It didn’t really matter where we took our four children, about two years apart in age, the comments from strangers were the same.
At the Capitol, at the Smithsonian, or, later, after we moved to Texas, in the Fort Worth Stockyards, people felt free to make comments about my family. “Wow! You must be really busy,” strangers would joke as they looked at my children, ages 7, 5, 3 and 1, or ask with a wink, “Don’t you know how to stop it?”
Large families are rare these days. Only 12 percent of adults have four or more children. Now that three of my kids are teenagers, I don’t think about family size because I’m too busy raising them.
Not only do I work, I take my kids to school, sports practice, doctor appointments, and I also attend concerts, soccer games, and parent-teacher conferences, all while trying to spend as much quality one-on-one time with them as possible.
“If you want to know what it’s like to have a fourth child, imagine you’re drowning and someone hands you a baby,” comedian Jim Gaffigan says in a particularly funny skit. The struggles are real.
Of course parents are stressed.
Recently, I was pulling out some photos to show a friend, and she saw that the calendar on my phone was open. “Oh my!” she said, seeing the days packed so tightly together that it was almost impossible to read. “How do you do that?” I just laughed.
Doesn’t every parent have a full schedule?
I had the same reaction when US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy recently issued a stark warning about declining parental health and mental health, titled “Parents Under Pressure.”
“Over the past decade, parents have been more likely to report experiencing consistently higher levels of stress than other adults. In 2023, 33% of parents reported high levels of stress in the past month, compared with 20% of other adults,” the report said, citing a survey by the American Psychological Association.
Nearly half of parents said they “can’t control their stress at all most of the time.”
It’s clear that parents are more stressed than childless adults — after all, they are caring for other human beings, and that’s a big responsibility.
Good parents, even if they are healthy, organized, and financially stable, feel the weight of their responsibilities and it manifests as stress, just like the “Coffee is Hot” warning on a fast food coffee cup. Tell us something we don’t know.
Sometimes it’s even hard to admit that I’m feeling overwhelmed. After all, most of us wanted kids. I especially wanted lots of kids. So isn’t this what I get for being?
But living with this level of stress for 25 years while your child grows from a toddler into (we hope) a fully functioning adult seems intolerable. I’ve heard dozens of people my age who are parents say things like, “I never thought it would be this hard or this busy!”
The Surgeon General’s report noted that parents (and caregivers) are struggling with “financial burdens and economic instability, time constraints, concerns about children’s health and safety, parental isolation and loneliness, difficulties managing technology and social media, and cultural pressures.” I have experienced all of these, and I can safely say that so have my parent friends.
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There’s no doubt that the perception that raising children is difficult discourages adults from having children. Birth rates are at dangerously low levels. You can almost hear childless adults looking at us and asking, “Why would we want to do that?” They look stressed, exhausted, and strapped for cash.
Is raising children really that difficult?
The problem is not that parents cannot cope with stress or meet the challenges of parenting; it is often the expectations of individuals, families and society that create the most stress.
In his book “Family Unfriendly,” Tim Carney, a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a Catholic father of six, argues that our culture makes parenting harder than it needs to be. One example is our obsession with busyness and excellence, most notably in our kids’ obsession with expedition sports, which costs parents huge amounts of money and time.
Carney argues that other factors also contribute to the anti-family culture, including neighborhoods that are no longer walkable, children lacking community, and the virtual disappearance of the multigenerational family connections that once existed.
As a parent of four, I very much agree with Carney’s views on modern American life. He longs for a simpler way, and he offers solutions that don’t make it seem like the only way to improve parenting is to live on a farm and make your own butter.
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Carney shared his thoughts on the latest report in an email. “The Surgeon General is right,” he wrote. “Parents are overwhelmed, which is likely contributing to the decline in birth rates. He is also right to cite the breakdown of community as a cause. Raising children is not an individualistic endeavor; it takes a village, to borrow a phrase. As we become more isolated and dispersed, raising children becomes more difficult.”
In his book, Carney proposes policy changes, such as parental leave, to make America more family-friendly. He is a vocal supporter of marriage and child-friendly tax systems. “Government should be pro-children, because government should be pro-people. Our government is for people, not for puppies.”
Parents, look at things objectively. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed.
Many parents don’t live or think in the policy realm, and while they are not without the power to influence lawmakers’ positions on tax law, let’s be realistic: Some of these solutions may be difficult to implement, at least at the behest of parents.
Observing the ups and downs of parenting among my friends and myself puts things in perspective. Parenting is a phase, like anything else. Some dissatisfaction is normal, according to the U-shaped happiness scale. The happiness scale finds that people are happiest in childhood and adolescence, and least happy in their 40s. Not coincidentally, the 40s are when many parents are raising adolescent and teenage children, but happiness declines again in their 60s.
So it’s normal to feel overwhelmed or overwhelmed during parenting, but it doesn’t have to be miserable all the time. My parents still say the best years of their lives were raising me and my brother, and now that I’m halfway through raising four kids, I think that’s true for me, too.
One of my favorite poems by author Shel Silverstein is “How Many How Much”: “How many good things happen in a day? It all depends on how well you live.”
I challenge myself to reframe feelings of overwhelm as a parent as an opportunity to love my kids in the best way I can. That doesn’t necessarily mean doing more or signing them up for more events, but it does mean focusing on quality time and interaction. Parenting can be busy and challenging, but it can also be fun and joyful. Your mindset is key.
“Low your expectations of your kids,” Carney wrote me. “Send them to local recreational leagues instead of away programs. No violin lessons. Let them have fun and let them be bored.”
Carney also suggested “surrounding yourself with your community, ideally your church.” Finding support within the community can improve everyone’s well-being and reduce the stress parents may be feeling.
Raising children is hard and challenging, but it’s also a wonderful blessing and opportunity — and sometimes both are true at the same time.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four children. Sign up for her newsletter, “The Right Track,” delivered to your inbox.