#56. Intensive Parenting Is Harming Parents as Well as Kids

Reflections provoked by the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental Health of Parents

Dear friends,

On August 28 of this year, the U.S. Public Health Service issued an official Surgeon General’s health advisory entitled Parents Under Pressure, which reviews evidence that becoming a parent in the United States is a mental health hazard. Parents in the U.S. have been found, in multiple studies in recent times, to be less happy and more stressed, anxious, and depressed than adults who are not parents. Of course, the advisory is not meant to tell people not to become parents, though I would not be surprised if it does have that effect on some young adults. Many have already chosen to remain childless because of the financial and psychological distress among parents they see around them. The advisory, rather, is meant to tell us all that, as individuals and a society, we need to take steps to make parenthood less stressful.

The Case for More Public Assistance for Parents

In some ways I applaud the advisory. It makes the case well that parents in the U.S. need more public support than they get. A cross-nation study of 22 OECD countries (mostly in Europe but including the U.S.) revealed that the U.S. ranked dead last in the relative happiness of parents compared to non-parents. Parents were also less happy than non-parents in most of the other countries, but in none of them was the discrepancy as great as in the U.S. In fact, in eight of the countries, including the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, parents were happier than non-parents.

That study also showed a clear positive correlation between the degree to which the national government provides support for parents and parental happiness. The researchers created what they called a comprehensive policy index (CPI) for each country by combining measures of four ways the government might be helping parents. These are policies that provide (1) paid parental leave for infant care, (2) paid sick and vacation days, (3) work-schedule flexibility, and (4) financial assistance for childcare expenses. As one would predict, the greater the CPI, the less distressed and happier were the parents. On the CPI measure, as in parental happiness, the U.S. was dead last, and the Scandinavian countries were near the top.

But We Also Need to Change the Way We Think About Parenthood

The Surgeon General’s advisory acknowledges that some of the problem has to do with our changed societal expectations about being a parent, but to me it doesn’t go far enough in examining those expectations and what we might do about them. We have, over time, embraced ever more the concept of “intensive parenting,” the idea that parenting is hard work, that parents must be intimately involved in overseeing and directing everything their children do. The report does point out that mothers with full time jobs now spend on average more time directly with their children than stay-at-home mothers did decades ago.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy seems to accept as a given that being a parent is hard work. The first sentence of his personal forward to the advisory reads; “Parents often say that parenting is one of the best jobs but also one of the hardest.” Then, a paragraph down, he says, “Being a dad is the toughest and most rewarding job I’ve ever had.” And he begins the concluding paragraph of his forward with the words, “Raising children is sacred work.” That sentence is also highlighted in the published document. in big orange letters at the top of the page.

My parents (mother and stepfather) are no longer around, so I can’t ask them. But I am 99% certain that they never would have described being a parent as a “job.” And they probably would have gagged if you described it as “sacred,” unless maybe you put it in the context of a philosophical or theological idea that all of life is sacred. Like most parents in the 1950s they pretty much let us (their four sons and one niece) be. They let us take charge of our own lives, ever more so as we grew older. They also expected us to help around the house, to get to places where we wanted to go on our own (by bicycle, walking, or public transportation), to take responsibility for our own schoolwork or deal ourselves with the consequences, and, by the time we were teenagers to earn our own spending money with out-of-home part-time jobs. They were not different in these respects from most other parents at that time.

I’m not sure to what degree my parents and their contemporaries thought about those policies as good for us kids or good for themselves, but the fact is they were good for all of us. Parents could focus on other aspects of their lives and we kids were allowed to experience the joy, pride, and developmental benefits of learning how to take responsibility for ourselves. As I have described previously (e.g. here and here), kids were far happier and emotionally well-adjusted by every available measure in the 1950s than they are today. I don’t have the data at hand, but my bet is that parents were also a lot happier then. I’d even venture to say they were happier then than non-parents were. Kids, despite their foibles and sometimes annoying behavior, were generally a source of pleasure, not work. And the happiness of kids and parents reinforce one another. The anxiety and depression of parents can infect kids with the same, and vice versa.

Wise Words from Alison Gopnik

One of my favorite researchers and conveyers of research is Alison Gopnik, the eminent developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She is famous for research documenting the remarkable learning and reasoning abilities of young children when left to their own devices. Gopnik is also the mother of three grown sons and grandmother to at least one young boy. And she is author of a 2016 book for parents entitled The Gardener and the Carpenter.  Her thesis there is that too many people these days think of being a parent as being like a carpenter. If you do everything right, you should get a perfect product. If you mess up, the product will be messed up. She says it’s more like gardening. You plant the seed, you provide what you hope is a fertile environment, and you watch it grow.

One index of the modern problem, according to Gopnik, is the use of the word parent as a verb rather than just as a noun. She says it first came into use that way in 1958 and this use has continuously increased since then. Here are some of Gopnik’s words about this dreadful verb:

• “’Parent’ is not actually a verb, not a form of work, and it isn’t and shouldn’t be directed toward the goal of sculpting a child into a particular kind of adult (p 8) ….  We recognize the difference between work and other relationships, other kinds of love.  To be a wife is not to engage in ‘wifing,’ to be a friend is not to ‘friend,’ even on Facebook, and we don’t ‘child’ our mothers and fathers (p 9).

• “To be a parent—to care for a child—is to be part of a profound and unique human relationship, to engage in a particular kind of love (p 9).  … Love doesn’t have goals or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose of love is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own.  It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose for ourselves, or even one we would choose for them.  … Loving children doesn’t give them a destination; it gives them sustenance for the journey (p 10).”

• “The word ‘parenting,’ now so ubiquitous, first emerged in America in 1958 and became common only in the 1970s (p 21). . … But, in fact, parenting is a terrible invention. It hasn’t improved the lives of children and parents, and in some ways it’s arguably made them worse.  For middle-class parents, trying to shape their children into worthy adults becomes the source of endless anxiety and guilt coupled with frustration.  And for their children, parenting leads to an oppressive cloud of hovering expectations (p 24). … The rise of parenting has accompanied the decline of the street, the public playground, the neighborhood, even recess (p 36).

Continuing with the gardener and carpenter metaphors, she writes further:

• “In the parenting model, being a parent is like being a carpenter.  You should pay some attention to the kind of material you are working with, and it may have some influence on what you try to do.  But essentially your job is to shape that material into a final product that will fit the scheme you had in mind to begin with.  And you can assess how good a job you’ve done by looking at the finished product.  Are the doors true?  Are the chairs steady?  Messiness and variability are the carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies.  Measure twice, cut once (p 18).”

• “When we garden, on the other hand, we create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish.  … And as any gardener knows, our specific plans are always thwarted. The poppy comes up neon orange instead of pale pink, the rose that was supposed to climb the fence stubbornly remains a foot from the ground, black spot and rust and aphids can never be defeated.  … And yet the compensation is that our greatest horticultural triumphs and joys also come when the garden escapes our control, when the weedy Queen Anne’s lace unexpectedly showed up in just the right place in front of the dark yew tree, when the forgotten daffodil travels to the other side of the garden and bursts out among the blue forget-me-nots, when the grapevine that was supposed to stay demurely hitched to the arbor runs scarlet riot through the trees. … Unlike a good chair, a good garden is constantly changing, as it adapts to the changing circumstances of weather and the seasons.  And in the long run, that kind of varied, flexible, complex, dynamic system will be more robust and adaptable than the most carefully tended hothouse bloom (p 18-19).”

• “So our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child.  Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish.  Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows.  ….  We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn (p 20).”

Amen.

Further Thoughts

Alison Gopnik, of course, is not the only wise person who has told us to loosen our attempts at control and place more trust in Mother Nature’s biological plan for our kids and our kids’ abilities to carry out that plan in their own unique ways. Kahlil Gibran, with his book The Prophet, of course, is one. In my next letter I plan to elaborate on the concept of the“Good Enough Parent,” the idea that just as Goldilocks would choose the porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold, she would choose the parent who parents (there’s that verb, we can hardly avoid it these days) neither too much nor too little.

What do you think? Is trustful, relaxed, joyful parenting (I give up trying to avoid the verb) possible in today’s world? If so, how? If you think it’s not possible, why? This Substack series is, in part, a forum for thoughtful discussion. I greatly value readers’ contributions, even when they disagree with me, and sometimes especially when they do. You will notice in reading comments on previous letters that everyone here is polite. Your questions and thoughts will contribute to the value of this letter for me and other readers.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Note added Oct. 23, 2024. I now have a new post that responds to questions and comments on this letter. You can find it here. If you have new questions or comments on this letter, it would be better to post them on the new post.