The Moms Are Not Alright: Inside America's New Parenting Crisis

Introduction

WHEN I FIRST STARTED reaching out to women about sharing parenting stories from the past few years, I asked them a deceptively difficult question: If you had to write a book about your experience, what would its title be?

The answers weren’t surprising so much as incredibly, devastatingly, on point:

When the Village Burns Down: Pandemic Parenting and Mental Health

I Cried a Lot and No One Heard Me: Adventures in Isolated Parenthood

Can’t Believe We’re Still Doing This Shit: Three Pandemic Pregnancies

Discovering We Don’t Belong and Our Friendships Are Garbage: A Pandemic Outcast Story

Not Now, Maybe Never: Seeing Parents Suffer Has Nearly Convinced Me to Opt Out of Parenting

Covid Baby: What the Hell Was I Thinking?

I asked parents to think of their experience as a book-length story, not to trivialize it, but to underline just how complex and dynamic these past few years have been. Every one of us, caregiver or not, has gone through a prolonged series of extreme lows followed by moderate relief, with vivid character transformations and previously inconceivable moral and ethical stakes thrown in. We have lived through a society-throttling event. Six and a half million people have died, one million of them in the United States alone. We have weathered incredible, unspeakable loss, and had no space to grieve; endured ongoing fear of infecting ourselves or our loved ones; lived through confusing and inconsistent guidance on who we can see, how we can behave, and what is best—not just for ourselves but for the communities we call our own.

That’s enough emotional weight to cause any one person to collapse. But some people—millions and millions of them—had to parent through it, too. Parenting is never easy, but pandemic parenting is like being dropped into the middle of the wilderness without any tools save a Netflix account and a flimsy cotton mask and being told to navigate yourself to safety. Oh, and Mom, you have to carry all of your children on your back.

Put plainly, the additional labor of pandemic parenting was not distributed evenly, not even close: One study, by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a think tank focusing on global economic policies, found that 61.5 percent of mothers of children under twelve reported taking on the majority of additional domestic labor and care work in 2020—as compared with 22.4 percent of fathers. (Even in families where only the mother was employed, she still reported doing more of the household work.) Fathers who thought they were pulling their weight were not: As one New York Times headline put it, Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling. 3 Percent of Women Agree.

Families found themselves isolated from or abandoned by the informal and formal networks that had made their lives livable. For many, the only way to survive was for someone to dedicate themselves to caretaking full-time. In the vast majority of heterosexual families, that person was the mother. More than two million women, many of them mothers, left the workforce between the beginning of the pandemic and January 2022 and haven’t returned. According to Stanford University’s Rapid Survey Project, which has been polling parents with children under five on a monthly basis since the beginning of the pandemic, in February 2022, 39 percent of mothers reported that they had quit their jobs or reduced their hours since the start of 2020 (up from 33 percent the previous year). There’s simply not enough childcare, especially the affordable kind. Many moms, particularly those working inflexible, lower-wage jobs, feel like they have no other option than to quit.

More than two and a half years into the pandemic, the problem is only getting worse. Sure, parents aren’t juggling remote schooling anymore, and there are finally vaccines for kids under five. But there’s also an accumulating, pervasive exhaustion. Some of it has to do with vigilance about the virus and the fact that it keeps changing its behavior and transmissibility, which means parents have to continuously reevaluate their risk calculus.

But the exhaustion is also a symptom of just how many other societal failings parents are dealing with on top of a pandemic: Even if it doesn’t always show up in the stories that follow, every conversation I had with mothers included fears of gun violence and the ongoing stress of grappling with racial inequality, climate change, and the shaky state of American democracy. The story of the past two and a half years is the story of our country struggling to address a public-health catastrophe, but it’s also the story of months of protests against police violence, an insurrection in the nation’s capital, stifling wildfire smoke, heat domes, hurricanes, floods, and the general feeling that society as we know it is unraveling at the seams.

In June 2022, the Rapid Survey Project found that 46.5 percent of parents reported feeling stress (defined as feeling tense, restless, nervous, anxious, or unable to sleep at night because his/her mind is troubled all the time) at least once in the preceding week. In the first month of the pandemic, when many people envisioned a second coming of the Black Death, the number was only five points higher. And a striking 23 percent of parents reported feeling depressed, up from 15.9 percent pre-pandemic.

When I talk to mothers today, I hear two strains of anxiety. Those who dropped out of the workforce are scared about the looming recession, about whether or not they’ll ever be able to find a foothold back in their industry, and about making ends meet on a single salary. Women still in the workforce feel like life should be getting easier, but somehow it’s feeling less sustainable. That exhaustion is showing up in the data: Deloitte’s 2022 Women @ Work report found that 53 percent of women have higher levels of stress than a year ago, and 46 percent feel burned out. In my reporting, I’ve found the burnout to be particularly acute in fields like education, social work, caregiving, and nursing. These mothers aren’t just overburdened or exhausted. They feel utterly unable to continue to do the work they love.

This is not, of course, the first time in this country’s history that parenting has been difficult for an extended period, that it has