How parenting today is different, and harder
American parents are finding the job much harder than they expected, found a large new survey by Pew Research Center. And it’s not just how they feel — parenting is more demanding than it used to be, a variety of research has found.
Eight in 10 parents of children younger than 18 find parenting to be enjoyable and rewarding most or all of the time, according to the new survey of 3,757 U.S. parents in that group. But two-thirds also say it’s harder than they thought it would be — including about one-third of mothers who say it’s a lot harder than they expected.
The findings reflect and build on other research. Today’s parents spend more time and money on their children than previous generations — working mothers spend as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers of the 1970s — and feel more pressure to be hands-on. Especially for college-educated mothers with careers, the demands have caught them off guard, economists have found. At the same time, many jobs have become all-consuming, paying people disproportionately more per hour for working long hours and being available anytime — but at a cost.
The survey helps describe some of the ways in which parenting has become more demanding and stressful (one-third of respondents said it was that way all or most of the time).
For one, mothers feel increasingly torn between their various roles. They have more options beyond motherhood, in terms of education and career, yet they still feel societal pressure to meet certain standards as mothers.
In the Pew survey, just one-third of mothers said being a mother was the most important aspect of who they were as a person. Yet they also said they felt judged for their parenting by friends or other parents, more than fathers were, and spent significantly more time than fathers on the physical and emotional labor of parenting. In recent years, the pandemic also forced many mothers to make it their primary role, even if it hadn’t been their plan.
“Women are more invested in work and feel less guilty about that, too,” said Robin W. Simon, professor emerita of sociology at Wake Forest University, who did early research on parenthood and identity. “Women of earlier cohorts who were employed wouldn’t readily admit that being a mother wasn’t the most important. It’s not that the parent identity is less important, but it’s an important identity among others.”
Low-income parents, and those who are Black or Hispanic, were most likely to say that being a parent was the most important thing about them. They were also more likely to say that parenting was enjoyable or rewarding most of the time. That aligns with findings that for many poor women, children are “the chief source of identity and meaning,” as described by sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas in their book, “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage.”
Also, research has found, today’s parents feel intense pressure to constantly teach and interact with their children, whereas previous generations spent more time doing adult activities when their children were around. While this increased attention used to be an upper-middle-class goal, more recent research shows that people across class divides believe it’s the best way to parent.
Often, Pew found, this means more emotional engagement. Nearly half said they were raising their children differently than the way they had been raised by their own parents, and the largest share said the main difference was in how they showed love and built relationships with their kids. In open-ended responses, they said they wanted to raise children who felt unconditional support from their parents. That meant less yelling and more verbal affirmations, outward displays of affection and honest conversations about hard topics.
“I didn’t have a safe place to express my emotions of feeling understood,” one mother, 32, told Pew. “I try to have weekly talks with my kids to check in on their emotions to see how they are. Even if they had a good week, I have found it is still good to remind them you are there for them.”
Becky Kennedy, the psychologist known as Dr. Becky who founded the parenting group Good Inside and wrote a book of the same name, said that among the parents she works with, this was common.
“Forever, parenting has been the only job in the world that we get no training and no support for; we’re just expected to do it,” she said. “This generation knows how much it matters, and it feels harder because they know how broken the system was for parents, and they’re trying to fill that gap.”
Another way parenting has become harder, according to the survey, is a new set of concerns about children’s well-being.
Parents typically have such worries, but fears have changed over time. The so-called helicopter parents of the 1980s were mostly concerned about physical safety, like kidnapping and teen pregnancy. Those concerns remain, but they’ve been superseded by ones about mental health: Three-quarters of parents said they were worried their children would struggle with anxiety or depression, or face bullying.
Low-income parents and Hispanic parents, especially immigrants, were more likely to be worried across the board, including about potential violence. Four in 10 Hispanic parents, and the same share of low-income parents, said they were extremely or very worried their children could be shot, compared with roughly 1 in 10 high-income or white parents.
Economic anxieties were another concern. Parents today are the first generation that may not surpass their parents economically. Now, they say their top priority for their children in adulthood is to achieve financial independence and have careers they enjoy: Nine in 10 parents said those things were extremely or very important to them.
“I want them to be independent, save money, invest in their future and become obsessed with their idea of success and not society’s ideas of success,” a 38-yearold mother told Pew.
These pressures to invest more in children may be one of the drivers of the nation’s declining fertility rate. One mother, 41, said: “I have one child instead of three, like my parents, to ensure we have enough resources for activities, tutoring and organic good.”
And parents are thinking about these pressures when they consider their hopes for their own children’s adulthoods. Just 1 in 5 parents said a top priority for their children’s future was that they grow up to have families of their own.