How Some Parents Struggle With Realities of Modern Day Parenting

“I could just let go.”

Rosanna Breaux cast the intrusive thought from her mind and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

Glancing in the mirror at her newborn twins in the backseat, she reminded herself that the thoughts weren’t hers—they belonged to the postpartum depression.

As a clinical psychologist, she had known all the symptoms and warning signs and the possibility that she could be affected. She knew all the healthy coping mechanisms, too.

That didn’t make the experience any less distressing.

“I just was empathizing so much with the people who experience this and don’t know what it is or feel like something’s wrong with them for having those thoughts,” Breaux told The Epoch Times.

And the number of parents struggling with mental health challenges may surprise some.

Experts say both new and traditional pressures are contributing to parents’ stress load, from age-old worries about finances and “mom brain,” to navigating new technologies and a growing youth mental health crisis.

Citing a Pew Research report, Murthy noted that three in four parents say they are either extremely or somewhat worried that their child will struggle with anxiety or depression.

Breaux, who leads Virginia Tech’s Child Study Center, said recent studies do give cause for alarm.

“We have a mental health crisis that has been going on. The pandemic just exacerbated that,” she said.

The CDC reports that in 2021, 42 percent of students reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless, 22 percent seriously considered suicide, and 10 percent attempted to end their lives.

Additionally, the Health Resources and Services Administration reports that nearly one in five children in the U.S. has a special health care need, including chronic physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional conditions that require specialty health services.

In Murthy’s recent advisory, he pointed out that 41 percent of parents with children under 18 report feeling so stressed on most days that they can’t function, compared to 20 percent of other adults, according to an American Psychological Association survey.

Those concerning statistics make it vital that parents pay attention to their own mental health, Breaux said.

“I always talk about the oxygen mask. You need to make sure you have yours on and you’re in a place that you’re not going to be reactive when you’re interacting with your child. And that’s hard to do sometimes—especially if you’re a single parent or the primary parent and have these other things going on,” she said.

It can also be difficult for a parent who is dealing with their own mental health condition. But Breaux noted that few resources and programs exist for the specific purpose of helping parents with their own mental health concerns in addition to their child’s.

“Oftentimes there are families that have parents struggling with the same thing as their kids, be it anxiety, be it depression, be it ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder],” she said. “In order for them to support their children with these things, they need to build these skills themselves.”

The key, Breaux said, is learning to practice emotion regulation—that is, finding a healthy way to cope with overwhelming thoughts and feelings.

“Are you going for a walk or doing exercise? Are you utilizing social support? Are you using mindfulness?” she said. “For me, getting even a five minute hot shower was … a way to at least have some private space and time and sort of thinking through what is going to refill your cup.”

Shifting Landscape

Finances have always been a worry for those looking to expand their household. But in the current economic climate, many parents are struggling even harder to make ends meet.

Prices are up more than 21 percent on average since 2020, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show.

For parents, the soaring cost of child care has been especially crippling.

“I think there’s a child care crisis,” Washington-based clinical psychologist Amber Thornton told The Epoch Times.

“Simply finding child care is very hard, whether it’s the access to child care or the resources to pay for child care. I think that is a tremendous barrier and burden that parents today are really carrying.”

Thornton noted that past generations of parents were more likely to rely on a grandparent or other extended family members for child care. “But now we’re seeing people need to work longer, so grandparents might still be working and just can’t serve as that support in the way that families previously benefited from,” she said.

Another shift in the modern family dynamic that Thornton has observed is an increase in family estrangement as more people are choosing to cut ties with family members over past disagreements or missteps.

“I think our understanding of trauma and mental health is kind of contributing to that, because we’re realizing maybe [there are] these things we don’t have to accept, and maybe we can create a new norm around what it means to be healthy and happy in our relationships, even with our families,” she said.

But a smaller family can also mean a smaller support system, and support can be crucial for parents dealing with chronic stress.

That’s why such decisions should not be made lightly, Thornton said.

“For people who are thinking about this, they have to kind of decide, well, what are their values and what are they actually wanting to prioritize? … With everything, there’s a cost or there’s a consequence.”

For parents needing more support, Thornton recommended that they seek out a mental health professional or connect with other parents or adults in their community.

“I think that there’s this overarching lack of communal support for parents today, and the more that we can get back to that in as many ways as possible, the better for us and for our kids, too,” she said.

Mom Brain

Juggling a career and child care is difficult across the board. But what mom coach and mother of seven Hannah Keeley discovered is that for mothers, the challenges can be particularly stressful.

The disparity, she says, can be chalked up to what she calls “mom brain.”

“You’ve heard of mother’s intuition? Well, that’s mom brain,” Keeley told The Epoch Times.

Keeley, a former behavioral therapist, left the workforce to stay home with her children. But after having a few children, she realized that her brain was not functioning the way it used to.

“I thought motherhood was going to be this idyllic life, and I was going to be like Snow White and singing, and the birds would nest on my shoulders,” Keeley joked.

The reality was far from a fairy tale.

“I had stress and depression and anxiety so bad that I literally just had a breakdown,” she said.

Confused, Keeley began to research the biological changes that affect a woman’s brain after she becomes pregnant. What she learned was that the female brain physically changes during pregnancy to prepare her for parenthood, prioritizing her protective instincts over self-preservation.

Although unsettling at times, that rewiring of the brain is a good thing, Keeley noted. It helps mothers to pick up on subtle shifts in their environment, gifting them that sixth sense that allows them to detect when something is wrong.

The drawback, however, is the “mom fog” that comes with that new superpower.

“We can’t get anything done,” Keeley said. “We can’t accomplish anything. We walk in a room, we’re like, ‘What was I coming in here for?’ Can’t finish sentences, and so we’re like, ‘What is wrong with me?’”

While there is no official cure for mom brain, Keeley said it is possible to disrupt the negative thoughts those changes can cause.

“You have to break the pattern first,” she said. “You have to interrupt it externally, whether you snap a rubber band, whether you wear whistle around your neck, whether you do a Tarzan yell, clap your hands, whatever it is.”

Societal Pressures

Moms may be fighting a biological battle with themselves on a daily basis, but both moms and dads are facing new pressures today that previous generations of parents did not.

Social media, for instance, poses new risks to children’s safety and mental health, adding another worry to parents’ traditional list of stressors. But studies are finding that parents are also vulnerable to the mental health risks associated with using such platforms.

“It’s just this kind of artificial sense of perfection. This artificial sense of … look how good I am doing it,” said Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, a behaviorist and well-being instructor.

Hanley-Dafoe noted that the rise of social media has given way to a culture of comparison where users are constantly seeking external validation. And whether posting pictures of Thanksgiving dinner or interior design choices, parents are not immune.

“It’s kind of this comparator of, if I can do this, obviously, this means my kids are super well adjusted, healthy, wonderful humans. … But that’s not necessarily the case,” she said.

Rather than fixate on crafting an online persona, Hanley-Dafoe suggests that parents refocus their energy on cultivating a comforting atmosphere at home.

As for the challenges posed by social media, social worker and psychoanalyst Erica Komisar said they are only an offshoot of a longstanding cultural problem.

“If you look at the sequencing of what happened to parenting, women and men were told that everyone should work outside the home. … That to have a good life, you needed to have more money, more materialism, more stuff, and that career achievement outside the home was really what everybody should be aspiring to,” Komisar said.

Now, after decades on that path, what is happening is “children are breaking down right and left, and parents are not happy,” she said.

Komisar contends that the widespread prioritization of accruing wealth over raising healthy, well-adjusted children is the true culprit behind both parents’ and their children’s deteriorating mental health.

“We live at a level that has dictated how we parent, instead of parenting the way we want to parent and then adjusting our finances to how we want to parent,” she said. “A lot of the choices that we’re making, we don’t realize it, but are very material choices where we’re really choosing our lifestyle over our children.”

The solution, Komisar suggests, is for parents to be present for their children and provide them with a good foundation early on so they can handle adversity as adults.

“The truth is, we’ve always had adversity, and there are a lot of kids who do fine around social media,” she said. “And the difference between the kids who are doing OK and the kids who aren’t doing OK is their foundation. … That’s what we need to be talking about.”