Modern-day parents are dealing with both the traditional challenges that come with child-rearing and new ones that “previous generations didn’t have to consider,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said in a recently released advisory.
Now, 41 percent of the United States’ 63 million parents with children 18 and younger are “so stressed they cannot function,” according to the federal advisory.
Murthy wrote that parents’ high level of stress is partially due to the “complexity of managing social media…concerns about the youth mental health crisis, and an epidemic of loneliness that disproportionately affects young people.”
There are numerous other things emotionally exhausting parents right now, like decreasing access to child care and shifting expectations of what parents need to do to be considered a good parent, psychologists and parenting experts told The Hill.
Experts agreed with the surgeon general’s decision to call out social media as a major source of parental stress, since many parents struggle to control how much time their children spend on the app or what content they are exposed to.
“Because kids are so engaged online, they are exposed to all kinds of harmful content,” said Mia Smith-Bynum, a professor of family science at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
Christopher Mehus, a research associate professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota, told The Hill the biggest change in parenting over the past century is the increased understanding how much parenting matters.
That knowledge of how much impact parenting can have on a child’s well-being has led to positive things like more actively engaged parents but makes parents feel like they have to be perfect.
On top of this, child-rearing has become more of a financial burden for parents as salaries fail to increase at the same pace as the cost of living and child care becomes less accessible.
The cost of child care alone has increased by 214 percent since 1990 while the average family salary has increased by 143 percent since then, according to report from The First Five Years Fund.
