41% of parents and caregivers say they are so stressed they cannot function most days." This was in the report, Parents Under Pressure, issued by the US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy".
Some of the key factors outlined in the report include things that are structural,
- Parents working longer hours in total.
- Child care costs have soared beyond even some college tuition.
- Saving for tuition sometimes feels hopeless given rising college costs.
- There’s a surging mental health crisis.
- In America there are threats outside of their control like school shootings.
- Also harms and risks of social media and technology.
But I believe Murthy genuinely pointed at the intangible specter that is making it impossibly hard. Our ‘culture of comparison’ is a key factor in the damaging levels of stress experienced by parents
In my experience there are people who are outside of the current parenting circle and those inside. Those outside, some of whom had children before social media took hold, roll their eyes at the struggles we face and blame parents for pretty much everything. I see it in the commentary at the end of any newspaper article that remotely touches on parenting.
It’s our fault for giving our kids phones. It’s our fault for not keeping them off social media. It’s our fault for having kids. It’s our fault for not disciplining them. It’s our fault that they’re not going into school. It’s our fault that they have soaring mental health problems and diagnoses of ADHD, because we gave them phones and so on, full circle.
The critics love to say 'What's wrong with these parents. Just don't give your kids phones', which is a shorthand way of saying, I have no idea what it is like to parent this generation and of the interwoven pressures parents face every day as a result of the addictive grip of big media companies' apps.
As the report rightly states, ‘Such pressures are having a siloing effect on parents, leaving them lonelier, more excluded and more stressed than non-parents.’
Here's the irony. Being a parent used to be one of the great touch-points in society; a way of meeting new people, making new friends, and being part of a community. Now we’re spending more time with our kids than ever before, worrying about our ‘parenting project’ like no parents have ever done in history, but we’re somehow doing it worse and feeling more miserable and lonely.
Dr Leonard Sachs’ book ‘The Collapse of Parenting’ talks about how parents don’t seem willing to create boundaries anymore. Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy, talks about the growth of the therapy industry, and its knock-on effect on parents. Only recently a mum asked me whether all teens should get therapy. If you’d asked me what a therapist was when I was a teen I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about, let alone known anyone who saw one.
Meanwhile, those same critics wonder why there’s been a collapse of people wanting children. Frankly, I’m struggling to find an electrician who’ll turn up and do the job properly, forget applying for what now looks like the hardest job in the world; Parent.
A big part of the increase in stress is that there has been a massive shift in what is seen as good parenting. Adequate used to be good enough. Yes, I was called a gutter snipe as a young teen because I was outside all hours, roller skating up and down the road without meals or supervision; homework wasn’t a word in my vocabulary. I’d just drink a pint of the milk that was left on our doorstep then carry on. I was perfectly happy at the time. After all, I’d got the cream at the top of the milk bottle. The criticism was whispered across fences in the neighbourhood and between parents who never even met my parents. My father and mother hid his alcoholism, our poverty, and the household chaos very easily; they simply never invited anyone home. Everything that was said about us was speculation, and my parents didn’t hear it because the door was closed.
Looking back, my teenage loneliness grew out of lack of community, lack of friends, and the shame my family carried because of our poverty and his alcoholism which then fuelled the lack of community and my lack of friends. My parents weren’t good parents, but I think blaming everything on them isn’t helpful. It’s far more complex, yet that’s not how it works now. Our only references for what parenting should be comes from our own experiences coupled with information we’re getting from the society around us.
So when we remember the adequate to bad parenting we received and feel wounded by the way our parents did it – fuelled by social media discussions about our traumas – we become adamant that we’re going to do it better. My parents didn’t take us on holiday so I’m going to make sure my kids get a holiday. My parents didn’t give me hot dinners so I’m going to make sure we have a hot dinner every night. My parents yelled at me often so I’m going to be a gentle parent who never yells… ‘ah damn I’ve yelled again’.
Instead of reassuring parents that there’s only so much control they can exercise. That getting frustrated, upset, and angry is normal and that giving our kids personal agency yet holding strong boundaries is actually a good thing, there’s a constant display of ‘bad parenting’ examples available to us all on social media along with long threads of judgement. Parents who want to do it well spend their time scanning for what they should be doing, consulting expert opinions, and aiming for some mythical ‘great parent’ goal, terrified of screwing up their kids.
Tim Carney, summed it up brilliantly in the The Free Press. ‘I don’t think parenthood was thought of as this deliberate, intentional, massive thing that we decided to undertake so we need to undertake it right. I think it was more thought of as adults are going to get married, and married people are going to have kids.’
Meanwhile, on social media the ‘gentle parenting’ movement is in full swing, but what the hell is it? I see people showing videos of kids enraged and parents not responding to which they say, ‘See, gentle parenting doesn’t work’ and then there’s a pile-on saying ‘That’s not gentle parenting, you idiot.’ Others look on, aghast, at the confusion over boundaries and love and where we should be putting our emphasis; terrified of even admitting they don’t know what they’re doing.
As Murthy says, "In my conversations with parents and caregivers across America, I have found guilt and shame have become pervasive, often leading them to hide their struggles, which perpetuates a vicious cycle where stress leads to guilt which leads to more stress."
Instagram is full of people showing their parenting wins in their clean, beautiful houses. I’ve been into a lot of houses and I know for a fact that most families live in at least a bit of chaos most of the time. Our job should not be to judge, our job should be to support and help each other. I saw a recent Insta of a woman saying ‘It changed everything when I realised that I should keep the house five minutes away from being ready to host at all times’. Me: Funnily enough, I have the same philosophy done differently. I make sure that the people I host don’t care what my house looks like, which means I am also five minutes away from ready to host at all times.
The shame and inadequacy felt by people isn’t new. It’s the same shame that drove my parents to keep their door closed instead of reaching out for friendship and support, which might have helped to fix some of the other issues.
The difference is that it’s now so pervasive you can’t ‘close the door’. Which leads me onto my own tips; which include metaphorically closing the door.
- Be a "single tasker" and focus on one task at a time. I often forget this, and when I do I notice my stress levels rising. When I do one task at a time, I tend to do it better, it feels less stressful, and I get to the end of the day knowing that I did the most I could. That way I feel no shame.
- Identify and address internal and external sources of stress and judgment. I lived with shame and stress for at least a decade of my parenting. I finally worked out where it was coming from and shut the door on that person. I realise that this is a radical decision that many can’t make, but finding boundaries for people who put pressure on you is very important. My friend’s mother in law used to come to her house and point out any dust she’d missed. She would spend ages trying to clean before the woman came around. I think the better way of dealing with this is realising that this person is obviously brilliant at household cleaning, so hand them a duster when they arrive and say you have too much on your plate and you know that this is their area of expertise.
- Ration your exposure to negative media and cultivate positivity. Switch off the social media, switch off the news. Nothing big will happen when we’re away, but the calm that it brings can be completely transformative. When your are on social media don’t linger on anything that is negative, and actively follow people who make you feel good. This will teach the algorithms to support a positive, enabling feed. Every month go through your feed and unfollow anyone who makes you feel uncomfortable or bad.
- When you’re making a list of things to do, focus on the ones that really matter and stop thinking about what you haven’t done. I’ve trained myself to only focus on what I’ve achieved during the day, not on what I haven’t. Food writer, and fellow listener, Tara Wigley has a reminder with her to-do list saying, ‘Separate the to-do list from the emotions.’
- Practice cognitive empathy to understand others without getting emotionally drained. What I mean by cognitive empathy is remembering that when our kids or partner get upset we need to try and keep our own emotions out of the equation. Yes, we should empathise and show that we recognise their pain, but when our own emotions get tangled up in that pain we end up carrying too much ourselves and we’re far less helpful to the person we’re trying to support.
- Prioritize meaningful happiness over self-gratifying happiness. I find it can help to brainstorm a list of things that genuinely make me feel good. Walking my dogs with a friend, listening to birds, seeing the sun rise, running, dancing to a favourite tune, helping others. These things connect us to the universe and to others. Eating chocolate can make us feel good, but it’s a short-term high compared with some of the other soul-fulfilling things we might choose. Having a list to hand can help in moments when we feel we really need to ground ourselves.
- Harness the stress-busting power of nature, exercise, and sleep. This doesn’t really need any more explanation. Also, see above.
- Lean on your support network and don't be afraid to ask for help. Most of us are terrible at asking for support and help. We don’t want to be a burden and we don’t want people to meddle. Yet, it can be the one thing that really sparks community. A friend reached out to me for help when her daughter was severely anorexic. We just went on regular walks, which gave her space to talk and think and process her pain. I felt good that I could offer her something of value. She wasn’t a burden. Often we feel like people are a burden if they keep saying the same thing over and over and never doing anything about it. But maybe the problem is our need to fix things. When they’re ready they will do something.
- Shed the guilt and shame – you're not alone in your struggles. Write this on a post-it and share the message with everyone you meet. We need to get the message out. If you hear someone shaming anyone else notice it, and gently pull them back from it with a message of why it doesn’t help.
- Trust that this too shall pass, and focus on your own capacity to manage it. Trust me. Nobody is doing this ‘right’, we’re all screwing up most of the time, life is messy, difficult, stressful, but it can also be joyous, silly and relaxing. You have more agency than you may think. Choose to notice the joy, choose the messy kitchen that happens because you wanted to finish supper with a card game, choose homemade popcorn and slumping on the sofa watching something funny over constantly being busy. Life is short and your kids aren’t a project to get right; they’re also messy, joyous, busy, scared, loving people who deserve curiosity rather than judgement.
