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.
Great...now I'm stressing out over stress...
I repeat myself when under stress
I repeat myself when under stress
😄😄
You need some Discipline. Maybe it should be Beat into you?
On a less snarky note....
Local churches played a big role in helping their communities. The "Moral Majority", prosperity gospel and televangelists help to kill them off and push people away from religion. Scandals hurt a lot too--and their response to them was /is appalling. Instead of dealing with these problems, double down on calling everyone who disagrees with them baby killers. Local churches are still strong and helpful in some areas, but they're not the force they used to be.
As for talking about stress, self-help gurus stock 'n trade.
The overriding theme of this blog is "alarming new problem actually shown to be neither new nor alarming."
Yes. There is a lot of fake alarmism out there. It’s nice to have Kevin to validate what many of us instinctively know — that the alarmism is mostly bullshit.
As someone with reasonably well-controlled depressive and anxious tendencies, as well as a penchant for mild-to-moderate pessimism, I formulate the problem thusly: "Life sucks, but it has always sucked, it used to suck a hell of a lot worse than it sucks right now, and it could certainly suck a lot worse in the future. So enjoy the hell out of the reasonably good times while they last, because there is absolutely no guarantee that they will last for long. And take comfort in the fact that this is all temporary."
TBF, the last 8 years have been stressful despite the economic boom. Russia, China, Houthis shooting at the Jews, Nazis, Racists, the Orange guy stealing votes, immigration, violence, COVID lockdowns what is next?!?
Other than covid (depending on where you live), I don’t think any of those things had any impact on the average American.
...we didn't start the fire...
The Drum Trendline notwithstanding it looks to these Mk I eyes that it bottomed out circa 2017 and has been growing slightly since.
A doubling in sevent-plus years, but starting at what level? Sounds like a dot com marketing release touting huge growth, and omitting it started at epsilon…
An awful lot of media these days is focused on getting more eyeballs and that generally means sensational headlines about how much we are at risk of one thing or another. If they don’t have the data then they cherry pick a few anecdotes to create a scary story. I really appreciate Kevin putting together these charts that give us context to whatever the panic du jour is.
Parents make up only about a quarter of the adult population, maybe 1/3 of the 18-49 year old group and these charts cover a pretty good economic time period with good job growth, increases in asset values and expanding health care access.
A sizeable jump in a quarter or third of the population can pretty easily be drowned out by small movements in the rest of the population.
Hard to always find good data, but when you have a preconceived point to make, i guess any old data will work.
Stressed out parent.
https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/grpd-mother-arrested-in-death-of-19-month-old-daughter/
Can’t see that on the chart anywhere. You can’t help them.