Surgeon General Warning!!! Modern Parenting Is Too Hard & Stressful? Should We Take the Warning Seriously? Is Parenting Too Time Intensive? Or Are We Just Over Thinking It & Making Things Harder?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In his recent advisory on parents’ mental health, the United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, said out loud what many parents might have only furtively admitted: Parenting today is too hard and stressful. Of course, there have always been concerns about families’ well-being. And while some of today’s parents’ fears are newer — cellphones, school shootings, fentanyl — parents have always worried about their children. So why has parental stress risen to the level of a rare surgeon general’s warning about an urgent public health issue — putting it in the same category as cigarettes and AIDS? It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy — that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life. This paragraph comes from The New York Times. The article was titled: "Today's Parents: 'Exhausted, Burned Out and Perpetually Behind'" The author is Claire Cain Miller. You can read the full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/upshot/parents-stress-murthy-warning.html Zac & Don discuss whether parenting today is too hard and stressful. They wonder if there is any truth to the notion that parents feel they have to spend more time parenting their children. Zac & Don also reference the following article and documentary. How School Drop-Off Became a Nightmare https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/09/school-drop-off-cars-chaos/679869/ Babies the Documentary https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/