Parental stress can be a drag on the economy

It's official. Parenting is difficult. So much so that US Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy has issued an advisory about the stress and mental health issues that parenting creates. Parenting joins social media for children, healthcare worker burnout and firearm violence as issues the US Department of Health and Human Services felt it needed to formally address.

- Kathryn Anne Edwards

The surgeon-general is a politically appointed position, so a warning of this kind naturally evokes some skepticism. This is just another way to push for Democrat priorities like more funding for childcare! These millennials are soft and need to stop complaining! Who are they to say parenting is harder now? In the grand tradition of being right and wrong at the same time, maybe prior generations did have it harder, but there is nothing to gain by withholding help from today's parents.

According to the surgeon-general's advisory, parenting has devolved in ways both obvious and subtle. Of course, there's the cost. The US Department of Agriculture, which has been estimating the cost of raising a child since 1960, says low-income families will spend US$120,000 (S$155,000) per child from birth until the age of 17, and high-income families at least US$380,000.

The Brookings Institution estimates middle-class families spend US$310,000 on average. Then there's the cost of college. Not surprisingly, one in four parents struggles to afford food and housing. Money is an obvious stressor, but parenting has never been cheap. The real accelerants of parental stress are the modern worries that prior generations could not even imagine. Consider that the No. 1 killer of children in the US is guns.