For today’s edition of tell-me-something-I-don’t-know, may I humbly offer the following? Americans are lonely. American parents, and especially American mothers, are overwhelmed.
These aren’t new phenomena, per se. In 2000, Robert Putnam lamented the demise of bowling leagues (though he didn’t see pickleball coming!). For decades, religious communities have been fretting about the decline in their rolls. Parenting has probably always been hard, though made harder still by the transition toward dual-income couples (without a parallel increase in affordable, high-quality childcare and other critical social services) in the mid-20th century.
But there’s something new, or at least something more acute, happening lately on both the loneliness and overwhelm fronts. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, has made the podcast rounds characterizing loneliness as an “epidemic” to rival that other one we just lived through. Parent overwhelm hasn’t, to my knowledge, been framed in epidemiological terms, but the memory of caregivers driven to their breaking point during the Covid years remains fresh. And, anecdotally anyway, it doesn’t seem like parental stress levels have quite returned to baseline.
We don’t always talk about the loneliness epidemic and the travails of contemporary parents in the same breath, but perhaps we should. Both problems seem to me underpinned by overreliance on—even fetishization of—the nuclear family. (Plus lots of other stuff, but we can get into that another time.)
Historian Stephanie Coontz has written compellingly about the “domestic family ideal” as a cultural obsession that bears only passing resemblance to reality. When I introduce this ideal to undergraduates in my Sociology of Family class, I show them a video. Its origins somewhat unclear, but it seems to be a PSA for proper familial behavior (title: “A Date with your Family”). It’s black-and-white and features a well-dressed family—mother, father, daughter, and two sons—going about their evening routine. Father returns from the office to a home-cooked meal that mother is just pulling from the oven. Daughter, meanwhile, has been crafting a tablescape with fresh flowers to brighten up the dinner experience. Elder son works diligently on his homework before helping younger son wash up for the meal.
For 2024 audiences, the video reads as an over-the-top parody of 1950s-era nonsense. My students are quick to point out its limitations: it’s very white, very heteronormative, very middle-class, very gender-traditional. And yet, I tell them, this image is more than a historical artifact. It remains a powerful, if typically unspoken, marker against which we measure our own and others’ families and, often, find them wanting.
Families that have been through divorce are labeled “broken.” Working moms lead to “latchkey kids,” whose development is surely negatively impacted. Family dinner has fallen by the wayside, which is probably the reason kids these days get into drugs. And so on.
Many of us—probably most of you reading this post—would likely dismiss this domestic family ideal as exclusionary and unrealistic, let alone “ideal.” Yet when we set aside the surface-level trappings, I see sneakier messages we haven’t yet escaped.
One is the notion that the ideal family is the self-sufficient family. Most obviously, that family relies on dad’s (and, increasingly, mom’s) hard work rather than government handouts. But also embedded in the ideal of male/female complementarity and clear role specialization is the suggestion that two people can, when dividing and conquering, handle it all. The caring, and the earning. The cleaning and the yardwork. The childrearing and the corporate ladder-climbing. The comforting and the disciplining.
Far fewer couples today divide work along these neat lines. And far more bring in paid providers to do, or help with, what was once the homemaker’s job. But I wonder if the ideal of the self-contained and self-sustaining nuclear family survives in a disinvestment from, or perhaps a reluctance to rely on, local community.
By “community” I don’t mean “shop small” and “get to know your neighborhood coffee shop,” though those are good things, too. I mean the network of people who don’t live with you but do live near you, and who you call to help jumpstart a dead car battery, or pick up your kid from school when you get stuck at work, or lend you the proverbial cup of sugar. Call them friends, call them neighbors, call them friendly acquaintances, call them community.
One solution to the problem is to join one of those trendy “communal living” arrangements, though they come with headaches and challenges of their own. A less extreme path forward would be to more freely ask for support from, and offer support to, the people in your little corner of the world.
Sounds simple, even obvious, yet there are obstacles here, too. On the would-be recipient side, one of the biggest seems to be fear of imposing. Folks like me, who emphasize the labor side of everything, have probably contributed to this problem. I can’t ask you to do childcare labor for me! I don’t want to burden you with my emotional problems! I’m sure you have way better things to do with your time than pick me up from the airport!
As I’ve written before, care is this weird mixture of labor and love, and it’s easy to lose sight of one while you’re focused on the other. Further, there’s a big difference between obligatory and freely-offered care. I am obligated to care for my dog; if I care for your dog, it’s because I want to. (This is not a perfect dividing line, of course. My neighbor might coerce me into dog-sitting; plenty of dog owners neglect their pups’ needs.)
But when care is closer to the freely-offered side of the spectrum, it can be a gift for giver as well as recipient. When you allow me to be there for you emotionally, I feel trusted and connected—and less lonely. When you allow me to bring you dinner or babysit your kid while you’re going through a hard time, you give me an outlet for my feelings of compassion for you.
Another barrier to greater reliance on community care is fear about what your “neediness” implies. The mythos of the ideal marriage, the ideal parent-child bond, the ideal nuclear family – these all hinge on the idea that family members can and should be able to meet all of each other’s needs. And thus to accept, let alone ask for, help can feel like an admission that your family is inadequate.
The illusion of familial self-sufficiency may in part be a paradox of privilege. Though none of us are truly self-sufficient, it is easier to pretend when your skin color, or income, or immigration status protects you from many social ills and enables you to pay someone to provide childcare, or meals, or a ride to the airport.
I’m not suggesting that paying for the help you need is wrong. And I’m certainly not suggesting that community care (let alone charity) should substitute for better social service provisions, as conservatives often suggest. But perhaps one small way to undermine the forces of hyper-capitalism and individualism and all those other isms we decry—and, more immediately, to combat disconnection and overwhelm—is to be a bit less self-reliant.
The best thing I read last month: Strangers to Ourselves, by Rachel Aviv, is a collection of case studies that challenges simple narratives regarding the nature of mental illness. Her thesis is that the stories we tell about what an illness means—or even what constitutes an illness in the first place—are social constructions that powerfully shape sufferers’ experiences. It reminded me of the medical anthropology texts I pored over in college, but make it a page-turner. I didn’t agree with Aviv’s framing of every case, but all of her stories made me think.