In his recent advisory on parents’ mental healthdiamond game, the United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, said out loud what many parents might have only furtively admitted: Parenting today is too hard and stressful.
Of course, there have always been concerns about families’ well-being. And while some of today’s parents’ fears are newer — cellphones, school shootings, fentanyl — parents have always worried about their children.
So why has parental stress risen to the level of a rare surgeon general’s warning about an urgent public health issue — putting it in the same category as cigarettes and AIDS?
It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy — that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.
This parenting style is known as intensive parenting, as the sociologist Sharon Hays described it in the late 1990s. It involves “painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics and futures through everyday interactions and activities,” the sociologists Melissa Milkie and Kei Nomaguchi have written.
But we may have reached a point, the surgeon general and other experts suggest, where intensive parenting has become too intense for parents.
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