OPINION: Parental stress is an underappreciated drag on the economy

It’s official. Parenting is difficult. So much so that U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has issued an advisory about the stress and mental health issues parenting creates. Parenting joins social media for children, health-care worker burnout and firearm violence as issues the Department of Health and Human Services felt it needed to formally address.

The surgeon general is a politically appointed position, so a warning of this kind naturally evokes some skepticism. This is just another way to push for Democrats’ priorities like more funding for child care! These millennials are soft and need to stop complaining! Who are they to say parenting is harder now? In the grand tradition of being right and wrong at the same time, maybe prior generations did have it harder, but there is nothing to gain by withholding help to today’s parents.

According to the surgeon general’s advisory, parenting has devolved in ways both obvious and subtle. Of course, there’s the cost. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has estimated the cost of raising a child since 1960, says low-income families will spend $120,000 per child from birth through age 17, and high-income families at least $380,000. The Brookings Institution estimates middle-class families spend $310,000 on average. Then there’s the cost of college. Not surprisingly, 1 in 4 parents struggle to afford food and housing.

Money is an obvious stressor, but parenting has never been cheap. The real accelerants of parental stress are the modern worries that prior generations couldn’t even imagine. Consider that the No. 1 killer of children in the U.S. is guns. Unlike almost every other cause of death among children, gun deaths have been rising every year for the past decade. Even though few of child deaths from guns are related to school shootings, such events and their victims are on the rise. These shootings have an outsize impact on parental stress and fear. In 1977, just 24% of parents reported to Gallup that they were worried about their child’s safety at school; last year it was 38% (with spikes after large-scale school shootings, reaching 55% following Columbine).

Parents must also handle the fear of their children, 1 in 4 of whom have been in an active shooter lockdown. And new research is emerging that shows simply practicing for active shooters in drills can psychologically harm children.

Gun violence is a terrifying possibility, but monitoring and managing access to social media is a daily struggle. Parents are trying to not only wade through the quandary of how much screen time is reasonable for their children but also whether allowing them access to social media will actively harm them. That’s especially true after a Facebook whistleblower came forward in 2021 with evidence that the company’s research concluded Instagram was harmful for teen girls, even as the company was denying such claims to the public.

Many parents also find themselves outmatched when it comes to preparing children for the job market. College, once considered a sure investment for anyone who made it through, is now understood to have varying returns based on gender, ethnicity and parental income. Young people are becoming disenchanted with higher education, with 1 in 5 graduates declaring it wasn’t worth the time and cost. As such, the so-called college premium is declining.

However bad the economy has been at times over the past 80 years, there is little to compare with the harbinger of potential job destruction that is artificial intelligence. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicted it will destroy 300 million jobs worldwide. It’s already showing up in layoff data. Sure, the economy is always evolving, destroying jobs that are no longer relevant while creating new ones, but that doesn’t make it any easier for parents as they try to steer their children toward economic security.

These challenges come as parents spend more time with their children than prior generations. In time-use studies, both mothers and fathers report spending more hours of the day caring for children, with increases of 40% and 154% respectively, since 1985. Time-intensive parenting has become the norm because it’s now broadly considered the standard for “good parenting.”

The upshot is parents are stressed and that has consequences for everyone, radiating out through worsening mental and physical health, substance abuse, marital conflict, family breakups, setbacks for child development, child behavior, child safety and child mental health. Even from the cold lens of the economy’s needs, none of that is preferable to stable families with members in good health, especially if it deters individuals from having children and reduces fertility.

The surgeon general’s advisory offers policies as diverse as reducing poverty and building more community spaces as ways to make parenting less stressful and lonely. It’s not clear any policy, with the exception of reducing costs, would be successful. But there is nothing to gain by refusing to help, no economic diamond buried in stressed, depressed, overwhelmed parents that we can mine for later use. It’s pure loss. Policy isn’t a cure — it’s an aid, and if it can help parents, it can help the economy.

Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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