The job of a parent has never been easy. Parents have always worried about their children’s safety and nutrition, conflicting work-school schedules, and financial strains. Why then does it feel like today’s parents are more burned out than generations before? It may seem with the availability of modern tools and services that make our everyday lives more comfortable, it would be easier to handle all the parenting tasks today. But in 2024, U.S. surgeon general issued a public health advisory on parental burnout, urging the public to talk about this topic on a societal scale rather than treating it as an individual problem. So let’s dive into it. What makes today’s stressors for parents unique and how can we effectively manage resources to better support our mental health?

The Real Cost of Living

People today have more purchasing power than in the 1970s – for nonessential goods. We can buy a whole lot of obscure, innovative, useful or useless things today. The costs of housing and education, on the other hand, have skyrocketed disproportionately generation over generation. A few decades ago, it could be a norm for one salary to support the whole household. Now we can have both parents working full-time and still they may not be able to buy a house considering the relationship between average income and average house price today.

Same goes for childcare spaces. Before the rollout of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care System in 2021, I would see childcare spaces in Toronto cost between $1,800 and $2,500 per month. This is a whole month’s salary for many people in the city, which I’m sure prompted many mothers to ask – is it worth going back to work or should I stay on maternity leave until my child is old enough for public school?

Sadly, the financial burden doesn’t end when your child graduates from a private daycare into a publicly funded school. Regular school day usually goes between 9 am and 3 pm, and parents working 9-5 jobs must find alternative between 3 pm and the time they come home, which usually means paying for nannies or costly aftercare centres. This is exactly what the U.S. surgeon general means that we need to look at parental burnout from the wider perspective and find solutions that benefit parents as a group, such as providing financial support and other resources to help parents raise our future generations.

As an example, here’s a neat 5-minute video that talks about supporting parents in the workplace:

Financial resource management is a prominent topic for parents that I cover in this blog. Check out my post highlighting five free or low-cost indoor places to take your young child to in Toronto here.

The Age of Overstimulation

As someone who grew up before widely accessible internet, I never take for granted having a super powerful computer in my pocket. I love that I can instantaneously connect with my friends and family across the globe, easily sign my son up for March Break camp online, or order a freshly made meal right to my doorstep within 30 minutes of clicking a button if I don’t have dinner planned for the night. The technological advances of today sure give us more choices for how to manage our time. But they also overwhelm us.

Just like digital tool fatigue is a prominent topic for office workers, the same behavioural patterns happen for parents. We think digital tools help us manage the tasks of parenting efficiently. And in many ways they do. But if we don’t keep track of our resources when we use these tools, having too many notifications, conversations, updates, events, choices, and voices will drain us and increase stress.

Informational overload is a serious issue for modern parents. With all the variety of things we could be doing for ourselves and for our children, it’s easy to fall in to the “I should be doing more” trap. But we need to acknowledge that we are already doing so much. Parenting is a real, demanding job (check out my post that dives deeper into this topic) and another reason modern parents are having a tough time with it today is isolation.

Where is the Village

While social media has the power to connect us to people anywhere, according to research, it can also make us feel lonelier. The more we use social media, the more we tend to compare ourselves to others. The more we compare ourselves to others – whose behaviour we start perceiving as the “norm”, the more we start finding ways we deviate form this norm. The more we think we are deviating from the norm, the more uncomfortable we start feeling about ourselves and our lives. This intense passive observance is not a healthy habit for our brain, which is wired for real-life feedback and connection. So on the one hand, social media connects us with people, yet on the other, it can make us feel more isolated, which is especially detrimental to parents who need a whole “village” to help them raise children.

The passive observance of other parents on a mass scale is something previous generations didn’t have to adjust to. This is a strictly modern parenting problem, and the best way to deal with it is to be mindful about how we manage our resources when it comes to digital tool use – something I will be covering more in my future posts.

Do you think modern parents have it harder or easier than previous generations? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!