Bringing Different Communities Together to Support Parents
The Surgeon General’s Report
Today, when the Surgeon General’s Advisory on Parents Under Pressure was released, I feel truly elated, similar to the way I felt long ago, when I was in Germany and saw the Berlin Wall between East and West Germany come down. This Advisory is a crucial step in bringing down the walls between the people who work on issues of young children, of adolescents, and of parents.
For decades, I have researched one main question—how can we help children learn and thrive?
To pursue studies on children’s wellbeing and learning, I’ve had to cross borders. It’s been like being in different countries, let’s say Germany, England, Sweden and others far more diverse. The people who research and advocate for young children are one country; the people who research and advocate for youth are another country; and the people who research and advocate for parents and their work and families are still another country. Different communities of people, different vocabularies, different studies, and different interventions.
With the release of this Advisory, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, an amazing pioneer and bold and brilliant leader, opened up the borders between these three worlds in ways I have rarely seen before.
This Advisory makes a very definitive point: that children (young children AND adolescents) won’t do well unless their parents do well. It thus says that we as a nation have to focus on parents’ wellbeing if we really want children to learn, to prosper, and to have the futures we aspire for them.
This may sound self-evident, but it isn’t. That’s why I was cheering like I was in Berlin.
And I was cheering even louder when I read this:
First, it's time to value and respect time spent parenting on par with time spent working at a paying job, recognizing the critical importance to society of raising children.
I am going to focus on the Reports’ recommendations for employers, which are threefold:
Expand policies and programs that support the well-being of parents and caregivers in the workplace
Implement training for managers on stress management and work-life harmony
Provide access to comprehensive and affordable high-quality mental health care
These recommendations are powerful, but there are five other things that work-life researchers have learned that need emphasis. These are things that I began to learn long ago and continue to learn as President of Families and Work Institute and continue to learn as President of the Work and Family Researchers Network.
You see, I was in Berlin in 1989 for the National Academy of Sciences in the United States to look at how German employers and policy makers—as well as those in England and Sweden—were dealing with the fact that increasing numbers of parents were employed. I found then, as scholars continue to find, that first it’s not enough to have policies on work-life harmony (this is a much better phrase than work-life balance, which implies an unachievable 50/50 split, which is why I Iike the phrase “work-life fit” even more).
Working parents know this. Your organization can have a policy that lets you work flexibly but—as I was told in Germany years ago— “if lions (the bosses) frown on that policy, it’s not going to help you that much.” This report acknowledges the reality that policies are necessary but not sufficient.
Second, it’s not just about time. Let’s begin with my own research on children, who tell it like it is. In 1999, I found that if given one wish to improve the impact of their parents’ jobs on their lives, the largest proportion in a nationally representative sample of third through twelfth graders wished that their mothers (34 percent) and their fathers (28 percent) would be less tired and stressed. When asked in an open-ended question, 56 percent of parents assumed that their children would wish for more time.
But time by itself was not on the top of children’s wish lists. Only 10 percent wished for more time with their mothers and 16 percent for more time with their fathers. Only two percent of parents guessed that their children would focus on their work stress.
That doesn’t mean the time parents and children spent together is unimportant. Time matters a lot but remember young people only had one wish in my study They knew that if their parents were stressed out, the time they had together wouldn’t be that great. They wanted their parents to be less stressed by work so they could be more present.
And this finding wasn’t just then. We repeated the question in 2020—31 years later—in our latest nationally representative study of children and their parents (The Breakthrough Years Study), this time with nine through nineteen-year-olds. Although we can’t make direct comparisons because the samples and question are slightly different, we again found that the largest proportion of adolescents (40 percent) wished that their parents were less tired and stressed. Finally, we found that when adolescents reported that their parents were more stressed, the kids weren’t faring as well on the wellbeing outcomes we measured. This report acknowledges that we have to pay attention to more than time.
Third—and the report does not directly discuss this—it’s not just about parenting stress, it’s about work stress as well, which has been piling up over the years. Working parents know this and my organizations’ nationally representative studies over three decades have found this, again and again.
And fourth, work and family stress isn’t just about the amount of work we have to do; it’s also affected by the relationships we have at work.
For example, in one of our more recent analyses of the U.S. workforce, we compared employees who’d faced adverse life experience over the past year— deaths or illnesses of loved ones, health problems, and economic upheavals (that is, Covid-like experiences)—with those employees who hadn’t faced those experiences. We then compared employees in workplaces where they had more or less positive relationships at work, which we defined as:
Experiencing support and belonging at work (e.g., “I feel I am really a part of the group of people I work with”)
Participatory decision-making (e.g., “Managers at my organization actively seek out information and new ideas from employees at all levels of the organization to guide their decision-making”)
A culture of respect and trust (e.g., “I can trust what managers say in my organization”, which we also asked about supervisors and coworkers)
A whole employee approach (e.g., “I have support from coworkers that helps me to manage my work and personal or family life”)
Not surprisingly, when employees had adverse life experiences, they were much more likely to be in poorer health and have more work-life conflict. But not so when they were in workplaces with good relationships. Having good relationships at work almost completely erased the differences in wellbeing between those two groups of employees!
The fifth point is that employees and employers can work together to create workplaces that work for both the employer and the employees; that is, workplaces that address work and family stress and improve relationships. We’ve studied this, experimented with this all over the country and recently improved our approach, most recently with teachers in Head Start through the National Academy of Head Start and in a state with employees in their children’s cabinet.
My work across the fields of child development, adolescent development and work and family tells me we can further bring down the walls between these three worlds of children, adolescents and work-family in ways that help us all—and especially our children—thrive!