The surgeon general has a new public health warning. And this time, the hazard isn’t tobacco or alcohol: it’s parenting.
Two-fifths of parents say that on most days, “they are so stressed they cannot function,” the Office of the Surgeon General reports in an advisory titled Parents Under Pressure. Roughly half of parents term that stress “completely overwhelming.”
Those dire findings anchor a 35-page report, released in late August, that posits parental stress as “an urgent public health issue.” It draws on data from the American Psychological Association and other sources to build a case that parents are facing more stress than at perhaps any other time in recent history.
One-third of parents with children under 18 rate their stress level as 8 or higher on a 10-point scale, according to psychological association data. Two-fifths of parents report being “so stressed they feel numb.” Three-fifths say stress makes it hard to focus. Two-thirds are consumed by money woes.
I’ve truly never understood why people unthinkingly have children and then suffer them. The default should not be yes, it should be that you prove to yourself that it is an appropriate thing to do.
Reproduction is as basic an instinct as it gets. Humans are not robots. Rationality does not win out against instinct the vast majority of the time.
And yet rationality is the defining characteristic of humanity.
Maybe in a theoretical sense. In a practical, everyday sense not so much.