Parents Don't Face a Mental Health Crisis.

It's something else.

Tomsickova

My family decided to homeschool our daughter this year.

It wasn’t a happy conversation.

We couldn’t find a single school within driving distance that had a clean indoor air policy. We went on tours. We listened as principals assured us that teachers wouldn’t harass our child for wearing a mask, even as they said other kids might ask her questions about why she was doing it.

Last spring, my university changed their mind about supporting remote work for professors, even though a growing majority of the student body demands online, hybrid, and hyflex coursework. Many of them are parents or caretakers juggling multiple responsibilities. My bosses tried to schedule me for face-to-face classes, and then they told me to resign. They did this after I redesigned the entire curriculum for one program and wrote two free textbooks.

So I gave up my tenure and resigned.

One of my friends, a new mom, recently said she knows all about the growing risk of airborne disease in schools and daycares. She doesn’t wear a mask because, when she does, other parents withdraw from her. “I’m unmasking for my mental health,” she said. Almost every day, children are pressured or bullied into doing things that put their parents in harm’s way, and it’s all completely normalized.

The Surgeon General recently released an advisory on the mental health of parents. It says parents face higher levels of stress than other adults. It goes on to cite “challenges like navigating technology and social media” and “an epidemic of loneliness” and “isolation.”

It’s strange to feel gaslit by a Surgeon General’s warning about my mental health, but here we are. The advisory makes a vague call for governments and communities to do more to support parents. It reminds me of the time a colleague and fellow parent stood in my door, unmasked, watching me pack up my largely unused and poorly ventilated office, offering over and over to help carry things to my car. When I politely declined three times, she finally got to the point.

She wanted to know if she could have my office.

I told her I didn’t care.

Every now and then, my in-laws bring up our mental health and ask us if we’re finding a “balance” between keeping our daughter safe from the disease and violence that now plagues the school system. They never clearly describe what that “balance” would look like, other than total submission to the status quo.

That pretty much sums up the kind of help we’ve been offered over the last four years. It amounts to a handful of superficial favors and concern trolls, often merely a prelude to their own requests for favors. I’ve been asked to run websites, design courses, write proposals, and help grade for other teachers.

But they won’t advocate for me.

These calls for more support irritate me a little, because help in this culture often means doing something for someone that doesn’t feel too uncomfortable or inconvenient, so you can take credit for it later.

I loathe that kind of help, and I don’t want it.

That kind of help hurts your mental health.

Here’s the thing.

There’s no “balance” when it comes to what we want versus protecting and providing for our children. There’s raising our child, and that’s it.

We educate our daughter. We play with her. We plan safe activities and field trips for her. We do our best to arrange safe play dates. All of this comes at the expense of our comfort and convenience. It’s often exhausting to do the job of multiple teachers and caretakers, but we have no choice. There’s no Disneyland in our future. There’s no babysitters. There’s no grandparents or aunts to give us a break, because we can’t trust them alone with our daughter for five minutes.

We tried, and they made her sick.

Now we plan all the safe gatherings. We read the articles and spoonfed them to our relatives. We manage the Covid tests. We bring the air purifiers and make sure they’re running. We bring the masks. We supervise it all, because they’re always looking for ways to let their guard down.

We do all of this for their mental health.

And you know what?

Maybe parents like me are suffering from a crisis of loneliness and isolation. That’s vastly preferable to subjecting our funny, bright, healthy child to the same fate as nearly 6 million children currently suffering from Long Covid. They’re suffering because our public health agencies spent the last four years lying to parents about the risks their children have always faced.

Here’s just one family with a six-year-old:

"To see him struggle to stay awake, or crying and saying he doesn't feel good, it's heartbreaking, it's demoralizing, because there's not a lot of treatment options," she told CBS News. 

That’s one six-year-old child out of 6 million who can’t enjoy a normal day of school, can’t play with friends, and can’t enjoy time outside.

I don’t care what it does to my mental health. We’re not going to risk that for our daughter. At the same time, we also realize that millions of parents have no resources to homeschool their children. They’re stuck sending their kids to unsafe schools, which sometimes won’t even accept donations of air purifiers because that would be “unfair” to all the other children they’re infecting.

That’s not good for their mental health.

These children are dealing with cognitive problems, memory deficits, and mood disorders. They and their parents aren’t getting the help they need, because our media outlets continue to run irresponsible, malicious news stories attributing all of the problems to lockdowns, not the virus, even as they also simultaneously publish studies and reports on the damage the virus is doing, and the waves of secondary opportunistic infections they’re causing.

If you’re an informed parent, you remember the desperate year we all spent waiting for the FDA and CDC to finally approve vaccines for children under five, while almost everyone we knew stopped masking and started asking us when we would stop fearmongering about the virus.

On at least one occasion, I remember reading the news about more delays to my spouse in the kitchen, and watching him hold back tears.

That wasn’t good for our mental health.

Then we finally got our daughter vaccinated and enrolled in an outdoor preschool, just in time for them to abandon their mask policies. We spent hours gathering research and showing it to the teachers and administrators. We bought hundreds of the best masks for kids we could find. All of that, and we got a temporary reinstatement of their indoor mask policy.

After that, they abandoned it for good.

We donated Corsi-Rosenthal boxes and air purifiers. We had to quietly patrol the rooms to make sure they were turned on and facing the right direction. Sometimes I found them off and shoved against the wall. For months, we spoonfed teachers information about clean air.

That wasn’t great for our mental health.

Fortunately, my daughter’s teacher took us seriously and was already spending 90 percent of the day outside. We’re grateful for that teacher working with us to make sure she understood when it was okay to take her mask off and when she needed to keep it on. That was good for our mental health.

Yes, we signed up for parenthood.

We chose our children.

Some parents simply don’t like their kids and don’t want to be around them. They would rather pack their kids off to schools with dirty air, and then spend their free time filling up the internet with uninformed rants about their families being sick all the time. I feel bad for some of them, because they’ve clearly been brainwashed into ignoring the key problem that’s currently driving the vast majority of their mental health crisis, the airborne spread of disease.

But that’s not all parents.

Some of us are doing the heavy lifting. We really do love our kids. But let’s face the truth, it’s incredibly hard to give them the attention they need and play in their imaginary worlds when we’re also having to work two or three jobs to keep them fed and clothed. We signed up to be their parent. We didn’t sign up to also be their teachers, coaches, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and pediatricians. And yet, we’re having to do all of that because nobody will fill those roles. Nobody is truly helping us raise them. They’re just standing around offering advice, which is apparently what a majority of Americans do best.

If that weren’t enough, we get judged by a certain kind of activist and asked why we agreed to have children if it was so hard, and didn’t we know that the world is overpopulated anyway?

That’s not good for our mental health.

To answer that question, I would like to point out that I’ve done the math, and my entire family consumes less water, food, and energy than one average American adult. We also produce less trash. Our daughter already understands and acknowledges more truth than everyone we know put together. It would be nice if she didn’t get toothpaste everywhere, but we’re working on that.

The doomers who heap judgment on parents for having one child never seem to be offering to take themselves out of the overpopulation equation, do they? I guess it was okay for their parents to have children.

They also don’t seem to acknowledge that every single aspect of society they enjoy, from groceries to the house they live in, was built by someone who was born, and is arguably also a part of the overpopulation problem.

I’m just wondering at what specific date it became ecologically unacceptable to bring a single child into the world.

Was it 1971?

Next up, we have the ones who complain about their tax money going to support things like schools, when they don’t have children. I beg your pardon, but if you plan on staying alive for a few more decades, I think you might benefit from having a halfway educated population who can keep what’s left of the stores, hospitals, power plants, and roadways halfway functional.

For the final blow:

Anytime a parent dares to paint an accurate landscape of their lives and confide to the public sphere how difficult it is to raise and care for a child in the current landscape of violence, disease, selfishness, and fascism, they’re told that they should enjoy playing with their children.

For what it’s worth, we do.

The smiles and laughter from our children are often the only things that make all of this worth it. When someone tries to weaponize that against us, they taint it. They use that as a silencing move, as if parents everywhere should just stop complaining and choose between accommodating everyone else’s comfort and convenience or simply rendering themselves invisible.

That’s not good for our mental health.

Of course, many parents are so misinformed that they will spout corporate propaganda at other parents, downplaying and minimizing their legitimate concerns as they ignore facts and embrace the idea of exposing children to violence and disease. Conservative politicians, often parents themselves, want to use our kids as political props, citing their health and safety to advance their own political agendas while simultaneously telling us that school shootings are merely a fact of life and it’s good for kids to get sick over and over again.

All too often, it’s other parents doing the most damage to our mental health, as they inflict the same damage onto their own children, all in order to maintain a certain version of normal they don’t want to let go.

These parents are the ones who express animosity at the childfree. Meanwhile, I completely understand why someone wouldn’t want to take on the responsibility of parenthood, given the current circumstances. If the elite want everyone to have more kids, then they should’ve ensured there was a world worth bringing children into. Time and again, they refuse to do that.

For the elites, children are just future customers.

And future expendable labor.

My daughter has recently become aware of Donald Trump. She wants to give him a lifetime supply of snacks and send him to outer space.

“He can be king of Mars,” she says.

My daughter and I also recently had a conversation about the general state of things. She asked what we’re supposed to do. I told her we can’t force other people to do the right thing. We just have to do it and help other people catch on when we can. She knows she’s the only one wearing a mask whenever we go anywhere, and once or twice she has even asked why so many adults are making such bad decisions. It’s not exactly good for my mental health to have to explain the Asch conformity experiments to a 6-year-old, but I’m doing it.

It’s not exactly good for my mental health to lie awake at night, wondering if my state or county will pass a law that makes it illegal for my daughter to wear a mask, or decide that my views on public health make me an unfit parent, and take her away. It’s not exactly good for my mental health to watch politicians campaign for office while doing absolutely nothing to alleviate this stress. It’s not exactly good for my mental health to see what’s happening to parents in Gaza or Lebanon, wondering if it will ever end or who’s next on the list.

We’re trying to teach our daughter the difference between right and wrong in the middle of a genocide sponsored by our government.

That’s not good for our mental health.

I’m not writing this simply for myself. Although you don’t often hear from beleaguered parents, there are millions of us.

We need to be heard.

So in response to the Surgeon General’s advisory, I’m going to say, no, parents aren’t suffering a mental health crisis. Western society is suffering a crisis of greed, selfishness, vanity, apathy, and myopic thinking. We spend every ounce of our time and energy protecting our children from it.

That’s the crisis.