It is the kind of statistic that makes you do a double-take, because it can’t be right. It is, though: 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”.
Things are not much better in the UK. In a survey last year for the United Nations Children’s Fund, 49% of parents of under-fours said they had felt overwhelmed all or a lot of the time in the past 12 months (43% felt anxious, 36% unsupported and 26% lonely).
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. Tackling these issues demands deep pockets. Instead, according to Keir Starmer, the UK has a £22bn black hole left by the Tory government.
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campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed found that of 35,800 parents, 45.9% with a child under five have taken on debt or withdrawn their savings to pay for childcare.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 subsidise 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.)
The lack of urgency to help out parents also strikes me as complacent. Politicians can make concerned noises but do little, because parents can usually be relied on to keep caring. I was thinking about this when walking around the local streets at school-run time this morning: I saw a woman manoeuvring a doubledecker buggy of stacked, crying babies over a steep kerb; a man pulling up his little girl’s sagging tights while his little boy ran ahead; a woman with three book bags in one hand and a scooter in the other, and wondered if they were anxious, lonely and completely overwhelmed? If they were, it didn’t show; they were cheerily coping.
Parents keep caring; they keep coping until they absolutely can’t. But these strains could stop them having more children, and stop others – who see the toll it takes – having children altogether. “I can’t say with certainty that if I went back in time, I would choose to have children again,” one parent tells me. Even if you just look at the hard-nosed economics, that’s a real problem: ageing, shrinking populations need young workers. So is the demonstrable, unhappy truth that “the stresses parents and caregivers have today are being passed to children in direct and indirect ways, impacting families and communities”, as Murthy’s advisory puts it, citing multiple studies on adverse effects (poor health, lower attainment, higher rates of developmental disorders). Struggling families have costs beyond the very real human ones.
“Raising children is sacred work,” Murthy said. We certainly hear that a lot – politicians fetishise the family; there is widespread fretting about declining birthrates. But when will they start legislating as if they believe it?
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
