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    The Moms Are Not Alright: Inside America's New Parenting Crisis
    The Moms Are Not Alright: Inside America's New Parenting Crisis
    The Moms Are Not Alright: Inside America's New Parenting Crisis
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

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

    By Anne Helen Petersen

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From the author of the bestselling cultural touchstones Out of Office and Can’t Even, an honest, intimate, and often shocking look at how the events of the past three years have pushed parents to the breaking point—and how many of them are emerging stronger and more resourceful than before.

    Parenting is tough under the best of conditions. Thanks to the ongoing calamities of recent years, it’s more challenging than ever—for mothers in particular. Recent statistics show that more than 60 percent of women have taken on the majority of pandemic parenting and household duties, almost 50 percent are under regular stress, and 39 percent with children under five say they have either left the workforce or reduced their hours because of a lack of reliable and affordable childcare. In short, mothers are not okay.   

    Plenty of news stories have reported on the increased pressure mothers have been under in the face of Covid, gun violence, inflation, racial acrimony, and more, but we’ve heard little beyond sound bites from women themselves. In this powerful account, Anne Helen Petersen, one of today’s most astute and empathetic cultural observers, gives women voice. Drawing on responses she received from more than a thousand mothers, Petersen shares the first-person stories of thirty-three of them. We hear from moms from a wide range of races, backgrounds, income levels, cities, and towns. Some are single, some divorced, some in same-sex unions. All of them are ready to talk.

    With cathartic, raw candor, these moms tell how they’re attempting to work through the anxiety, fatigue, and abject terror of the early 2020s. In stunning detail, they discuss how they’re grappling with the day-to-day emotional and economic fallout, and the deep demoralization that accompanies the sinking feeling that so few people in power are thinking about ways to help. During the shutdown and now, these mothers have felt alone and largely forgotten. For many, it’s increasingly impossible to do what feels like good parenting within the system as it is. Some of this is the fault of the pandemic, but some, too, is the ongoing unraveling of the social safety net and government failure to cultivate communities that support parents. As one mom says, “Most of my friends and their partners are barely hanging on.”

    But these stories also show something else: the resilience and adaptability of families. Despite their hardships and worries, these mothers have crafted ways to survive—and thrive. In the absence of political solutions, they’re building their own support systems for themselves and their children. Yes, these moms are pissed off and worn out, but they’re also, ultimately, hopeful.

    Not just a story for mothers, this is for friends, colleagues, employers, and even (perhaps especially) policymakers. The way we treat parents is the way we regard caregiving, labor, gender, family, and community at large. If we don’t figure out how to address these issues now, all of us will suffer. The Moms Are Not Alright will make parents feel seen, but it will also speak to the many who are eager to reconsider the way we think of community and care moving forward. 

    Editor's Note

    Pains and joys of parenting…

    “I’m tired and scared and anxious and unmotivated and proud and grateful and desperately sad and hopeless,” says one of the many mothers interviewed by culture writer Petersen (“Can’t Even”) for this Scribd Original. The raw stories these moms share about their experiences raising children during the chaos of the pandemic and more are eye-opening, moving, and reassuring.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Originals
    Release dateSep 28, 2022
    ISBN9781094451077
    Author

    Anne Helen Petersen

    Anne Helen Petersen is an author and journalist who writes about culture, celebrity and feminism for Buzzfeed News. She received her PhD from the University of Texas. She is the author of Scandals of Classic Hollywood, and Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud is her second book. She lives in Brooklyn.

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    • 5/5
      Refreshing to read about real people’s struggles…really puts things into perspective in terms of how hard it was for mothers to stay sane during COVID. Ultimately, it’s disgraceful that we as a society just decided that putting people through this kind of hardship is OK.
    • 5/5
      Anne Helen has done a masterful job of describing the situation for parents during the pandemic. The personal stories from the mothers provide a frightening glimpse into lives that were forever changed due to COVID. The complete lack of regard for parents by much of society is cruelly evident. We left them alone and blamed them for needing support.
      It is not an easy read but a necessary read for all to understand what we did to parents, really mothers, during this difficult time.

    Book preview

    The Moms Are Not Alright - Anne Helen Petersen

    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

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