At the end of the summer, the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on the mental health of the nation’s parents. Too many families, Murthy wrote, are beset by economic factors beyond their control, including the costs of health care, child care, elder care, housing, and groceries. Murthy cited alarming results from a survey by the American Psychological Association, conducted in 2023, in which forty-one per cent of parents said that “most days they are so stressed they cannot function,” forty-eight per cent said that “most days their stress is completely overwhelming,” and fifty per cent said that “when they are stressed, they can’t bring themselves to do anything.” The A.P.A. found in the same survey that financial concerns were a major and increasing source of household tension.
Murthy’s advisory urged support for a range of initiatives that could alleviate pressures on parents and that have been championed by progressives for ages, such as paid family leave, universal preschool, more generous child-care subsidies, and an expanded child tax credit. Insufficient or erratic child care is a major disruptor of parents’ work schedules, and causes hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity each year. In eleven states and the District of Columbia, child care costs at least twice as much as typical monthly rent or mortgage payments, and two-thirds of parents nationwide report spending twenty per cent or more of their take-home pay on child care. For sole parents, this share rises to thirty-five per cent.
In the race for the Presidency, Kamala Harris has made the “care economy” the keystone of her domestic-policy agenda. She has promised to revive the expanded child tax credit of 2021, introduce a six-thousand-dollar tax credit for parents of newborns, and cap child-care expenditures at seven per cent of a family’s income, among other measures. The Vice-President also signalled her commitment to pro-family economic policy in choosing Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her running mate. With a single-seat Democratic margin in his state’s Senate, Walz advanced a progressive agenda that made school breakfast and lunch free, made public higher education free for low-income students, added more than two billion dollars to Minnesota’s K-12 school budget, expanded the state’s child tax credit, and enshrined paid family and medical leave. What Walz’s government accomplished in terms of improving the material well-being of families in Minnesota was breathtaking, and it’s curious that the Harris-Walz campaign has not done more to center this triumph as a model for the whole nation.
The inconvenient reality, however, is that the U.S. Senate is often where these policies go to die. And, no matter who wins the Presidency, the Senate will almost certainly continue to be the graveyard of the care economy if Republicans take control of the chamber, as is expected, in the upcoming election. Three years ago, a majority of U.S. senators rejected renewing the expanded child tax credit, which had temporarily lifted more than three million children out of poverty. (In August, Senate Republicans blocked a deeply flawed attempt to restore it.) At the end of 2021, the intransigence of Joe Manchin, the nominally Democratic senator from West Virginia, killed the child-care and universal-preschool provisions of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill. These provisions, in addition to making parents’ and children’s lives easier, would have eventually pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy through job creation and increased tax revenues, among other means, according to an analysis by the Century Foundation.
Recently, the men on the Republican ticket have opened up about their ideas for helping families who struggle to pay for child care. J. D. Vance, the senator from Ohio, who has repeatedly ascribed sociopathic tendencies to those without children and who once declared that “normal people” do not want their children in day care, suggested that cash-strapped young parents should consider if “maybe grandma and grandpa wants to help out a little bit more.” (Vance has also expressed support for an expanded child tax credit, but skipped the vote when it came up in the Senate, in August.) On October 16th, Donald Trump, speaking in front of an all-female audience at a Fox News town hall in Georgia, may or may not have endorsed an expanded federal child tax credit, saying, “We have a lot, and we’re going up higher, but we’re also going to readjust.”
In September, the former President was asked about the child-care crisis at an economic forum in New York City, and he replied, essentially, that what parents shell out for a day-care spot is nothing compared to the revenues his Administration would generate with higher tariffs. Would those trade-war spoils be used somehow to offset child-care costs? Nobody knows. “Look, child care is child care,” Trump observed. “It’s, couldn’t, you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.” When he’s right, he’s right.
Although financial worries are undoubtedly the biggest monster under the bed, the Surgeon General’s advisory addresses several other demons that keep parents up at night, including concerns about their children’s mental health and social-media usage. One stressor in particular stands out for how much coverage it has since received, most recently in a much-circulated episode of “The Daily,” the Times’ flagship podcast. Americans are raising their kids, Murthy wrote, in “an intensifying culture of comparison,” one that creates “unrealistic expectations around the milestones, parenting strategies, achievements and status symbols that kids and parents must pursue. Chasing these unreasonable expectations has left many families feeling exhausted, burned out, and perpetually behind.”
These pressures flow from a generation-long rise in what is known as intensive parenting: a competitive regimen of closely supervised, meticulously curated child rearing that makes strenuous demands on a parent’s time, disposable income, and executive function, and that is typically geared toward securing a child’s spot at an élite college or university. As the Times reporter Claire Cain Miller said on “The Daily,” parents and kids alike are buckling under “this pressure to be optimizing our kids all the time.”
Sociologists have been analyzing this stripe of parent for decades. Sharon Hays, in her 1996 book “The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood,” saw “intensive mothering” as symptomatic of what the economist Robert Heilbroner called “the implosion of capitalism,” whereby, Hays wrote, “the norms and practices of the capitalist marketplace find their way into areas of life where they had not been before.” As a result, “social life is increasingly perceived and discussed as if it were merely a collection of individuals who calculate the most efficient means of maximizing their power and material advantage.”
Parenting styles have always doubled as economic indices, of course—in agrarian societies, for example, more children meant a more economically productive household. What the current vanguard of intensive parenting appears to reflect is a deepening phobia of diminishing returns. Jennifer Breheny Wallace, in her 2023 best-seller “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It,” writes that people born in the nineteen-eighties and later “have lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth compared to what other generations had at their age.” The reversals of fortune that befell many millennials continue to worsen, in some respects, for Gen Z. Adults under the age of twenty-five are now spending forty-six per cent more on health insurance and thirty-one per cent more on housing than the same age group did a decade ago. These young adults also have more debt, partly thanks to the Supreme Court, which has stymied the Biden Administration’s attempts to cancel four hundred billion dollars in student loans. As the foundations for building an independent adult life continue to crumble under young people’s feet, hypervigilant parents are fixated more than ever on the top-flight college degree as a guarantor of their children’s financial comfort and social standing.
Unsurprisingly, parents who stress out this much about their kids stress out their kids, to the point of harming their chances at happiness and success in adulthood. A 2019 report published by the National Academies of Sciences acknowledged “nascent” evidence indicating that “youth in high-achieving contexts are an at-risk population,” with rates of depression, anxiety, “rule-breaking,” and substance abuse that are “much higher than national norms” and “sometimes higher than those in urban poverty.” In her book, Wallace invokes the term “toxic stress,” a condition more commonly associated with children who have experienced abuse, neglect, war, or the loss of a parent. “Never Enough” opens with the story of a teen-ager who is so hollowed out by Advanced Placement classes and varsity sports that she runs laps at practice with her eyes closed. Later in the book, a mother complains, “My kids don’t know the joy of a traditional Thanksgiving meal with family gathered around a table.” What has kept them from this sacred rite, year after year, according to this parent? Soccer tournaments.
Perhaps the intensive parent is not always the most reliable narrator. If her family opts out of a poorly scheduled sporting event, it seems unlikely that it will affect her kid’s future earnings or chances of getting into Harvard. The notion that children’s lives are forged in a crucible of relentless résumé building is somewhat undermined by current surveys of how many of their waking hours are spent on gaming and social media. And if it were meaningfully true that close to half of all parents are regularly “so stressed they cannot function,” society as we know it would cease to exist. We’d certainly be seeing a lot more dissociation and panic attacks on the sidelines of those infamous Thanksgiving soccer games. It’s doubtless that many of these parents feel internal and external pressures that take a real toll. But these feelings are perhaps most salient as identity markers. The stress can be seen as proof of one’s commitment to child optimization—and, it follows, of one’s place in a socioeconomic hierarchy.
It’s easy to see why intensive parenting has garnered disproportionate attention in the media, on the parenting discussion boards, and in the group texts ever since Murthy published his report. Individual parents lack the authority to, say, lower inflation rates or change the Senate filibuster rule. But their child-rearing style is something that is largely within their control, and thus it might strike them as the stuff of a more fruitful conversation—a conversation that also happens to flatter the priorities and anxieties of exactly the kind of affluent, highly educated person who generally dominates the parenting-advice space.
Inevitably, a conversation driven by matters of choice does little to address the real barriers that keep middle- and working-class families from thriving. Instead, the discourse fixates on what amounts to a form of conspicuous consumption. It confuses clinical anxiety with status anxiety; it blurs the line between debilitating stress and elective busyness. A working-class parent cannot choose to conjure a mathematical equation that will make her paycheck stretch to cover her rent, groceries, and child-care bills. She cannot choose to create more day-care slots if she lives in a child-care desert, or to bend the time-space continuum to insure that unreliable and underfunded public transport can get her from her job to day care in time for pickup. But a more financially secure parent in the grip of intensive-parenting dogma can choose to enroll her kids in fewer “enrichment activities.” She can choose to accept that her kid will not die in a ditch if he doesn’t get into Stanford, and if she’s sick of chauffeuring her kids to sports all the time, she can choose to stop. Her social context and conditioning may make these choices seem like difficult ones, but choices they remain.
By conflating these discrete sets of challenges, we belittle them both. A coherent, constructive debate about how to help working parents—about how our politics and institutions can foster a care economy that exists, in one form or another, in virtually every other developed nation on Earth—is only possible if it draws a clear distinction between the crushing structural inequities faced by a large cohort of families and the status-safeguarding decisions of a smaller but far more visible cohort. Until then, we can only expect more news cycles about how parents today have it harder than ever, and more confusion about which parents we’re actually talking about. ♦
