The cause of anxiety in parenting today

Lauren Sandler, MA Journalist and Author, explains what the biggest causes of parental stress are for parents today and what parents can do to ease the stress they face
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The cause of anxiety in parenting today

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There are so many factors that feed parental anxiety today. A lot of them are cultural but a lot of them are also economic and kind of live in the space in between those two things I believe. For example, think about what it takes to get a child into college. It is not just the incredible tuition costs. It is also what´s going to go onto that application, which means an investment of everything practically from birth, from soccer practices to foreign languages to all the different things that we expect a child to do outside of school to demonstrate that they deserve a place at whatever institution they can manage, just to help them get by as adults. No longer is it a question of high achievers achieving highly, but everyone needs to acheive highly just to maintain their place. That´s a real change, and that´s a realy change not just in kids´lives but in parents´ lives in terms of what we need to invest economically in our children and also how much time and energy we spend going from practice to practice, how many hours we devote to helping them with their homework and what that costs us in almost a deep spiritual sense because that isn´t how we all want to spend time as families necessarily and yet that´s what claims us. At the same time, so many of us grew up in housholds with working mothers and I think that there has been some backlash against that. Our mothers who worked were real pioneers and they got to feel like they were really doing it on their own terms. Now, most women who work whether they choose to or not have a real need to. There is no such thing as a single income household for so many people anymore. And so, whether you work by choice or by necessity, you are always aware of what you are not giving to your child when you are working and that is just a crazy making situation. The notion that we are not working just for our place in the marketplace or our own sense of freedom. We are working out of necessity, and yet we are being bad parents at any second that we are not focused on parenting. I think it is also creating a culture in which we judge each other for own choices as parents and especially as mothers in a way that is so disportionate to the choices that we actually make on a day to day basis. And I think it is really driving people crazy.

Lauren Sandler, MA Journalist and Author, explains what the biggest causes of parental stress are for parents today and what parents can do to ease the stress they face

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Lauren Sandler, MA

Journalist & Author

Lauren Sandler is the author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child and the Joy of Being One, and a journalist who writes on cultural politics and gender issues for publications like Time, The New York Times, and Slate. And she’s as an only child and the mother of one herself. 

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