Why are so many parents ‘so stressed they cannot function’? 

Stress levels among modern-day parents appear to be growing at an alarming rate — so much so that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently issued an advisory calling parental stress an urgent public health issue.   

Parents in 2024 are handling the traditional challenges of child care while dealing with stressors “previous generations didn’t have to consider,” Murthy, who is a father himself, said in the advisory.  

As a result, 41 percent of the country’s 63 million parents with kids younger than 18 feel “so stressed they cannot function,” and another 48 percent say their stress is “completely overwhelming,” according to the advisory.   

Murthy noted in the advisory that parents now grapple with the “complexity of managing social media … concerns about the youth mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness that disproportionately affects young people.”  

Psychologists and parenting experts who spoke with The Hill said many other societal factors are also contributing to parents’ emotional exhaustion — including decreasing access to child care and changing expectations of what it means to be a good parent.   

Social media poses huge risks to kids

Experts who spoke with The Hill said the surgeon general was right in naming social media as one of the biggest parental stressors of the modern era.  

Many parents struggle to control just how much time their kids spend on apps like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, where they could be exposed to dangerous content.    

In 2022, 97 percent of teens admitted to using social media, with more than half admitting that it would be hard to give it up, according to data from The Pew Research Center. 

Most kids are almost constantly checking social media, with the typical teen spending about five hours a day using platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, according to a 2023 Gallup poll. On average, older teen girls are spending the most time on social media, the poll shows.   

Research shows all that screen time can hinder cognitive, linguistic and social development in kids and pose risks to their mental health. One 2019 study found that young people who use social media for more than three hours a day are at a higher risk of developing mental health problems.   

It’s not just time spent on social media that is detrimental to kids’ well-being, but also the content they are exposed to that parents may struggle to monitor, according to Mia Smith-Bynum, a professor of family science at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.   

“Because kids are so engaged online, they are exposed to all kinds of harmful content,” said Smith-Bynum.  

“Children of color are likely to see abuse by the police, when those videos get circulated,” she added. “We know that that stuff has harmful effects.”  

On top of this, social media gives kids essentially unlimited access to one another outside of school, which makes children vulnerable to being bullied all day every day. Nearly 60 percent of teenagers in the U.S. have experienced cyberbullying in their lives, and 63 percent admit that it is a major problem for kids, according to Pew research.  

Parents are far more aware of their potential impact

One of the biggest things that has changed for parents over the past century is society’s understanding of just how much of an impact parents have on well-being and success, according to Christopher Mehus, a research associate professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota.   

The knowledge that parenting is important has led to positive things, Mehus said, like parents spending more time actively engaged with their children than previous generations.  

But he said it has also “significantly” increased pressure on parents to be perfect — which is impossible.   

“No matter what you do as a parent, somebody will tell you that you’re doing it wrong,” Mehus said. “There seems to be a misguided expectation that we should all know what we’re doing as parents.”   

This is where the harm social media causes to children overlaps with the harm it poses to parents. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok allow never-before-seen access into people’s lives, giving others more insight into what parents are doing with their children than in previous generations, according to Rosanna Breaux, assistant professor in the department of psychology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.  

The content posted to social media is typically positive, making everyone’s lives seem much more perfect than they are, according to Tovah Klein, an associate professor of psychology at Barnard College and author of the book “Raising Resilience: How to Help our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty.” This “curated” perfection can make many parents feel like they are doing a substandard job of raising their children — adding to the already monumental pressures of parenting.   

“Life is messy, and we miss out on the messiness [with social media],” she said. “It makes people feel terrible about everything that they are doing.”  

Child-rearing costs are increasing while salaries stagnate 

The number of Americans who are not sure where their next meal is coming from or where they are going to live is growing, putting major stress on parents struggling to provide food and housing for their families.  

After a years-long decline, food insecurity rates have skyrocketed in the U.S. since 2021, according to the Department of Agriculture. This is partially thanks to inflation, which has caused the cost of food to rise over the past few years.   

A record number of Americans — 653,100 — experienced homelessness last year, according to a recently released report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.   

The report explains that homelessness in the U.S. is likely rising because of a recent surge in rental prices, which have been increasing, in general, faster than salaries.   

This financial strain is especially stressful for parents also dealing with a steep rise in child care costs, which has far outpaced the growth of other family expenses like housing and groceries, according to a report from the First Five Years Fund.   

Since 1990, the cost of child care in the U.S. has increased by 214 percent, and the cost of housing has gone up by about 120 percent, according to the report, which analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics data.   

Meanwhile, the average family income has increased by 143 percent in the same time frame.   

A recent report from the nonprofit child care advocacy group Child Care Aware of America found that parents with two children in 11 states and in the District of Columbia on average paid at least twice as much for child care as they did for rent. 

The report also found that the average child care costs in 2023 were more than $11,500 a year. 

Those high child care costs are one financial burden causing parents stress. Decreasing access to child care, meanwhile, is also driving financial stress.

More than half of working parents with infants or toddlers reported having been late to work or needing to leave early from work at least once in the prior three months due to child care problems, according to a 2023 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  

Almost a quarter of parents with babies or toddlers have been fired from their jobs because of child care issues, the report adds.

Financial challenges like these can carry particular weight for U.S. parents because of the country’s economic policies.

“Part of why parenting matters so much, in the U.S. in particular, is that we put so much on individual people and individual families to take care of themselves,” said Jessica Calarco, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in inequality in families.   

“Other countries invest in policies that provide a base level of support and dignity and care for people regardless of their own means.”