I recently read The Princess in Black to my daughters, a book about a princess who is secretly a superhero. A few days later, my middle daughter, then three years old, dressed up in a princess dress with a superhero cape and mask, and decided to take the story’s premise one step further by being a princess/superhero/mom carrying around three stuffed animal “kids.” The following dialog ensued.
My daughter
(calling up the stairs)
Mom, tell me you see a monster!
Me
Oh no, I see a monster!
My daughter
I’ll be there in a flash!! I just have to get my three kids.
Me
(silently, laughing to myself: You’ll never get anywhere in a flash if you have to get your three kids ready…)
My daughter
(running up the stairs)
I’m here to save the day! Can you please hold my kids so that I can fight this monster?
As someone in the early childhood field, of course I over-thought this conversation for days. My daughter’s pretend play seemed to really represent “having it all”: she was a princess (self-actualized with lots of time for self care) and a superhero (fulfilled by meaningful work) and a mom. What an amazing interpretation of being raised by a working mom!
I loved that in her imagination, she could quickly arrange satisfactory child care and proceed straight to saving the world. And yet for me, this exchange also highlighted the gap between my daughter’s vision of adulthood and the real world. If we need child care to succeed as princess/superhero/moms, why is it so hard to find a place for our kids that is convenient, affordable, safe, and positive for everyone? And I couldn’t help wondering, how many little boys would arrange child care before fighting monsters? How were gendered parenting norms showing up here–with the mom carrying full responsibility for the children even when she has monsters to fight?
Last year, the surgeon general issued a notice about parent burnout reaching the level of a public health crisis. My first reaction was confusion. Humans have been parents since the dawn of time. What has changed so that being a parent is now a mental health risk? Why are so many parents under such high stress levels? Clearly many women are not feeling like competent princess/superhero/moms.
It does seem that parenting is a more high-pressure and intensive job than in previous generations. A brief library database search for books with the subject “child rearing” published in English between 1900-1980 yielded more than 13,000 records. That is approximately 163 books per year. A search with the same criteria but publication dates between 1981-2024 yielded more than 28,000 records–about 636 books per year!
I do sense a heightened expectation, at least in North America, that parents’ decisions be intentional, planned out, and optimized for success—what some call “intensive parenting.” I think this trend reflects several things. First, that avalanche of books on “child rearing” shows a growing belief that there’s a “right” way to parent. We may worry that any mistake we make as parents has the potential to cause irreparable harm to our child.
On top of that, social media feeds into the sense that if every moment with our children isn’t cute and joyful and perfect, we’re doing it wrong. Our self-worth, too, gets tied up with how our children act, especially in public. I remember with my first child seeing other kids melt down and thinking, “Thank goodness my daughter would never do that.” Then I learned: just give it time. A few months later mine did exactly the same thing.
We give parents both too much credit and too much blame for children’s behavior at any given moment. Also, if it has been a while since you’ve been around very young children day-to-day, it’s so easy to forget what life is like “in the trenches.” We forget the truly non-stop demands of caring for infants and toddlers. What if we decided not to judge parents—including ourselves—based on children’s moment-by-moment behavior? I think we could reduce some of the parental stress that prompted the surgeon general’s warning.
So, how do we break the habit of judging others and ourselves? Compassion seems key to this issue. It’s really hard to be a young child without the capacity for reasoning and regulating ourselves that comes with a developed prefrontal cortex. So we can have great compassion for our children and really try to see and respond to the feelings underneath the behaviors.
Just don’t forget to have compassion for yourself. Instead of thinking, “I yelled at my kid, so I’m a terrible person. I ruined my child, and they’re destined for failure,” we can change the narrative. Change it to something like, “Two-year-olds can be completely irrational and emotionally overwhelming. No wonder I lost my cool.” Recognize your reasonable human reaction to spending many hours with often unreasonable companions, including if those hours are before or after a full day of work. Parents get to have their feelings and not be simply the recipient of a child’s emotions and behaviors.
On an individual level, we can work on having compassion towards ourselves, our children, and other parents. But what about the broader policies that impact parents? The Surgeon General’s warning had a range of recommendations, including expanding access to affordable child care and mental health care. Yet access to these services is actually dwindling in Minnesota and nationwide.
Birth to five years old is a time when children are intensely dependent on the adults who care for them. What’s more, those early years are when the foundation of brain architecture is built. Infants and young children build their own capacities by internalizing what a caregiver has first done for them. Parents, for their part, need to feel they can make sure their children are well cared for—it’s crucial to their sense of efficacy. What’s interesting is that when a child enters kindergarten, the infrastructure for transporting, caring for, teaching, and feeding them suddenly becomes quite robust. Yet during that important period from birth to five, we offer parents little or no support, whether they work outside the home or not.
Caregiving work has been systematically undervalued in our culture. It has been highly gendered and racialized, perceived as “women’s” work, and often as the work of women of color. Child care was even excluded from the first minimum wage laws during the Reconstruction era. To this day, the child care sector is consistently undercompensated; Black and Hispanic early childhood educators earn even less than their white counterparts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services puts “affordable” child care at 7% of a family’s annual income. In Minnesota, infant care costs 20% or more of a family’s income on average. In other words, it costs more to provide high-quality child care than parents can afford. And for those parents who want and are able to stay home and do that crucial work of caring for their children? Well, good luck finding drop-in or part-time child care for times when you want to, say, follow the Surgeon General’s advice and seek mental health care.
To reduce parental stress, we can work on being more compassionate and less judgmental. But we need more than that. We need an approach to the early years that gets us closer to the robust support system we access when our children enter kindergarten. Researchers have looked at the well-funded systems in some European countries. They have found that those systems result in more moms in the workforce and children from all socio-economic backgrounds having the chance to attend preschool and get ready for kindergarten. What if the U.S. decided to make the same investment in young families? Then more of us could really be the royal superhero parents that my daughter imagines.
References
Lloyd, C.M., Carlson, J., Barnett, H., Shaw, S., & Logan, D. (2021). Mary Pauper: A historical exploration of early care and education compensation, policy, and solutions. Child Trends. https://earlyedcollaborative.org/assets/2022/04/Mary-Pauper-updated-4_4_2022_FINAL.pdf
Miller, C.C. (2021, October). How other nations pay for child care. The U.S. is an outlier. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/upshot/child-care-biden.html
Pistono, D. (2024, December). Is child care in Minnesota unaffordable for many state residents? MinnPost. https://www.minnpost.com/fact-briefs/2024/12/is-child-care-in-minnesota-unaffordable-for-many-state-residents/
U.S. Surgeon General. (2024) Parents under pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/parents/index.html
Related subjects
Tags: child care, early childhood education, infant and early childhood mental health, parents and caregivers