Parents in the US lack support while expectations are high. As a mom and an educator, I'm not surprised we have a crisis.

• Parents who lack support often think their struggles are a sign of failure.
• The US Surgeon General recently declared parental stress a public health crisis.
• Parents are motivated to make things better — to ease parental stress, societal shifts are necessary.

Before I had children of my own I visited a friend who'd just had her first baby. I came to her apartment with sandwiches, expecting we'd eat and then oooh and ahhh over the baby.

I quickly realized the baby wasn't in need of my attention. But my friend was.

Our conversation spanned a couple of hours and included many tears as my friend described the debilitating pain of her postpartum and postoperative recovery. She told me how she worried she wasn't bonding properly with her son while at the same time expressing how overwhelmed she was with the relentless demands of newborn care.

She described feeling utterly alone while at the same time mourning the loss of her autonomy. She was clearly a devoted new parent, but in her mind, she was failing at every turn.

As I walked home, I wondered how my friend was going to make it through the next five hours before her partner came home from work, let alone the next five weeks of postpartum recovery and newborn care. That was my first up-close view of the thin thread mothers cling to in the early days of motherhood.

It was also my first up-close view of the way our culture treats new parents. Expectations are shockingly high, and support is startlingly low.

Parental stress is a public health crisis

The sad reality is that my friend's circumstances were not all that novel. In fact, her experience is a rather routine path to parenthood in the United States. But the regularity of its occurrence doesn't make it right.

Concerningly, after the newborn stage, it doesn't tend to get a whole lot easier for most parents. The challenges are different, but the pervasive lack of support, coupled with absurdly high expectations, remain firmly in place throughout parenthood.

In August 2024, The New York Times published an op-ed by the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, in which he declared parental stress a public health crisis. While few parents were surprised by the reality Murthy described, many were pleasantly surprised at the recognition of their struggle.

Murthy cited a recent study by the American Psychological Association, which "revealed that 48% of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming." But parents aren't a population that is quick to broadcast their struggles, even to those whom they feel close to. Murthy hit the nail on the head when he called out the fact that parents "are struggling, often in silence and alone."

I am a mom to 4 kids

As a parent of four kids, I know I have often struggled in silence and alone, and for good reason. Parents are quick to be judged for any perceived failing.

In my experience, in the United States, desiring autonomy as a parent can be seen as a failing, prioritizing one's own needs ahead of a child's can be seen as a failing, and working too much can be seen as a failing. On the flip side, devoting oneself entirely to one's child can be seen as a failing, indulging a child's every whim can be seen as a failing, and quitting one's job to be a full time parent can be seen as a failing.

The razor-thin margin of error between success and failure in parenthood is a moving target at best, and it is enough to cause any parent to struggle in silence.

Social media doesn't help

As Murthy points out, "All of this is compounded by an intensifying culture of comparison, often amplified online, that promotes unrealistic expectations of what parents must do." Parents' inexhaustible efforts to meet these increasingly unrealistic expectations have only added to their stress.

When parents continue to blame themselves, they essentially absolve an entire society from taking any action to give them the support they desperately need and certainly deserve. In a culture where nearly half of parents say their stress most days is completely overwhelming, we're long overdue in recognizing not an individual issue parents can fix by simply trying harder or parenting better.

Parental stress is a societal issue that needs to be addressed with policy change, perspective shifts, and by normalizing the call for help that comes from a parent in need and showing up as the response. By declaring parental stress a public health crisis, Murthy did parents everywhere a great service. By asking for widespread cultural shifts in "how we value parenting, recognizing that the work of raising a child is crucial to the health and well-being of all society," Murthy is asking us all to help shoulder the burden that has rested solely with parents for far too long.

Christine Carrig, M.S.Ed., is the founding director of Carrig Montessori School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You can subscribe to her Substack or follow her on Instagram @christine.m.carrig.