Is parenting really harder today?
Last Wednesday, the U.S. surgeon general issued a public health advisory about the impact of modern stresses on parents’ mental health, saying today’s parents face unique challenges, like social media and the youth mental health crisis.
But some parents from older generations say raising children has always been, and always will be, a struggle. And while some experts agree that parents today have it worse, others say that since we lack objective data, it’s all about individual perspective.
“We frame everything through our own experiences,” Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta and the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Studies in Population, told CBC News.
A new advisory from the U.S. surgeon general warns parenting can drastically impact mental and physical health, citing extreme stress from financial strain, time demands and societal pressures.
Duncan McDonald, of Orillia, Ont., says parenting stress is not unique to this generation and, in fact, there are more resources available for parents now than when he raised his children. He’s 64, a former pastor, and has three daughters and six grandchildren.
He used to work long hours, admits he didn’t manage his stress well, and when his daughters became teens he “went from dad to dork” almost overnight. That was the late ’90s, and McDonald says he worried about his daughters making responsible choices, while also trying to navigate the early days of cellphones and home computers.
“The teenage years were the most stressful. The most difficult, ” McDonald said. “Kids will always do what they want to do.”
‘Just different’
In his advisory, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy also cited 2020 data from Pew Research that 70 per cent of the 3,640 U.S. parents surveyed with at least one child under the age of 17 said they believe parenting now is more difficult than it was 20 years ago.
Yet as Strohschein points out, it’s possible every generation thinks they had it the worst. And every generation has a point. The Greatest Generation raised children during the First and Second World Wars, and their children were parents during the rise of the nuclear bomb.
Baby Boomers raised children in the era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger. And parents around the turn of the millennium had to navigate the advent of the internet.
While we don’t have objective data that can prove which generation was the most stressed, we do have data that parents today spend more time with their children, Strohschein says. This “intensification of parenting,” she says, stems from the modern idea that parents need to invest all their own time, energy and affection into their children.
It creates time pressures that other generations may not have felt so acutely.
“So, yes, parents today might report being more stressed, but they also have much closer relationships with their children than previous generations,” she said.
“As always, there is a trade-off — across generations, things will look different, but no one generation had it better or worse than any other. It was just different.”
The intensification of parenting manuals
It’s very hard to compare parenting in different eras, says Dr. Ashley Miller, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. That said, she does think modern parenting is not only more stressful, but that the stress has increased even in the nearly 20 years she’s been in practice.
“Expectations are too high. That’s expectations parents put on themselves, but also general societal expectations, even myths, about the role of the parent in child development,” Miller, who is also a child and adolescent psychiatrist, said.
There’s a pervasive cultural idea that parents should be striving to keep their children happy all the time that’s very different from previous generations, she says.
These expectations become evident in the shift in tone in parenting manuals throughout the last century. While manuals were relatively rare around this time, one parenting manual from 1919 warned mothers about the dangers of the “spoiled baby,” and cautioned that “the nervous baby must early learn absolute respect for authority.”
The website of the History channel says this was the typical parenting approach at the time, and pointed to psychologist John B. Watson’s 1930 book Behaviorism as another example.
“Never, never hug or kiss them, never let them sit in your lap,” Watson wrote in the book.
The Museum of Health Care in Kingston, Ont., notes its collection of Canadian parenting manuals from 1926 to 1959 mostly contain information on physical care. This is especially true for the earlier manuals, the museum says in a blog post, where “virtually no attention at all is given to the many other facets of raising a child.”
Things started to shift in the 1960s, when Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous 1946 manual Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care went mainstream. Spock encouraged a more affectionate, nurturing and hands-on approach, the History channel explains.
The parenting guru discusses his own upbringing, his child-rearing philosophy, his far-reaching influence and how he’s dealt with criticism.
“I don’t think that a child who has been loved in a sensible way goes off the deep end with drugs or with sex or with other things,” Spock told CBC News 31 years ago, when he was 90.
Still, parenting manuals themselves were few and far between before the 1970s, when they proliferated, according to the New York Times.
“Parenting” itself wasn’t even commonly used as a verb until then, says author Andrew Bomback in his book Long Days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting. That’s when parenthood transformed “from someone to be into something to do,” he wrote.
The comparison problem
Linda Hunter of Brighton, Ont., says she doesn’t think parenting is harder now, nor does she think it was particularly stressful when she was a single, working mom raising young children in Toronto in the 1970s and ’80s, either.
Hunter, 72, told CBC News she attributes that to her good job as a registered nurse, and support from family and friends. The problem today isn’t necessarily that parenting is more stressful, she says, but that parents are comparing themselves to others too much, both in terms of social media and social interactions.
“They want to hear from their friends that are having the same problem. So they’re going back and forth, giving each other support, but they’re not getting any ideas to help. They’re just complaining to each other,” Hunter said.
McDonald, the former pastor, says he sees the increase in expectations playing out in modern parents. He looks at his grandchildren — their creative but intense birthday parties, their many extra-curricular activities — and says it’s no wonder that parents today are so exhausted.
“They have a lot more balls to keep up in the air,” he said.
But Miller, the psychiatrist, says modern parenting stresses go much deeper than that. Social support tends to be inadequate, isolation has increased and practical demands on parents are higher, she said. Meanwhile, the cost of living has increased and parents are working more, which means more juggling.
“Parents feel shame and guilt because they feel that they must have some kind of deficiency because they’re struggling, but in fact it’s a much larger societal issue,” Miller said.
“They’re very much not to blame for the challenges of being in this current time.”
