I wrap up my workday and head for home, making a quick stop to grab the supplies my sixth grader needs for a project due this week and some ingredients for a quick dinner.
Once home, I check the sixth grader’s school website and discover a missing assignment. Bringing this up sparks a minor meltdown. I summon the emotional energy to help her calm down and problem-solve. My husband arrives home with our high schooler, who’s discouraged by something that happened at soccer practice. We’ll have to process that later.
Around the dinner table, we realize that both kids have sports practices Thursday, on opposite ends of town, at the same time as a mandatory parent meeting at school. And now I’m ready for my own meltdown.
On this particular evening, my family wasn’t navigating anything unique or especially catastrophic. Scenes like this play out nightly in homes across the United States. In fact, my family’s circumstances offer the protections of multiple forms of privilege. Certainly others have more difficult circumstances.
Why is it still so hard?
For a long time, I felt ashamed for being overwhelmed by parenthood. How do others seem to have it all together? Of course, the highlight reel of social media only fueled this comparison game. I often felt that I was falling short, missing some hack that others had found for not feeling constantly exhausted.
The reality is I’m far from alone in experiencing what social scientists term parenting stress. Defined as the negative psychological reaction to a mismatch between the demands of parenting and the resources available, parenting stress has become increasingly prevalent over the past five decades. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half of all parents in the U.S. said their stress was completely overwhelming on most days.
Stress like this has an impact: Parents who experience high levels of parenting stress have decreased mental health and feel less close with their children.
I began researching parental stress and well-being when, several years after becoming a parent, I left my job as a social worker and entered a Ph.D. program. Through this process, I learned something that changed my perspective entirely: Parents today experience such high levels of stress because people have never traditionally raised children in isolation. And yet, we are more isolated than ever.
It clicked: Parents don’t need to do more or try harder. We need connection. We don’t need more social media posts on the “top three ways to keep your family organized.” We need a paradigm shift.
In the age of the nuclear family, it’s common for multiple generations to come together only on special occasions.
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