What We’re Missing About the Surgeon General’s Advisory on Parenting

The big problem isn't bad parenting. It's Big Parenting.

The state of parenting in 2024 has been on my mind a lot lately. And it’s not just because I’m the parent of two teens.

In August, the U.S. Surgeon General released an advisory on mental health and wellbeing among parents. Clickbait headlines quickly followed exclaiming that parenting is hazardous for our health and that the parents aren’t all right.

Yet, truthfully, many of us parents aren’t all right. According to the advisory, 48% of parents say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared to 26% among other adults. The CDC reports that rates of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and overdose deaths among adults in families with children have spiked since since the pandemic and are showing no signs of slowing down.

In the words of our Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy,

“Parents have a profound impact on the health of our children and the health of society. Yet parents and caregivers today face tremendous pressures, from familiar stressors such as worrying about their kids’ health and safety and financial concerns, to new challenges like navigating technology and social media, a youth mental health crisis, an epidemic of loneliness that has hit young people the hardest. …With this Advisory, I am calling for a fundamental shift in how we value and prioritize the mental health and well-being of parents. I am also outlining policies, programs, and individual actions we can all take to support parents and caregivers.”

Amen.

Yet, there’s a key factor that’s barely merited a mention in the significant media coverage of the Advisory: the impact of the parenting advice industry. It’s obvious that too much parenting advice can make us feel like crappy, inadequate parents, guilty that we are never doing enough. But I believe this industry has directly compromised the wellbeing of parents by systematically increasing the likelihood of intensive parenting.

Intensive Parenting

The term intensive parenting, coined by the sociologist Sharon Hays, describes what many of us have come to believe is the ideal style of parenting: “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive.” In other words, healthy development requires us to tirelessly educate, enrich, and engage our children.

There are many ways we parents try to live up to this ideal. Meal times with infants become sign language tutorials to boost their communication skills. Walks in the park become botany lessons. Coffees with fellow parents become child resume comparison sessions, often leading to a sense of rising panic because my kid isn’t in Advanced Algebra (I should have put him in Russian Math!) or isn’t competing in the Geography Bee when he’s not also on the road for the Karate National Semi-Finals.

We’ve in effect become the Chief Operating Officers of our kids’ childhoods. And it’s exhausting. Working mothers today, already stretched thin, spend more one-on-one time with their children than stay-at-home mothers did in the 60’s. Unfortunately for many of us it’s not time spent baking cookies - unless kids practice their fractions while measuring out flour and sugar.

Parents aren’t idiots. But there’s a perfect storm of uncertainties staring us in the face every day - economic instability, safety concerns, and worries about kids’ cognitive development. We might be overwhelmed and exhausted, but we’ll hedge our bets and do whatever it takes to help our kids.

Let’s start with economics. The American Dream ain’t what it used to be. For the first time in generations, kids have a 50/50 chance of doing financially better than their parents. College is more competitive and necessary for having a decent wage. Fewer young families are able to afford homes. Hard work isn’t enough in the face of such economic insecurity, so falling off the economic ladder seems an all-too-real possibility. If my kid doesn’t have an edge, they might end up living in my basement, just another failure to launch.

Then there’s the miasma of cultural anxiety about child safety, steadily growing since the child abduction scares of the 80’s. In the U.S., this was the era of milk carton kids, rumors of Satanic child sex abuse cults (that’s made a comeback), and the PSA, “It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?” Today, we intellectually know that abductions and cultic abuse are rare, low base-rate events. But then we get the next Amber Alert on our phones… overprotective parenting and curtailed child independence start to make sense.

It’s not only physical danger we’ve come to fear. We fear our children will fail to reach their full intellectual potential. Remember Baby Einstein? It promised, through its array of early childhood videos, toys, and flashcards, to enrich our babes’ brains. Never mind that the Federal Trade Commission went after them for false advertising. The promise of producing genius boss babies made the company a gazillion dollars. The timing was just right, too. It was then, in the ‘90s, also known as the Decade of the Brain, that the public learned - accurately and inaccurately - that the very structure and function of kids’ brains were sensitive to all sorts of things: cognitive enrichment, early adverse experiences, and perhaps most of all parenting.

Economics x child predators x sensitive brains = parenting pressure.

Parents will do anything for their kids. Perhaps intensive parenting and the toll it takes on our wellbeing is worth it as long as it helps our kids become healthier and more resilient. The best evidence to date, however, suggests that it does not, and might even have paradoxical negative effects.

And that’s where another powerful influence comes in, turning up the volume to 11 on the pressures of intensive parenting: The rise of the parenting advice experts.

Big Parenting

Twenty-first-century parenting can’t be understood outside the network of influencers, medical professionals, developmental psychologists, and corporate entities that collectively exert a disproportionate influence on how parents think about good and bad parenting. As far as anyone can tell, they’re here to stay because parenting advice is a multi-billion dollar business. It’s Big Parenting.

The army of parenting experts serves as this generation’s Dr. Spock, but numbering in the hundreds if not thousands. It’s a full-court press of attachment parenting experts, parent whisperers, data interpreters, and therapists-you-want-to-be-your-BFF-on-speed dial. At the same time, many of them, even the Influencers with a capital I and with millions of followers and top-notch publicists, often have good intentions and solid, evidence-based advice. I believe they do want to help, they do want to convince us to take more time for self-care, and to fight back against the gas lighting and unrealistic expectations foisted on parents. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and parenting experts (I can say WE parenting experts here) are driving intensive parenting into overdrive.

As the classic communication theory concept of Marshall McLuhan goes, the medium is the message. And the key media for parenting advice, social media, convey some messages with crystal clarity: Parenting is a never-ending checklist of do’s and don’ts; we should access outside expertise on a daily basis; and our dream of being good parents might be just a TikTok or New York Times bestseller away.

I don’t want to call out any particular parenting experts. As I said, I believe the intentions here are largely benign - even when packaged in daily barrages of Instagram posts and sleek corporate marketing. But their ubiquity and their tone, which ranges from solicitous concern to abject alarm, tell us something different. They tell us parents to remain vigilant. They warn us against falling asleep at the wheel on this long-haul, cross-country drive called parenting. They end up convincing us to trust ourselves less, judge ourselves more harshly, and to keep coming back for more advice. This is a recipe for intensive parenting.

On a virtual conference organized by the Office of the Surgeon General prior to the release of the Advisory, I submitted a question to the Zoom Room chat:

“Many parents don't struggle with finding advice and information - they struggle with making sense of it all. It's too much, and they don't know how to find the signal in the noise. I wonder if the Office of the Surgeon General has thought about how to help parents tackle parenting advice overload, and perhaps to relearn how to trust their own instincts and family traditions. Perhaps just trying to do less can take off some of the pressure.”

Ok, so that was mostly a rhetorical question. By posing it, I was suggesting something people generally don’t want to hear, although this particular audience understood it perfectly. To parenting advice givers: Give it a break. To parents: seek less advice.

When someone asks me what book they should read when they have a parenting dilemma, I tell them, “Don’t read any of them. What do your instincts tell you? Have you talked to your mom, or uncle, or the wisest person you know? If after that, you still feel you need some input, then we’ll talk and I’ll send you some links.”

Parents are under pressure. But as we figure out ways to support them better, we should seriously consider whether the parenting advice industry is part of the problem, driving parents even further into dangerous territory and intensive parenting. The best advice for parents might be no advice at all. Parenting advice experts of the world - we need to do better. We need to do less.