I really hope this next topic picks up steam in the general public. The Biden Administration is continuing to recognize the struggle that American citizens are facing. On Thursday, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy wrote an opinion essay for the New York Times called, “Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.” In the piece, he issues a surgeon general’s advisory to call attention to the “stress and mental health challenges faced by parents and caregivers,” saying that it’s a “serious public health concern.” The essay also talks about different stressors that parents and caregivers face and the effect that has on parents and children. Finally, it calls for ways to address and alleviate these issues, like ensuring parents get paid time off, giving financial support like the child tax credits, addressing gun violence, and giving everyone access to affordable child care and mental health care.

The U.S. Surgeon General has issued an advisory on the wellbeing of parents, saying “addressing parental mental health conditions, and importantly the underlying stressors and causes, is critical for the well-being of children and society.”

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, a father of two, also penned an opinion piece for the New York Times on his own experiences with parental stress, sharing, “The joys are indeed abundant, but as fulfilling as parenting has been, the truth is it has also been more stressful than any job I’ve had.”

“I’ve had many moments of feeling lost and exhausted,” Murthy wrote. He continued: “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. It’s time to recognize they constitute a serious public health concern for our country. Parents who feel pushed to the brink deserve more than platitudes. They need tangible support.”

That’s why he said he issued the advisory, in which he calls for “a national paid family and medical leave program and ensure all workers have paid sick time.”

The advisory also addresses a need to ensure that “parents and caregivers have access to comprehensive and affordable high-quality mental health care.”

In his piece for the NYT, Murthy cited a recent study by the American Psychological Association, which said that 48% of parents said “most days their stress is completely overwhelming.”

The study also noted that 62% of parents say “no one understands how stressed out they are.”

Murthy added that the “traditional hardships of parenting” are now compounded by “new stressors, including omnipresent screens, a youth mental health crisis and widespread fear about the future.”

He called parenting a “team sport,” writing that support for parents is essential.

“Raising children is never going to be without worry,” he wrote in his opinion piece, but “reorienting our priorities in order to give parents and caregivers the support they need would do a lot to ensure the balance skews toward joy.”

[From People]

The essay is thoughtful, well-done, and definitely worth the read. Here’s a gift link if you’re interested. Being a parent is incredibly stressful and it comes with so much pressure and self-imposed guilt. When my older son was younger, he had ear infections non-stop and I had to take a lot of time off to stay home with him because he would get these really high fevers and wouldn’t be allowed in daycare. By the time he was 23 months old, he needed two sets of tubes and his adenoids removed. Mr. Rosie worked for the Apple Store at the time, so we made it work by doing trade-offs, but I felt so terrible about how much time I’d have to take off. I’m so lucky that my wonderful boss at the time was the mother of young children herself.

I’m a member of two local Mom groups on Facebook and I read posts from women all of the time about how stressed out they are trying to hold everything together. What Dr. Murthy says about living in the age of social media causing extra stress because we’re constantly comparing ourselves to our contemporaries really stood out to me, too. It’s not just because parents are comparing themselves to other parents, but because their kids are now doing it too! There are so many areas of stress in our lives today, including money, health, work, taking care of family members of all ages, and how to balance it all. Sometimes it feels impossible, doesn’t it? I truly appreciate that we have an administration that not only claims to be for families but is actually trying to do things to help us.

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