The Mental Health Risks of Parenting

What we can learn from the Surgeon General's Warning

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

In an advisory issued last week, the U.S. Surgeon General warned about the increasing mental health risks associated with parenting. Now, before you object that this is just more liberal anti-family propaganda, it’s not. In fact, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy goes out of his way to call parenting “sacred work.” His point is just that the data shows that most parents are suffering, and he’s right. They are. They are suffering in what appear to be unique historical ways that must be addressed, particularly considering the declining birth rates.

I tried to get at this point in You Are Not Your Own, but I’m going to elaborate on it here with the help of the Surgeon General: parenting in the contemporary world is overwhelming, shaming, and anxiety-inducing, because we are living in an environment that is not designed for humans as God created us. God created us to belong to Him, but society is designed so that we each radically belong only and ever to ourselves. As a result, we are hyper-competitive and individualistic, which leaves us burned out, anxious, and lonely.

The Surgeon General begins by establishing that something is deeply wrong with parenting today. He notes a study that says “41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function,” which is remarkable. If nearly half of our parents cannot function because of their level of stress, surely that is a marker that something is wrong with our society. Something systemic is going on. Here’s another statistic: “Nearly 70% of parents say parenting is now more difficult than it was 20 years ago.” Now, of course it’s entirely possible that those 70% have no idea what parenting was like 20 years ago, but even the perception that things have significantly changed is notable. When asked what their concerns were, they all had to do with technology and social media, and the biggest concern was exposure to explicit content online. Parents have always had concerns about what their children were exposed to, but they didn’t always have to worry about their kids having a screen with access to extreme pornography and videos of violence and all kinds of evil. Parenting isn’t the same experience.

There are, I believe, three major categories of stressors that have contributed to making contemporary parenting so incredibly difficult:

1. Loneliness

2. High achievement/low risk culture

3. Technology