Transcript of The Parents Aren’t All Right

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For years, research on hyperattentive parenting has focused on all the ways that it can hurt children. But now, the US government is reframing that conversation and asking how our new era of parenting is actually for parents themselves. Today, my colleague Claire Cain Miller on why raising children is now a risk to your health. It's Wednesday, October ninth. Claire, thank you for doing this episode with us. This is going to be an interesting conversation because inevitably, I suspect it's going to end up being a little bit about us. We're both parents, and we're talking about parenting.

Yeah. How old are your kids?

Mine are two and three.

Mine are eight and twelve.

I win.

You're in a busier phase, that's for sure.

Right. And By win, I mean, my situation is a little more challenging, but just a little. Just a little.

Biger kids, bigger problems is what they say. It becomes less physically demanding, but it's more mentally demanding.

All right, maybe you win. I want to start by asking you to describe what our surgeon general just said about parents and parenting. Not a subject we tend to think of as a classic question of public health and the surgeon general.

The surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, put out an advisory. These are rare warnings. Past ones have been for things like cigarettes or gun violence. This time, what he's saying is that today's parents are not okay. They're too stressed, not the normal amount of stress. But what he's saying is that parenting has become so difficult that it's become an urgent public health crisis.

Basically, slapping a warning on the business of parenting.

Right.

And why? Exactly. I'm sure he has a very good explanation, but just on its face, parenting has never been easy. It will never be easy.

That's right. He does say parenting has always been something something that brings both joy and challenge at the same time. But what's really different now is that we have entered this new era of parenting. Social scientists call it intensive parenting. Basically, what it means is that we spend a lot more time and money on our children than previous generations did. Intensive parenting was first described by a sociologist named Sharon Hayes, and this is how she said it. Child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing parenting, labor-intensive, and financially-expensive. The basic idea of intensive parenting, which I've reported on now for many years as it's gotten even more intensive, is that kids need to be constantly educated and enriched and engaged.

Right. It feels like in layman's terms, intensive parenting is being all up in your kid's business and feeling like parenting is a 24-hour job where you're very invested in your children's social and intellectual growth in a very hands-on way.

That's right. That's like when you take a walk and you notice that the leaves are changing, you say to your child, Look, the leaves are changing. Do you know what drives that? Do you know why that's happening? That means that when they're doing a game on the floor, that you are down with them.

I feel like you've been watching me secretly in my kitchen with my children.

I mean, of course, this is how children learn, right? But it's We've really gotten to an extreme. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, says that when children watch TV, it should be co-viewed. The parent should be sitting with them, watching TV with them, hitting pause to talk about what's happening on TV, what they can learn from it. I think a lot of parents have used TV as their chance to go in the room and cook dinner. So this idea that when we are with our kids, we need to be constantly engaged in teaching them.

I want to ask you, Claire, if what you're describing describing this concept of intensive parenting, is widespread enough to be a public health crisis. I would imagine that what you're describing might be the province of certain parents who have the financial wherewithal and in a sense, the luxury to parent in this intensive way, and therefore, that it might not be a vast, widespread collective experience, and therefore, perhaps not a nationwide public health issue.

So when this style of parenting started, it was certainly an upper middle class phenomenon. But a variety of research has shown that it has spread across the income spectrum, across racial groups, that this is now considered by parents the optimal way to parent your children. If you have less money, if you have a job that allows for less time at home, you obviously have less ability to carry it out, but you still feel the pressure. So in some ways, that's even more stressful.

Okay, so we're all basically intensive parenting now? And why? Why are we participating in this stressful, intensive, hands-on, never-ending form of parenting?

A lot of things began to change around the time that we began to do this. One is that kids born in the early '80s, when you and I were both born, are the first generation of kids in America to have just as much of a chance of doing better than their parents financially as worse. Before, it was a definition of the American dream that each generation did a little bit better, and that is no longer a guarantee. There's this anxiety that kids won't do well, that they will fall out of their class, that they need to really have the utmost education and enrichment in order to succeed as adults. One way that that started to show up was that college became a lot more competitive and much more necessary for achieving this middle class wage. What the social scientists I talk to say is that our society has become so worried about the importance of a college degree, about this fear that your kids will grow up to be unsuccessful adults and not be able to support themselves. How that filters down is that we feel this pressure to be optimizing our kids all the time, optimizing their resumes, preparing them for college, preparing them for this future in a way that parents really didn't feel that stress before.

So intensive parenting should be viewed as a striving parenting, driven by economic insecurity, like a guarantee of, people hope, a better outcome for their children at a time when there are very few assurances that their children will do as well or better than them. That's fascinating.

That's exactly it. As norms change, you look around and you see other people doing it. Even for parents who this might not be top of mind, it just gets in the air that we breathe that our kids need to do all these things in order to succeed.

You started, Claire, to hint at this idea that intensive parenting is a break from what came before it. I think it would be useful to situate this new form of parenting that the surgeon general has just identified as problematic in a larger history of how parents in this country have parented.

Right. The way that we parent changes a lot over the decades. In recent years, every change has increased the pressure on parents. If we go back to the '70s, that's when parent was still a noun. No one used it as a verb. It was something we were, not something we did. Parents, by and large, did adult things when their children just occupied themselves. So they were more likely to do things in the presence of children, but not with their children. Maybe they were playing tennis and their children were on the playground nearby, or they were having drinks with their friends in the living room, and their kids were in the other room playing alone. We hear a lot of older people talk about how different childhood is today. What I always hear them say is, We used to run around until the streetlights came on, or, We used to run around until our mom called us in for dinner, and there's some truth to that. At the same time, this is when the women's movement is really ramping up. More and more women are going to college and entering the workforce. For the first time, parents are really having to grapple with what that means when both parents are working outside the home.

There was a moment when people were really advocating for the government to step in and help families solve this problem through policies like subsidized childcare or paid family leave. Those things ultimately didn't happen, and that cemented an essential piece of the American attitude towards parenting, which is that it's an individual task. It's not a community one. It's not one that you can count on the government to help you with.

The government basically is saying to American families, in this new era of two parent working households, you're on your own.

That's right. But soon enough in the '80s, we enter a new phase of parenting that becomes much more hands-on, and parenting becomes a verb, not just a noun. This was also a time when parenting books just exploded. We started getting this idea that we needed to listen to experts, that we couldn't trust our own intuition about parenting, that we needed to learn how to do this, that this was a job we did. And this, the '80s, is also when we got helicopter parenting. Basically, what that meant was that children's physical safety became paramount.

That's Jenny. But that's not Jenny's dad. If she gets into that car, you may be looking at Jenny for the last time.

This was the era when there were a few high-profile child abductions. Abductions have never actually been common in America. They weren't then, they aren't now. But there were these kids' faces on milk cartons. Last year, 50,000 children disappeared, many of them from nice, safe neighborhoods.

It's okay. Come on, help me. Talk to your children about not talking to strangers and do today. Right. This is the era where I grew up. So it's Eitan Patz being kidnapped in New York. It's Adam Walsh, whose dad would go on to create America's Most Wanted. This becomes very scary for people, even though, as you said, it's never that widespread.

That's exactly right. And so there was this idea that kids needed to be constantly watched and supervised, playing and running around in the street after school on your own. That was no longer safe.

It's 10:00 PM. Do you know where your children are?

So if you watch TV in the '80s, you probably remember a famous PSA. Celebrities Were Filming It. It's 10:00 PM.

Do you know where your children are?

Andy Warhol.

Hey, it's 10:00 PM.

Do you know where your children are? Cindy Lopper. This idea of physical safety spread to other things, falling off your bike, falling out of a tree if an adult wasn't there. That was unsafe. There was this idea that parents needed to be hovering over their kids, making sure that they were safe and that they were supervised. But it is not yet at this point in the '80s, really about the intellectual development and enrichment and the idea that you're always supposed to be teaching your children. It's more about you're always supposed to be protecting them.

How do we get to that final frontier of parenting where we began, intensive parenting parenting? Because so far, we're just in this area of parents stressed out by worries, mostly about their kids' safety.

By the late 1990s, we're influenced by a lot of the things we've already discussed. There's rising economic anxiety, there's rising competition for college. There's still this lack of public policy to support parents. There's also something new. Neuroscientists start to learn more about young children's brains and how parents and the way that they interact with their children can influence that. Parents really grasp onto this idea that every interaction they have with their child is shaping who they're ultimately going to become.

We'll be right back. My name is Carlos Prieto, and I'm one of the people that help make the Daily. As part of our reporting on immigration, we heard from this woman crossing one of the most dangerous stretches of land on the whole planet to get to the United States. I knew that she was from Venezuela, which is where I'm also from. But what I found out is that not only was She was from the same city that I grew up in, but she was also from the same neighborhood. She was describing parks and plazas and streets where I spent a lot of my childhood.

She was a woman that I might have encountered at some point in my life.

It made me feel an extra responsibility to find a way for our listeners to feel like they understood her and her story. What makes the Daily special is that we try to understand every story with that level of closeness so that our listeners can really connect with the humans in the middle of a news event. If this is the journalism that you like and that you care about, the best way to support it is by subscribing to the New York Times. Claire, tell us about the brain science that ends up driving or helping to drive this final era of intensive parenting that we're in now.

Neuroscients really begin to focus on the fact that children's brains are moldable. For a long time, it was just assumed that your kid was born with this temperament and the certain set of skills, and they would turn out the way they were going to turn out. But neuroscience began to show us that the things that happen to us when we're young can have lifelong effects on our outcomes.

From birth to age three are the most important years in a child's brain development, the time that defines who they become.

We talk about adverse childhood experiences when kids are exposed to trauma or severe stress, that that can cause problems later on.

Did you know that the pathways in your infant's brain that deal with emotions are built and strengthened when you respond day after day to your baby's smiles by smiling back or picking him up?

We also learned that when kids are exposed to education and enrichment early on, that that can mold their brains in a certain way.

Talk, laugh, sing, and play peekaboo often so that children hear you speak.

We get this research about the number of words that kids hear before they're a certain age and how this can impact their vocabularies and reading comprehension later on. This is when we got Baby Mozart, this idea that you would play classical music outside your belly when your baby was in utero because there was this science that suggested that this molded their brain in certain ways.

You know at this moment in the episode, we have to play Baby Mozart.

I'm excited to hear it. But some parents take this to an extreme with this idea that parental inputs entirely shape a child's outcomes and what they become. What that does to parents is makes them feel like at every turn, at every moment, it's their responsibility to be shaping their children's future outcomes. And so fast forward a couple of decades, and this intensive parenting has only gotten more intensive, and according to America's top doctor, too intense for parents.

Give us a little bit more of a sense of what that looks like. I mean, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation the tendency to describe the leaf falling from the tree. But I really want to get granular around this idea of what intensive parenting focused on the responsibility of a parent to shape early outcomes because those mean later outcomes actually looks and feels like.

A statistic I think about all the time from my reporting on this is that working mothers today spend as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

Wow. How is that possible?

Well, one of the driving factors of intensive parenting is this feeling of guilt, especially eternal guilt for working outside the home. And there's this feeling that as a result, when you're not working, you need to be spending all your time with your children. So today, it's much, much more likely that your children are involved in your leisure time. They're involved in your exercise time.

Which is to say it's no longer exercise time.

They're no longer playing on the playground while you're playing tennis with your friends. They're instead playing tennis with you. Right. Time use data has shown that what this comes at the expense of is is parents sleep, parents doing things for their own health, and parents spending time alone with friends or their spouse.

That very much sounds like a more stressful form of parenting that the surgeon general is talking about. When parents have so little time to themselves and therefore so little identity of their own outside of parenting and their work, that is a less enjoyable form of parenting, period.

That's right. Another thing the surgeon general raised was social media and this sense of comparison. There have been a lot of surveys that say parents really feel judged by other parents. Social media, because it's showing the victories in children's lives and it's showing these happy family moments, is really making people who see it feel less than, feel insecure, feel like they're not measuring up in this world in which they're already feeling the way that they're parenting and juggling everything is not measuring up.

Right. Instagram, some people say, the great envy machine.

That's right. I don't know about you. Quick tip for parents who want to raise confident kids. But when I open Instagram now, Okay, when you discipline your kids, keep it short and sweet. No long lectures, don't tell them about what I see. What I see, not even accounts that I follow, is a bunch of parenting advice. This is a back to school hack you don't want to miss. It's like Dr. Becky. I make a menu for my kids the night before where they have to pick their breakfast option. Telling me how to parent. It's either seeing these happy families or seeing these experts telling me what I need to be doing differently. It's feeding this insecurity. I'll never listen to you.

It's as simple as this. When you say, We're all done with iPad after that one show, you are all done with iPad after that one show. Oh, yeah. There's a couple of them who are everywhere, and they're always in front of a microphone, and they're always saying things that you're like, Oh, it's totally not how I handle that.

Yeah, exactly. And so all these concerns and pressures have really added up. What the surgeon general is talking about is potentially toxic stress. Clearly, major stressors, like living through a war, have immediate serious impacts on people. But research also shows that low-level, persistent chronic stress have really big effects on people's mental health. It also puts parents at risk of more serious mental illness like anxiety and depression. The surgeon general cites data that shows that nearly half of parents say that most days they feel completely overwhelmed by the stress, numb or even nonfunctional. That's compared with only a quarter of people who aren't parents.

Right. I clearly, from what you're saying, understand this stew of factors, economic, social, social media that have conspired to make parenting the stressful experience it now is. Stressful to the point of, as you just said, depression, feeling numb. But to be provocative for just a moment, I want to put all of that to the test. Is it possible, especially on the brain science that you talked about earlier, that intensive parenting for all of the ways that it's bad for parents is good for most kids? So good, in fact, that it's still worth it.

Here's the thing. Nobody disputes that parents being engaged with their children, spending time with them, teaching them things is a bad thing. That is, of course, a good thing. But there is a backlash. You might have heard of the free-range parenting movement. It's basically this idea that kids should still be able to run free until the streetlights come on. These are parents who are actively resisting both the helicopter parenting and the intensive parenting. The problem with free-range parenting is that there are no other kids out in the street after school for their kids to run free with.

What's the point of a free-range kid if he has no other free-range kids to free-range with?

It's quite hard to implement. There have been very valid concerns that this parenting could be decreasing kids' independence and their resilience, their ability to solve problems on their own.

What does the science say about that?

There has been science that connects kids' lack of independence today to some of the mental health crisis that we're seeing among kids. There's something to be said for kids being out there, getting into a conflict, being scared, having to solve a problem on their own that helps them understand that anxiety and stress are something that they can cope with and and build that toolbox to cope with it. There is some truth to that. However, most parents are not doing it to that extreme. They're not letting their kids solve no problems on their own. I recently did a story that I thought was really fascinating because it was not the result I expected, which is that young adults who have been raised this way are still really close with their parents, closer than in previous generations. Conversations. They're talking to them more often, they're texting them, and both the parents and the kids are happy with this. They're just having a full adult relationship with their parents, and that is probably a good thing.

Right. That feels like a pretty healthy, desirable dynamic. However, if we inhabit the space of our surge in general and take at face value the idea that in this new era of parenting, parents are facing a public health problem. I'm curious what the surgeon general thinks are some of the solutions that might mitigate the parent problem of that equation.

Sure. He proposed a lot of big structural solutions, things like public policies, paid family leave, subsidized childcare at a time when childcare has gotten so much more expensive. He talked about workplace changes, employers better helping parents manage the juggle and understand that their workers have lives outside of work. He talked about changes in health care, health care providers being more aware of parents' mental health. Surely these things would all make big differences, provide relief for parents. They're also things that people have been working on for a long time, and it's slow-going. What I thought was really interesting is he also talked about cultural changes. The reason we parent this way is because it's become our the culture. That means that we could also change the culture. It sounds pie in the sky, changing the culture. It sounds very difficult for individual people to achieve. But he mentioned these really small things. If you have a friend with a baby, go over for 15 minutes and offer to hold the baby while they take a shower or take a nap. He talked about the need for more community spaces, places like parks and libraries, where families can get out of the insular household and interact with other families, maybe to get some support watching their children, but also to talk about these things.

He even said that parents should not feel guilt when they take time for themselves to exercise or take a nap or go out with friends. That's really important to do for their own health. And ultimately, if you're in better mental health, then that helps your children, too.

What does he say about how your spouse makes you feel when you take that nap, though?

Maybe you could trade off nap times, and maybe at the end of the evening, you could also get a babysitter and go out with your spouse. Totally.

Just ask him questions here. All right. Well, I have to end this by asking about you. You have become a real authority on parenting at the times. You brought us this reporting about intensive parenting and the surgeon general's report. Are you yourself an intensive parenter? I'm pretty much sure the answer is going to be yes. To the degree that you are, how stressed are you? How much are Are you reevaluating all of this? And are you contemplating any corrective of any kind? Are you willing to start to free-range a little bit?

Well, of course, I'm an intensive parent because it's hard not to be these days. But I do take this to heart. I try to catch myself. There was this moment when my younger son was in kindergarten, and I heard another parent talking about how her kindergarten her had a tutor, and I was like, Oh, my God, that hadn't occurred to me. Do I need a tutor? The same child was in rec soccer in kindergarten and went back in first grade, and there were no more kids from his school on the soccer team. So I texted some of the parents and said, Where are they? They're like, We signed up for private club. It's time to do private club when they're seven years old. And I was like, Oh, my God, do I need to do that? And I have caught myself and not done those things.

Caught yourself and said, I don't need to give into this pressure.

That's right. I don't need to give into this pressure. I have had moments where I'm like, You know what? You go to the basement and watch TV for an hour, and I'm not going to feel guilty about this because I am parenting non-intensively right now. So I do feel some sense of like you can let go of the guilt and embrace that a little bit.

All right, well, Claire, this has been extremely illuminating, and I'm grateful for your time. Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

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Time will be running out very shortly if you wait any longer. On Tuesday, millions of Floridians evacuated their homes as Hurricane Milton approached the state's West Coast. Forecasters are calling Milton the strongest storm to emerge from the Gulf of Mexico in 20 years. During a series of news conferences, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned that the storm's lethal force would extend across the Florida Peninsula and would likely flood communities that are still recovering from the state's last hurricane. A lot of the places on the West Coast of Florida that did receive significant storm surge for Hurricane Helene is projected to have even more storm surge from Hurricane Milton. And the scandal plagued administration of New York City Mayor Eric Adams is collapsing. On Tuesday, his first Deputy Mayor resigned, becoming the seventh senior official to leave the mayor's office over the past few weeks. Adams himself is under growing pressure to resign after being indicted on federal corruption charges for allegedly accepting illegal campaign donations and gifts from the government of Turkey in return for political favors. Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern and Shannon Lynn, with help from Ricky Nowetsky and Sydney Harper. It was edited by Lexie Diao, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Sophia Landman, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of WNDYRLE. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Maboro. See you tomorrow.