Parents Are Losing Their Minds

What Should We Do About It?

In this week’s New York Times Op-Ed Section, Vivek H. Murthy, our surgeon general, writes, “Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.” He says that as he travels the country, parents often tell him that “they feel lucky to be raising kids, but they are struggling, often in silence and alone.”

We need to place a higher value on parenting, Murthy says, and recognize that parenting is an essential task in a healthy society. We also need government policies that reflect a commitment to parents, with better daycares, safer playgrounds, new community centers, and more flexible work arrangements for parents. Without this help, Murthy said, parents will continue to be stressed, isolated, and have mental health issues.

Murthy adds that parents today have new concerns, along with the usual concerns around money and safety. Their children have their own mental health problems and spend too much time looking at screens. Parents also compare themselves to the edited images of other families on Facebook and feel lacking.

Murthy correctly identifies a major problem in our country — intense parental stress, but he skirts around the causes and solutions. Some problems, like our unequal and inadequate school systems, are not even discussed. The problems are so severe that unless solutions are found, we are going to become an aging and feeble country without the revitalization of youth and their vigor. Right now, given the current difficulty level of parenting, it is rational to not have children. That must change.

In a follow-up article in the Upshot column for the New York Times , Claire Cain Miller gives less attention to the lack of government and social supports, and instead blames the parents for their depression. She says that parents are driven by anxiety to achieve middle class status, so they micromanage their children’s lives, which then makes their kids crazy, too.

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.

She quotes some random experts who prescribe vague, unrealistic solutions. She implies that the parents are victims of a comparison culture and their own unachievable expectations.

Miller’s article is the typical finger-wagging of middle-class moms that I’ve read a million times in the New York Times. And frankly, it annoys the crap out of me. Those articles blame the parents for not parenting correctly, and downplay the real structural, economic, and collective pressures that parents experience.

I wish Miller had referred to an article that she wrote back in 2018, “Americans Are Having Fewer Babies.” There, she explains that Americans are having fewer babies for a wide-range of economic issues, including the cost of childcare, career priorities, cost of housing and more. Others forgo children, because they didn’t want to deal with all that stress and, instead, wanted to pursue their own interests. Who can blame them?

The truth is that parental stresses are real. Their problems are not simply a product of too much comparisons on Facebook. We need to stop blaming parents and look at external issues.

I spend a good chunk of my week supporting parents with autistic kids, as a volunteer and consultant. Soon, I’ll be part of a major new non-profit, which will provide these parents with some desperately needed advice regarding medical care, therapy, education, college, government supports, and more. I’m an autism mom myself, with some deep trauma from bad situations in the past, so I get it and want to help.

I talk to parents every day who are traumatized by deficiencies in their schools. Some of those parents have kids with documented disabilities, but others have kids who are totally average, neurotypical kids. Sometimes, those totally average kids fall through the cracks in the system and develop problems. All kids are still walking around with major damage from school shutdowns during COVID.

The cost of parenting is sky-high. High schools offer class trips that can cost $750 to many thousands; students that can’t participate feel stigmatized. Half the families in our town admit to using $150-per-hour tutors. And then comes college tuition with dozens of hidden costs (study abroad, frat donations, more tutors, therapists). If you can get your kid over the college finishing line, you might have to supplement their car and phone costs for years, because they won't earn enough to pay for rent and those extras.

Then they want to get married, and parents are footing that bill, too. I just learned that catering halls in my area charge $150 per guest. The average wedding in New York City, according to the Knot, costs $63,000.

If you’re raising a special needs kid, the stress, the isolation, and financial pressures are intense. I’ve written a bit about my family’s traumas for my autism newsletter. Thankfully, there are a few amazing philanthropists stepping into this space to help, but we need so much more.

To make lasting changes that will alleviate America’s toxic family environment, we must go beyond simplistic solutions and headlines. All parents — special needs and typical — need better schools; nothing creates more stress than failing schools. We need to build tighter communities with a housing supply that supports extended families. Parents need work opportunities that are closer to home. They need affordable housing. We need to fix the higher education-to-work pipeline. So much.

Education, housing, employment, higher education — families are sensitive structures that need thriving and healthy systems across multiple sectors. I hope that somewhere in all the craziness that is the 2024 Election, someone discusses these issues.

Extra: My favorite “They’re Eating the Dogs” remix.