Parenting is both joyful and challenging, deeply fulfilling and also incredibly hard. Even in the best of circumstances, parenting carries physical, emotional, and financial demands. Parents face daily stressors; financial pressures, demands on their time, concerns about their children’s exposure to technology and social media, and worries about their well-being, health, safety, and futures. Parents often experience fatigue, exhaustion, and burnout, and report higher levels of psychological distress than other adults. Parents experiencing poverty or financial hardships face additional stressors and report being less happy. Parents of color also contend with the compounding stressors of daily experiences of racism, discrimination, and stigma, while also worrying about the impact of racism on their children and seeking to protect them from it.
Research has shown that stress takes a toll on parenting. For parents facing economic hardship, ongoing stress associated with poverty or financial strain only add to the challenges they face every day. The stress of living in uncertain and financially strained conditions can make it difficult for parents to ensure consistency and stability in their child’s routine, to respond to their child’s physical and emotional needs, and to ensure their child’s safety. There are important programs that can mitigate financial hardship, help families make ends meet, and reduce the associated stress, including the federal and state refundable Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, paid caregiving leave, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and Medicaid—which play a critical role in supporting families.
These programs can help meet families’ most basic needs, yet for many, barriers get in the way of much-needed assistance. Existing federal and state policies should be improved to expand eligibility, increase access, bolster benefit levels, and advance equity to ensure that all families, and specifically Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other families of color who have often been excluded, can benefit from these supports and have the foundation they need to live healthy lives. Paid caregiving leave, which currently does not exist at the federal level, must also be established. These policies are critical in our response to the chronic stress, isolation, and declines in health and well-being for caregivers, and can help meet families’ needs and promote well-being.
A recent Surgeon General advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents, “Parents Under Pressure,” serves as a call to action on parental stress and puts forward many of these policies as part of a comprehensive approach to supporting parents and caregivers. The advisory brings attention to the importance of parental stress, mental health and well-being, makes the case that parents need care too, and elevates the well-being of parents and caregivers as a public health priority. Specifically, it outlines a series of policy changes and actions that can be taken by various stakeholders including national, state, local, and tribal governments.
Among the recommendations are a call for promoting and expanding funding for programs that support parents and caregivers and their families including the Child Tax Credit and caregiving supports—supports that in our research with parents and caregivers, they describe as what they need to be economically secure. The advisory also calls for policies to ensure parents and caregivers have access to comprehensive and affordable high-quality mental health care, including adequate payment for mental health services, enforcing parity laws, investing in payment models that integrate mental health care and primary care, and expanding the mental health workforce and community-based mental health care options.
We know that the well-being of parents and caregivers matters. It is our collective responsibility to support families, and policy is an essential tool to do that. Policies and programs can support parents, help to reduce their stress, and protect their mental health and well-being. We also know that the well-being of parents is deeply connected to that of their children. Parents who can meet their basic needs and access essential services like health and behavioral health care are better able to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of their children. By expanding and improving programs and ensuring that systems work well for families, especially for Black, Latine, Indigenous, and other families of color who have been repeatedly failed by these systems, we can significantly reduce the stress and isolation many parents feel, protect their well-being and mental health, and support caregivers who are doing the important job of raising the next generation.