I’m a mom. And I’ve been exhausted for years. Not just from the physical caregiving work—though that’s real—but also from the nonstop pressure to manage emotions and futures, with the uneasy sense that none of it is optional. Parenting today requires giving it all to our children: undivided attention, all our love, and loads of money. We build our entire lives around kids’ schedules, racing from soccer to piano to tutoring, eating dinner in the car; no rest on weekends because there are games, recitals, tournaments, play dates, and birthday parties to fit into the overflowing calendar.
At the same time, childcare costs are through the roof, parents are financing mortgages to live in neighborhoods with top schools, and college costs saddle many parents with more debt than students themselves carry. And somehow this all comes wrapped in the feeling that we should probably be doing even more. I’m tired just writing about it.
Have parents always been so exhausted? To some degree, sure. But we’ve reached unprecedented levels of what is now called parental burnout. In 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory naming parental stress and burnout a public health crisis. The report cited research that more than 40 percent of parents say they’re so exhausted most days they can’t function; nearly half say they’re constantly overwhelmed.
Burnout, a term coined to describe long-term stress from relentless workplace demands, is now used to describe what’s happening inside the home. The phrase “parental burnout” barely existed a decade ago, but as the Surgeon General’s report shows, today it’s commonplace.
Human Capitalization of Children
Over the last hundred years, children shifted from “economically useful” to “emotionally priceless.” What once might have been shared—by siblings, kin, neighbors, and communities—became an increasingly intense parental duty.
Layered onto this shift is the quiet influence of our society’s focus on cultivating “human capital.” Economists popularized the idea—most famously Gary Becker, who won a Nobel Prize in 1992—to describe the skills and capacities that make people productive.
Over time, this logic seeped into family life. Parenting came to be understood as a project of human capitalization, in which parents need to optimize, to hustle, to develop their children. Our kids are still priceless, certainly, but now they are also assets that must be invested in. Advice tells parents that it’s never too early to start, and that every interaction should “count,” so make the womb the first classroom, daycare into early childhood education, and play into enrichment.
Education itself is increasingly losing its ostensible purpose, civic formation: economists quantified the long-term ROI of early childhood investment at 13%. In our society permeated with rankings and data, framing stakes with a number makes parental choices feel measurably consequential. Every decision feels risky, like stock market performance.
The Emotionalization of Parenting
But the lock-in isn’t just economic; it’s emotional. Our lives have become soaked in therapeutic culture; attention to emotions and expressions of feeling are everywhere. It follows that parenting—an emotional job to begin with—is uber-emotional these days. When parents are told they must be endlessly attuned to their children’s emotions, their own emotions, and their emotions about emotions, parenting becomes extra exhausting. We have various descriptions for it: helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting, jackhammer parenting, gentle parenting, Tiger mom parenting, hyper-parenting, and more.
At the same time, parenting advice is incessant and omnipresent. While our parents may have relied on the single Dr. Spock “parenting Bible,” today parenting guidance is delivered through an overload of books, podcasts, influencer messages, chat groups, and TikTok memes ranging from: “Trust your instincts, mom, but, also, follow this 23-step baby sleep training program,” or “You’ve got this, dad! Also, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
Parenting Essential Reads
Parents feel the never-ending pressure. Who hasn’t found themselves hiding in the bathroom like Kim Kardashian, seeking 30 seconds of peace from screaming children, or, like Australian comedian Sean Szeps, doom-scrolling through WhatsApp parent groups that ping at all hours? These virtual worlds are less about coordination than pressure. Every “Thanks for the reminder!” on WhatsApp is a tiny signal to an audience of other parents: I’m a good parent too, I swear.
Paradoxically, even when parents are approached with well-meaning advice to do less, they may see it as yet another thing to add to the endless TO DO list. And if they don’t check everything off, they may feel like a failure. It’s no wonder burnout follows.
Exhaustion Is Harming the Social Fabric
Exhaustion is often taken as evidence of deep care. Parents bear such pressures that it feels like if you are not tired, perhaps you are not a good enough parent. But evidence shows that this all-consuming parental devotion (and exhaustion) is not even creating good outcomes. As Jonathan Haidt argues, we are raising an anxious generation—and not just because of (too) early exposure to social media. Managing children as projects limits their independence, free play, and capacity for boredom. Psychological research has shown that limiting those aspects of experience reduces children’s resilience and harms their mental health.
What’s more, when parenting is privatized and financially taxing, it becomes an engine of inequality. Wealthier families accumulate financial assets for children, including in 529 tax-advantaged education savings plans, while lower- and middle-income families increasingly rely on debt—especially mortgage debt—to reside in good school neighborhoods. Studies show that Black families disproportionately take on education debt for their college-age children, widening racial wealth inequalities. Families with children who have special needs bear disproportionate burdens on their own shoulders.
Parenting has long reproduced social inequality, as sociologist Annette Laureau pointed out in an influential study in the early 2000s showing how affluent parents pass on advantages to their children through concerted cultivation. But the new standard of privatized, overinvested childrearing seriously deepens economic and racial disparities among American families.
The Social Pressure to Overinvest
Parental exhaustion is not an individual or family failure, it’s a social problem. We’ve created a system that traps parents, enforced by fear and judgment. Our language reflects this when we talk about mom guilt or parent shaming.
Let’s also remember that a vast parenting industry—billions of dollars of gadgets, apps, toys, extracurriculars, tutoring, financial instruments—thrives on the anxiety and guilt of parenting-as-the-hardest-but-most-rewarding job. These “tools” offer self-care fixes without challenging the structures and norms of the emotional economy that produces burnout in the first place.
Unveiling how social forces create parental burnout exposes that deep exhaustion is not a signal that what parents are doing is inadequate. It’s a signal that we have normalized unsustainable standards. Raising children is not supposed to be grueling labor and children are not supposed to be private investment projects to be optimized.
“It takes a village to raise a child” is an old saying, but true. We need a village both in the sense of an extended network that supports us in caring for our children, and a community with shared well-being norms and social protections to help us raise future members of society. Those are the societal investments we need—not individual, burnt out parents–if we truly want (like we say we do) a bright future for our children.
