Vivek Murthy, fresh off his advisory about the dangers of social media, has a new advisory telling us that parents in America are distraught:
Surgeon General: Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.
The stress and mental health challenges faced by parents — just like loneliness, workplace well-being and the impact of social media on youth mental health — aren’t always visible, but they can take a steep toll.
....Something has to change. It begins with fundamentally shifting how we value parenting, recognizing that the work of raising a child is crucial to the health and well-being of all society. This change must extend to policies, programs and individual actions designed to make this vital work easier.
Murthy is right about surveys showing that parents have higher levels of stress than other adults. But this is neither surprising nor new: surveys have always shown this. It's not something unique to our brave new world of smartphones and COVID.
The gap between parents and non-parents hasn't changed much over the past couple of decades, which means we can get a good idea of how stress has changed by simply looking at overall stress levels. Here's Gallup:
Gallup suggests that adults reporting stress has gone up from 50% to 60% over the past quarter century. Here's another poll from the American Psychological Association:
This one suggests that average stress levels have been steadily decreasing since 2007 (when they started doing their survey). Here's another one from the APA:
This is the number of people reporting "extreme" stress. It's also been steadily decreasing. Finally, here's a poll from the CDC for just the past few years:
This one shows a spike in 2020 during the COVID pandemic and a steady decline ever since.
What's the takeaway here? One poll shows generic stress increasing moderately and two polls show it declining moderately. Overall, I'd guess that stress hasn't changed an awful lot over the past couple of decades but we sure talk about it more than we used to:
Murthy's goals are admirable. At the same time, one thing we really do seem to suffer from these days is tremendous growth in the business of scaring us about practically everything. I'm all for helping parents with the stress of raising kids, but I'm not thrilled about turning it into a "crisis," as so many things have been. I really don't think it is.