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Is parenting really harder these days?
Last Wednesday, the US Surgeon General a public health warning has been issued about the impact of modern stressors on parental mental health. She says parents today face unique challenges, such as social media and the crisis surrounding adolescent mental health.
But some parents from older generations say that raising children has always been and always will be a struggle. And while some experts agree While others argue that things are worse for parents today, there is a lack of objective data and it’s all about the individual perspective.
“We base everything on our own experiences,” Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta and editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Studies in Population, told CBC News.
A new advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General warns that parenthood can have a huge impact on mental and physical health, citing extreme stress from financial pressures, time pressures and societal pressures.
Duncan McDonald, of Orillia, Ontario, says the stress of parenting isn’t unique to this generation and that there are more resources available to parents now than when he was raising his children. He’s 64, a former pastor, and has three daughters and six grandchildren.
He worked long hours, admits he didn’t handle his stress well, and when his daughters became teenagers, “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 hardest,” McDonald said. “Kids will always do what they want to do.”
‘Just different’
In his advisory, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy also mentioned 2020 data from Pew Research that 70 percent of the 3,640 American parents surveyed with at least one child under the age of 17 said they find parenting more difficult now than it was 20 years ago.
But as Strohschein points out, it’s possible that every generation thinks it had it the worst. And every generation has a point. The Greatest Generation raised children during World Wars I and II, and their children were parents during the advent of the atomic bomb.
Baby boomers raised their children in the era of helicopter parenting and strange danger. And parents around the turn of the century had to deal with 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 can use to help their children. spend more time with their childrensays Strohschein. This “intensification of parenting,” she says, stems from the modern idea that parents should invest all of their own time, energy, and affection in their children.
It creates time pressure that other generations may not have felt as intensely.
“So yes, parents today may report experiencing more stress, but they also have much closer bonds with their children than previous generations,” she said.
“As always, there’s a trade-off — things will look different across generations, but no generation had it better or worse than another. It was just different.”
The intensification of parenting manuals
It’s really hard to compare parenting across eras, says Dr. Ashley Miller, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. That said, she thinks modern parenting is not only more stressful, but that the stress has actually increased in the nearly 20 years she’s been in practice.
“The expectations are too high. These are expectations that parents place on themselves, but also general societal expectations, even myths, about the role of the parent in the child’s development,” said Miller, who is also a child and adolescent psychiatrist.
There is a widespread cultural idea that parents should strive to make their children happy all the time, and that idea is very different from that of previous generations, she says.
These expectations are evident in the shift in tone of parenting manuals over the past century. Although manuals were relatively rare around this time, parenting manual from 1919 warned mothers of the dangers of the ‘spoiled baby’ and cautioned that ‘the nervous baby must early learn absolute respect for authority’.
The History Channel website says this is the typical parenting approach at that time, and pointed to psychologist John B. Watson’s 1930 book Behaviorism as another example.
“Never, ever give them a hug, a kiss, or let them sit on your lap,” Watson wrote in the book.
The Museum of Health Care in Kingston, Ont., notes that its collection of Canadian parenting manuals from 1926 to 1959 primarily contains information on physical care. This is especially true of the earlier manuals, the museum says in a blog post, which “pay virtually no attention to the many other facets of raising a child.”
Things began to change in the 1960s, when Dr. Benjamin Spock’s famous 1946 manual Common Sense Book on Baby and Child Care became mainstream. Spock encouraged a more loving, nurturing, and practical approach, the History Channel explains.
The parenting guru discusses his own upbringing, his parenting philosophy, his far-reaching influence and how he dealt with criticism.
“I don’t think a child who’s been loved wisely would go crazy with drugs or sex or anything else,” Spock told CBC News 31 years ago, when he was 90.
However, there were few parenting manuals before the 1970s, but they came onto the market in large numbers, according to the New York Times.
Until then, ‘parenting’ itself was not even commonly used as a verb, says author Andrew Bomback in his book Long Days, Short Years: A Cultural History of Modern Parenting. Then parenthood changed from “someone you are to someone you do,” he wrote.
The comparison problem
Linda Hunter of Brighton, Ontario, says she doesn’t think parenting is harder now, nor does she think it was particularly stressful when she was a single, working mother raising young children in Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s.
Hunter, 72, told CBC News she attributes that to her good job as a registered nurse and the support of family and friends. The problem these days isn’t necessarily that parenting is more stressful, she said, but that parents compare themselves to others too much, both in terms of social media and social interactions.
“They want to hear from their friends who have the same problem. So they go back and forth, give each other support, but they don’t get any ideas to help. They just complain to each other,” Hunter said.
McDonald, the former pastor, says he sees the increasing expectations playing out among modern parents. He looks at his grandchildren — their creative but intense birthday parties, their many extracurricular activities — and says it’s no wonder parents today are so exhausted.
“They have to keep a lot more balls in the air,” he said.
But Miller, the psychiatrist, says modern parenting stress runs much deeper than that. Social support is often inadequate, isolation has increased and the practical demands on parents are greater, she said. Meanwhile, the cost of living has risen and parents are working more, meaning more juggling has to be done.
“Parents feel ashamed and guilty because they feel like they are failing because they are struggling, but in fact it is a much larger societal problem,” Miller said.
“They are absolutely not responsible for the challenges we face in this day and age.”
