Parenting stress is on our minds a lot (ahem, always?), so when this Surgeon General’s advisory came out, we had a similar reaction - this is not new news, but amplifying the topic for more widespread discussion is undoubtedly a good thing.
We are excited to finally come together in this Q&A-style post to explore how we can leverage this new advisory to enrich the conversation on the nature of our collective parental stress, how we got to this point, and how to move forward.
Q: What do you think about the new advisory - does this fit what you’ve seen in your work, and in your own experience?
Debbie: I think parents who read the report will find it validating. I looked at the list of “Parental Stressors That Can Impact Mental Health and Well-Being” and I have experienced most of them at some point or another, as I imagine most parents have. I think it’s great that the Surgeon General is using his platform to highlight how stressful parenting has become in recent years, and how that stress impacts parents, kids, and society.
Yael: A Substack post from parenting journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer got to the heart of how I felt when I read it. On the one hand, it’s kind of a “duh” moment for the Surgeon General to call out something parents experience every day. That said, it’s also a moment of helpful validation that can pave the way towards more conversation that potentially could lead to new ways to navigate what often feels impossible. But one thing I’ll add – this is what I discuss in my book, Work, Parent, Thrive – is that the stress (and the pointing out of that stress) can be, in and of itself, quite productive and powerful – so long as we know how to wisely harness it (see below for more on how to do this!).
Emily: My first reaction was that women have been raising their voices about this for the last several years and now that a man in power speaks, everyone listens. As just one example, for the last two years, I’ve pitched articles about needing to address parental stress and anxiety as part of responding to youth mental health in this country, and all the news outlets passed. He’s saying what I’ve been saying! I do realize I am not the Surgeon General. However, I’m also not “just a mom complaining,” which is how it can feel. I’m an expert in the field – even more of an expert than the Surgeon General to speak on these issues.1
Off my soapbox and back to the original question: The summary in the Surgeon General’s NYT Op-Ed hit on all the most important aspects of what I see as problematic about modern parenting, from a lack of external supports and infrastructure to the role of social comparison and unrealistic expectations we have internalized. It’s a potent mix of external and internal stressors. The other problem he identifies that fits with my personal experience and that of every parent I know is the simple math of time. Parents spend more hours working and caregiving than ever before, so we have less time for rest and hobbies. That is a recipe for our own mental health problems.
Q: We’ve all read the advisory. What stands out most?
Emily: The comparison of who feels overwhelmed by stress on a daily basis really struck me: 48% of parents versus 26% of adults who aren’t parenting. But big picture, this advisory finally highlights what I’ve been trying to speak to in the last few years: the risk of high stress to parents’ mental health affects our children. We haven’t been talking about parental stress and anxiety nearly enough when we talk about our children’s mental health. This is the most important area to not just talk about but do something about.
Yael: The time demands strike me. There is this great irony that technologies of various kinds should have ostensibly enabled us to reduce the demands on our time – dishwashers, laundry machines, apps for everything! And yet we still feel so intensely overwhelmed. That lack of time is driven at least in part because we have expectations around intensive parenting driven by cultural pressures, though research suggests that intensive parenting is neither good for us or our kids. So even though we in theory could offset some of our demands and free up some time, many of us feel like we’d be terrible people (or perhaps we get FOMO?) when we don’t devote all of that alleged free time to family life.
Debbie: I was struck by a profound sense that we’re in the perfect cultural storm for parental stress right now. A few examples that stood out to me:
Raising kids is expensive, and financial stress is high these days. Childcare costs have grown by about 26% in the last decade in the U.S. About a fourth of U.S. parents struggle to afford the family’s basic needs, and many more are feeling strapped financially.
The increased time parents spend both working and engaging in childcare compared to past generations, which Emily mentioned above, is a recipe for stress and burnout.
We live in a world of school shootings, wars, pandemics, political divisiveness, climate change, and other stressors. Many of us are worried about kids’ and teens’ mental health in the wake of the Covid pandemic. The stressors of modern life are always in the background as we try to carry on and raise our kids.
No wonder so many parents are struggling!
Q: What do you think are some of the main factors driving this increase in parental stress?
Yael: In addition to the excessive pressure to be always-engaged in our parental roles, we’re also living in a period in which there’s an enormous lack of on-the-ground supports – like, we may want someone to call on for help, but, for many of us, no obvious person is available to call. This despite tons of research showing that humans are wired to rear children in community. Anthropologists even have a word for this: “alloparenting,” which refers to care of children that’s provided by non-parents. Rearing children alone isn’t how we are meant to do it.2 The trouble is, trends like moving away from kin, the dissolution of spiritual communities, and the fabrication of fake selves in our social media feeds, leave us without the real and true assistance we want and need. This can be detrimental for parents because rearing children is too taxing to do alone.
Debbie: Everyone is working so hard, and childcare is expensive and hard to find, so parents are in a bind. There’s also a lot of pressure on both parents and kids these days. I think a lot about Emily’s interview with Jennifer Wallace on our podcast, Psychologists Off the Clock. Jennifer talked about how parents’ fears about their children’s futures, because of economic uncertainty and a perception that only the highest achieving kids will get into college, feed into “toxic achievement culture.” I think we’re all experiencing pressure to be great, highly involved parents in order to help our kids succeed in life. Trying to meet those high parenting expectations and ensure a stable future for our children is too much - especially given the lack of support Yael mentioned.
Emily: I think it’s a convergence of so many factors and we can’t ignore any of them. It’s the increased economic stress on the middle class, the advent of the internet creating a sense of our children being under more imminent threat than they are statistically, social media influencers promoting false images of parenthood along with bad advice, and that parents simply have too much on their plates to thrive. We are just trying to survive.
Q: What advice or encouragement can you offer to parents who are stressed and/or burned out?
Emily: From my vantage point, our parenting culture of hyper-parenting is part of what is burning us out. I think we are parenting very anxiously right now, in large part to the constant fear messaging all around us about how we need to protect our children. This type of parenting is absolutely exhausting and it interferes with our children developing important skills. I like to remind parents that if you feel like you are parenting “so hard” and it still feels like you’re “failing,” it’s not you! We have evolved to a landscape of toxic messages about “good parenting.”
I’m here as a voice for another way! Knowing the benefits of doing less for our children so they can do more for themselves can help us make choices to do things differently that relieve our load and promote our children’s growth. (Shameless plug here for my book on autonomy-supportive parenting!) While making changes to external supports will take time to meaningfully alter our lives, we can start with changing our mindsets about parenting. For example, let’s question the very definition of “good parent.” What do we think a good parent is and how much is that definition culturally determined vs. based on our personal values? We can also be more aware of the fear-based messages around us and start to question how real certain threats are (e.g., the chances of a stranger abducting our child are miniscule, so can we allow our children more unsupervised time outdoors?). These kinds of mindset changes can equip us with a healthier and more balanced view of our parenting role.
Debbie: My specialty area is in burnout (I wrote a book about it!), which is exhaustion and disconnection resulting from high chronic stress over time. Parental burnout is a real phenomenon, and it makes parenting even harder. It can help to recognize that parental stress is starting to take a toll on you. If you’re noticing that you are highly stressed all the time, act as soon as you can to care for your own wellbeing and get some support. You might need practical support (someone to help you with the demands of parenting responsibilities) or emotional support. Remember that you are not alone - this parenting thing is tough! Meaningful, but tough. I liked this line on p. 29 of the advisory: “It is impossible to get parenting right all the time, so being compassionate and forgiving with oneself is essential.” I couldn’t agree more!
Yael: My main go-to suggestions of tools we can use to manage the stress (until social policy can catch up!) are to:
Use the Stress Wisely. Studies show that when we see stress as enhancing instead of debilitating, we are more likely to use it productively. In fact, studies show that stress motivates us to learn and grow, to reach out for help, and sometimes, to let some stuff go.3 Our parental stress can guide us towards something better! Let’s use it.
Build community. If you weren’t lucky enough to land in a community of helpful people when you became a parent, get deliberate about building your own. Get friendly with other parents in your neighborhood or at the park; join the local parenting Facebook groups; and, please, try to let go of the guilt of asking for help – as a human parent, you are going to need some!
Subtract. When the going gets tough, research shows that we tend to add to our schedules and task lists, even when it makes more sense to subtract. Furthermore, when we are overwhelmed, we are even more likely to overlook subtraction as a good option to consider (again, even when it really is the better choice!). We need to be more intentional about finding things to remove from our calendars and tasks lists.4
Look for opportunities to get enrichment out of role tension. This last bit is the central thesis of my book on working parenthood. We often only see (and feel!) the tension between roles, but overlook the myriad of ways that our parenting and non-parenting roles can enrich each other (e.g., by amping up our wisdom, our creativity, our perspective, or our sense of purpose).
Q: If you could change one thing about the world to help parents, what would it be?
Emily: Paid parental leave for at least six months and affordable childcare! Okay that’s two things but each would contribute to a substantial unburdening from parents. I had the luxury of taking 12 weeks of maternity leave for each of my children (unpaid). I was working in hospitals at the time and I saw medical residents return to demanding jobs as inpatient physicians when their newborns were six weeks old! That is inhumane. Affordable, quality childcare also provides peace of mind when parents do return to jobs that should pay more than childcare costs them. We have to consider this intersection of personal (eg, parent-infant bonding) and economic. I would also add a fact-checker on parenting influencers’ social media posts as at least one step toward reducing the power of toxic social messaging.
Debbie: Another quote from the advisory, on p. 4: “The work of raising a child is work, no less valuable than the work performed in a paid job and of extraordinary value when it comes to the impact on the future of society.” I think the unpaid work of parents and caregivers is tremendously valuable, and yet it is taken for granted. We need to treat the work of parenting with as much respect as paid employment. I would like to see more policies and programs to support that, like paid family leave, flexible work schedules, and access to childcare.
Yael: Ditto to extended leave! Also, add more hours to the day? And have some giant button in the sky that forces us to turn off all of our devices for a few hours each day so we can all come back into our bodies and lives.
One thing we know from research and ancient wisdom is that common humanity –our sense that we are not alone in our struggles –helps us endure what feels hard. So, to all the stressed out parents out there, let’s remember we’re all in this together!
What are your thoughts on the advisory and today’s parenting stress in general? We’d love to hear from you!
I felt uncertain about sharing my experience, including asserting my expertise, but Yael and Debbie cheered me on. Even knowing I’ve been socialized as a woman to stay small and quiet, I still feel uncomfortable speaking up sometimes!
For an extremely cool book on this topic, check out Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others
For a terrific book on this, check out Kelly McGonigal’s The Upside of Stress
If you’re interested in going deeper into this notion of how often we overlook subtraction, I highly recommend checking out Leidy Klotz’s book Subtract or this recent New York Times article on parenting.
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