Parental stress is at an all-time high. No wonder people don’t want children

From the difficult experiences of so many parents, I understand those who don’t want to take the risk of having a family

Earlier this summer, my two youngest children got up one morning and immediately started arguing. I got in the car and drove away from the house. I simply couldn’t bear to hear them fighting yet again, on yet another day, with weeks of the holiday stretching out ahead of us. 
I should say, at this point, that my children are perfectly capable of fending for themselves for the 20 minutes or so I was gone – just in case social services should be reading this. By the time I got home they were playing quite companionably. I, meanwhile, had calmed down. But, now, at this point in the summer holidays, after a full six weeks of the highs and lows of 24/7 time with my three sons, it comes as no surprise whatsoever to learn that the US Surgeon General has issued an official advisory: that parenting is more stressful than ever, and that Something Must Be Done about it. 
Of course America is completely bonkers when it comes to Moms and Dads: this is the world’s only high-income country that does not mandate any sort of paid parental leave. But Dr Vivek Murthy’s reminder of just how goddamn stressful, demanding and expensive modern childrearing is, is as pertinent this side of the Atlantic. As the long summer holidays draw to a close, I can’t be the only parent breathing a sigh of relief that the children will all be back at school by this time next week.
Why, exactly, does bringing up kids feels so difficult nowadays? Part of the clue’s in the name: parenting is a verb now because it’s become an active decision. On the one hand that’s a good thing – nobody should feel strongarmed, for whatever reason, into having a child. On the other, however, it also means that society as a whole no longer feels any sort of collective responsibility towards the next generation. Parents are left to get on with it; there’s a “you made your bed, you lie in it” sort of attitude – and heaven forfend that the little blighters should get in the way of anyone who’s either decided not to have children or whose child rearing years are far behind them.
When having a baby has become an individual choice, it inevitably becomes an individualised experience. You get to – or have to – choose your parenting philosophy now. Walk into a bookshop and the parenting section offers any number of paths to take. Will you be a hands-on, “gentle parent”? Or go for the more robust approach, as advocated by the likes of Kirstie Allsopp? Either way you’ll be held up to public scrutiny (and quite possibly subject to a visit by social services, as Allsopp discovered after she let her 15-year old go interrailing in Europe by himself this summer). Either way the tutting, eye rolling and condemnation is unlikely to be accompanied by any actual, useful help. Either way, you think, your kids are going to end up anxious and depressed – whether you’re a helicopter or a latchkey. We agonise over every decision and every misstep. Our children become a moral reflection on who we are as people. The pressure is immense.
It also completely ignores the fact that a lot of parenting is also basically grunt work that is both mind-numbingly boring and repetitive, from the feeding to the endless laundry, to the homework chivvying. (Suck it up! comes the cry.) But as well as this, you have to be able to meet all of your child’s emotional needs; to acknowledge that everything is all your fault but also to be able to fix it. As the writer Jessica Winter put it in an essay for the New Yorker in 2022, “this is parenting as brain surgery.” But, she goes on, “The essential enigma of parenting, though, is that you are responsible for your children and yet you can’t possibly be responsible for them. They are clay in your hands; they are the rocks that break your hands.” No parent can possibly be fully responsible for how another human being turns out. It is madness to think so – and yet that is what we essentially demand of parents these days. 
We also demand that they work, because our capitalist society takes both guts and some sort of independent means to cut yourself off from its demands. I have friends who valiantly home-educated their children for several years but eventually had to throw in the towel and send them all to school because the reality was that one salary simply wasn’t enough to buy groceries and pay the mortgage even on their modest home in a far-flung part of the country. Space to have children costs money; funding that space via a decent job takes time and effort – as well as more money on childcare. 
Perhaps it’s not surprising that numerous studies show that having kids doesn’t actually make you happier. A while ago my mother asked me, out of the blue, whether I was glad I’d had children. I said it was bloody hard, but on balance, I was. I asked her the same question in return – and there was an agonisingly long pause before she answered. “I think so, yes”, was the eventual answer. Thanks, Mum. 
Plenty of women out there don’t want to take the risk. At this point in the summer, I’m not sure I blame them.