Families

Guardian -41% of US parents are so stressed that they can’t function. That was the number that snagged my attention, but reading further into the newly released advisory by the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, 48% of parents surveyed also said their stress is “completely overwhelming”....

Surely, by any metric, these numbers represent a crisis. It is not even news: “America’s Mothers are in Crisis”, the New York Times warned in 2021, describing a “financial and emotional disaster” supercharged by the pandemic, and England’s catastrophic childcare crisis has been comprehensively reported over the past few years.

Why isn’t this being treated as an emergency? Because it is hard, or expensive, or both, to fix. The greatest stressor for many parents in the UK is money: the poorest families were hardest hit in the cost of living crisis and the number of destitute children has almost tripled since 2017...

Even parents well above the poverty line are forced into stark economic choices. In February, a survey from the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed found that of 35,800 parents, 45.9% with a child under five have taken on debt or withdrawn their savings to pay for childcare. US and UK governments show little inclination to subsidize them (even though it is economic idiocy to let 250,000 women leave the workforce because they can’t afford not to).

It is not just economic, though. Parenting is intrinsically stressful: you worry; you don’t sleep; you argue with your co-parent or struggle on your own; your time is no longer yours. But extrinsic, structural stressors can make it unmanageable: workplaces and working hours that don’t accommodate caring responsibilities; isolation from family and support networks; anxiety around tech companies deciding what children consume; the looming fact that climate indices predict a frightening, dangerous future, the kind no one dreams of for their kids. None of that is easily fixed, to put it mildly. Even partial solutions to elements of the overwhelming whole have been defunded (I’m thinking of Sure Start, New Labour’s early-years network of children’s centres and other services, which research continues to show made a real, lasting difference.)