The Biden administration’s Surgeon General is warning that parenting is a health hazard. They say that this is a major problem because parents have 13% more stress than non-parents.
Is this a problem? Isn’t stress part of the job?
The surgeon general says that today’s world presents “new challenges like navigating technology and social media, a youth mental health crisis, an epidemic of loneliness that has hit young people the hardest.” These unprecedented stressors call for “shift in culture, policies, and programs to ensure all parents and caregivers can thrive.” These programs include more paid family leave, better childcare and “historic investments in mental health care.”
This rings to me like the therapeutic state. Since the 1960s, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz warned about the rise of “no-fault diseases” that would lead to “coercive powers of medicine as an arm of the state.” He said that “no person can be free without shouldering his responsibilities.”
But the Surgeon General is saying that the stress of parenting is not your responsibility. It is the government’s to solve for you. That scares me. How does it sit with you?
