I’m terrified of having kids because of things parents say

From what my friends and therapy clients tell me, parenting today is nearly impossible.

I couldn’t articulate it back then, but I felt it in my bones. We lived in one of the few suburban-style neighborhoods in our small, rural Maryland town. My parents worked a lot, their 40-hour-a-week jobs plus housework, yardwork, and caring for us kids. I had two friends close by. If they were at soccer practice or out with their parents, I had none. My dad knew a bunch of other dads on our street, but he never had them over. My mom mostly focused on work and caring for me and my little sister. Every evening was more or less the same: eating dinner together and then watching Seinfeld or whatever movie was on HBO. It was like there was an invisible wall between our family and the rest of the world.

I’ve come to realize after 15+ years of city living that I want so much more than that. I want more than having to work all day, watching Netflix after work to “relax,” cramming weekends with errands, living next to neighbors I barely talk to, driving to strip malls, standing in the self-checkout line, spending so much time alone in a car, walking by people on the street and eating near other people at restaurants without even recognizing their existence (or them recognizing mine). I want dinners with friends multiple nights a week, plenty of time each day to enjoy other people, breaks to truly rest, an open-door policy for my neighbors, a vision of family that goes beyond a partner and kids, a deep sense of community.

As someone who hasn’t had children yet but would like to, I’m terrified.

Not of the lifelong commitment to another human being. I’m a little nervous but mostly excited for that. But of what appears to be a rite of passage for parents these days: a stressed out, sleep-deprived, isolated, lonely handful of years, until the kids are independent enough that you can try to rebuild friendships and community. I’m already struggling with city life as a 38-year-old, in a loving relationship, with a decent number of friends. I still feel like I’m searching for “my people,” whoever and wherever they are. The idea of closing off even more to raise a kid scares the hell out of me.

I’m writing this post to better understand why I’m terrified, and to normalize your feelings if you’re a newish parent or hesitant about becoming one. I feel foolish just noticing this recently, but we’re living through a parenting crisis that was only made worse by the Covid pandemic. And just like the other crises closing in around us—growing inequality, the warming climate, rising fascism—the people with the power to fix it are unwilling to do anything.

From what I can tell, parenting today is nearly impossible. I’m staggered by how many of my therapy clients who are fathers are struggling. These men—and many of my buddies with kids—are almost constantly stressed and strapped for time. They feel like they’re coming up short everywhere: as a parent, as a partner, as a friend, at work. If they aren’t lucky enough to have a job right now, they’re struggling to find meaningful work that pays the bills. Parenting is a major source of stress and relationship conflict. These are men in relationships, most of them with enough money and time to go to therapy. My heart hurts thinking of single parents raising kids while working full-time (or more), or parents at the very bottom of the economy.

And these are men! It’s estimated that women around the world take on three times as much care and domestic work. Most working mothers pull a “second shift” at home, which goes unpaid and often ignored and taken for granted. This comment on the “AskWomen” subreddit illustrates the extra stress many women feel about managing domestic labor because of “traditional” gender roles:

“I feel like I’m the one that has to remember and keep track of EVERYTHING. Plans, when things need to be cleaned, what needs to be done to keep our lives running. Sometimes I feel so incredibly overwhelmed.”

About four-in-ten parents say being a parent is tiring, and nearly a third say it’s stressful all or most of the time. A third are chronically lonely. While a larger share of mothers than fathers say they feel these things, many fathers do as well. Why are so many parents losing their minds?

As I’ve began to uncover the answer to this question, I’ve become getting angrier and angrier.

The answer is obvious: We went from thousands of years of collective child-rearing to the responsibility of raising a kid falling solely on a couple (or a single person), who also have to work to pay the bills and survive. The cost of living has steadily risen over the past few decades—mostly due to rising housing prices and child care costs—while incomes have remained relatively flat.

On top of that, the U.S. is the least family-friendly country in the industrialized world. A 2021 study ranked us the lowest among developed nations in policies aimed at helping parents support children, like paid parental leave and more generous vacation-sick leave. It seems like a cruel joke: The very moment parents need the most support, just as they’re tasked with caring for a tiny creature who can’t talk and needs 24/7 care, the village pulls away to leave them all alone. No wonder birthrates in the U.S. have declined over the past 15 years.

What happened? How did we get here? The answer to this question is more complicated, but here’s a rough sketch: Capitalism ripped our ancestors out of their communities and off of their lands (and still is in the process of doing so in the Global South), leaving them no choice but to rely on themselves and immediate family members for support. Thousands of years of indigenous wisdom, practices, and traditions that treated raising children as a community effort were replaced with individualism and dependence on the nuclear family (with most of the burden being forced on women). Then, the feminist movement fought for and won the ability for more women to enter the workforce. Now, men are having to feel some of what women have long had to shoulder, the backbreaking, stress-inducing, overwhelming work of raising children.

None of this is feminism’s fault, as conservatives want us to believe.

As I recently wrote, feminism is actually a big part of the solution to many of our crises—particularly the type of feminism that challenges our economic and political systems to change. Because what’s to blame is that our economic and political leaders seem uninterested and even incapable of solving the problem.

What pisses me off is that no one is doing anything about any of this! Conservatives talk a big game about “family” but want to go back to the 1950s, when men dominated family life and the economy exploited women’s unpaid labor at home (and tons of working-class women had to work on top of all of it). Liberals either outright ignore these issues or team up with conservatives on cutting public budgets for health, education, and welfare, and privatizing (and thus slowing killing) existing public programs. The work of political scientist Melinda Cooper has helped me understand how both major political parties are at fault. In an insightful post in

Spirit of Solidarity

, Ben Stegbauer references Cooper’s work to conclude that family has become a “carefully planned combination of neoliberal ideals and social conservatism built to relieve the [government] of any economic responsibility for its citizens.”

No wonder I’m terrified. If you’re a parent, no wonder you’re fumbling through every day just trying to survive. I know that recognizing this context and history doesn’t take away the dread about waking up to a crying baby again and again throughout the night. Or the exhaustion the next day. Or the anxiety of balancing work with parenting. Or the stress of managing everything. Or the loneliness of it all. But hopefully we can all remember that we shouldn’t feel shame for falling short. That we’re in this together. That the solution is—as it always is—a collective one.

As

Joshua P. Hill

wrote in a recent post for

New Means

:

“Our choices in this world matter. They matter quite a lot. But the ever-whirring capitalist propaganda machine doesn’t want us thinking that some of the most important choices we can possibly make are to join collectives, to be a part of organizations and institutions larger than ourselves.”

I’ll end with a question I’ve been churning over in my mind: What would it look like to solve the parenting crisis together, instead of by ourselves all alone in our individual homes?

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