There is a lot of shame and guilt associated with this topic.  A lot of judgment and moments that feel like failure but aren’t.  I want to start by saying that I can assume many grown-ups will brush off, or roll their eyes at, or find a way to explain why I am wrong as they read this.  That is ok.  It is still true even if we aren’t quite ready to bust through our shame walls and defenses to hear it.

The fact that you snapped at your kiddo over something small, or that you cried in the car before you walked through the door, or that you zoned out during bath time because your brain simply could not hold one more thing, or that you said “I’m fine” when someone asked how you were doing even though the dam holding back the tears was ready to burst, or that you seriously contemplated running away…none of those things are an indicator that you are a bad parent. 

Did those examples make you cringe?  Have you done one of those things and the first thought you had was, “Am I a terrible parent?” or “Why can’t I do better?” or “Why is this so hard when everyone else makes it look so easy?”

The reality is that all these things make you a human with a nervous system doing exactly what human nervous systems do when they have been running without a break, without support, without a single moment to seek or find peace.

This is not just a feeling. This is biology. And there is research to back it up. In August 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a formal public health advisory (one of only a handful ever issued, reserved for what his office calls issues requiring “immediate awareness and action”) specifically about the mental health and well-being of parents. He called it Parents Under Pressure. His words? “Many parents have lost their village. Parenting is a team sport.”^[1]

The Surgeon General of the United States said it.  Sure, that is one viewpoint in a sea of viewpoints, but I think deep down, we all feel the truth.  Maybe the exhaustion that we are carrying, the loneliness we feel, the lack of peace that hovers over us, maybe all of that isn’t a personal failure.  Maybe it is a systemic one.

You Were Never Designed to Do This Alone

First, let’s talk about what your nervous system actually needs. 

Dr. Stephen Porges is the person behind Polyvagal Theory.  His research, published and expanded across decades and recently summarized in a 2022 paper in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, tells us something beautiful and also kind of heartbreaking about human beings: we are biologically wired for co-regulation.^[2] What that means in plain language is that our nervous systems were never designed to regulate entirely on their own. From the time we are born, we borrow calm from other calm bodies. A soothed baby is soothed because a regulated grown-up held them and attended to them. A person who feels genuinely seen in a conversation leaves that conversation steadier than when they arrived. A kiddo having a meltdown is guided through it when a calm grownup mirrors it for them.  This is not a metaphor. This is a measurable, biological process.

Porges describes social connection as a literal neuromodulator, which means it actually changes your body’s physiological state in the same way that medicine might. When your nervous system registers safety (through voice, eye contact, presence, not being alone, etc.), it supports what he calls “health, growth, and restoration.”^[2] When it does not feel safe, it stays activated. On guard. It is unable to fully rest, even when rest is technically available.

If I asked you to think about the last time your nervous system truly felt safe enough to rest, not just physically tired, but actually settled, held, safe, what comes up for you?

For many grown-ups, that question is likely followed by a very long pause.  Or a sensation of overwhelm or confusion.  Or a plethora of other mental and physical responses arising from a new awareness.  How did I get here?

The village was not a lifestyle preference. It was not a luxury. It was a biological requirement that quietly disappeared, and we are all pretending that is not what happened.

Here is what we also know from the research: parental burnout, which researchers now define as a specific, chronic stress disorder tied to the parenting role, measurably dysregulates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is your body’s central stress response system.^[3] Studies measuring hair cortisol concentration (a biomarker for long-term, sustained stress) have found significantly elevated levels in parents experiencing burnout compared to those with adequate support.^[4] In other words, the exhaustion is showing up in your hair. In your blood. In your sleep architecture. This is not in your head. It is in your body, and your body has been sending signals that we have been conditioned to ignore.

We Didn’t Lose the Village by Accident

There is a version of this conversation that gets very political very quickly, and I’m going to do my best to avoid that direction.  I am avoiding that, not because the politics don’t matter, but because this impacts everyone, no matter where they land on the political spectrum, and I don’t want any divisiveness to affect the conversation.

I am going to start with some things that are true regardless of politics.

Families used to live closer together. Neighbors used to know each other. Intergenerational households existed where multiple adults shared the invisible and visible labor of raising kiddos. Religious communities, block associations, and informal networks of people who simply showed up for each other were the original infrastructure of parental support. And over the last several decades, slowly and then all at once, they have largely disappeared.

The loneliness data is overwhelming. Research published in World Psychiatry in 2024 found that poor social connection carries health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (personally, I would prefer smoking over loneliness), and that it is associated with a 29% increased risk of coronary heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke.^[5] The UK appointed a Minister of Loneliness in 2018. Japan followed in 2021. We are not imagining a crisis of disconnection. We are living it.

And parents are at the center of it. The 2024 Surgeon General’s advisory found that approximately 65% of parents report feeling lonely. Among single parents, that number climbs to over 75%.^[1] That means three out of four single parents are raising their kiddos in a state of significant social isolation. One, how does that affect these grown-ups in every area and predictor of wellness, and two, how does that affect the kiddos?

The Surgeon General’s advisory also noted something that made me do that deep, annoying breath thing that coincides with an eye roll, where you knew you knew, but you are now shocked to really know: today’s parents work significantly more paid hours than parents did in 1985, and simultaneously spend significantly more hours on direct childcare than parents did in 1985.^[1] Both went up. At the same time.

But let’s talk about what that actually looks like in numbers, because I think we have been underselling just how absurd this has gotten.

Since 1977, mothers have increased their time in paid employment by more than 300 hours per year, which is more than seven additional weeks of full-time work every single year, compared to a generation ago, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. ^[16] At the same time, the daily time mothers spend on direct childcare has nearly doubled from 54 minutes a day in 1965 to 104 minutes a day by 2012, a pattern documented across 11 Western countries in a study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. ^[17] Researchers attribute this to what they call “intensive parenting,” the cultural shift toward active engagement, direct involvement, supervision, and tutoring, rather than the more hands-off approach of earlier generations. It is a real and measurable shift in what society now expects parenting to look like.

Fathers have stepped up, too.  Time spent with children has nearly quadrupled for dads, from just 16 minutes a day in 1965 to about 59 minutes by 2012. ^[17] Pew Research Center data also shows that fathers nearly tripled their weekly time with children, from 2.5 hours in 1965 to 7.3 hours in 2011. ^[18] And still, the gap remains significant. Still, the load is unequal. Still, something has to give.

What gave was sleep. Rest. Any meaningful margin for recovery. Researchers have a name for what this creates: a “time bind.” I call it Tuesday.  Drowning in plain sight.  Running on fumes.  A nervous system that never finds calm.  We are doing more of everything with fewer resources and almost no backup.

Let’s Talk About the Load Nobody Sees

There is the labor that shows up on a to-do list. Groceries, school drop-off, doctor appointments, dinner. You can see it. You can cross it off. And then there is the other kind.  The labor that lives entirely inside your head and your nervous system and never, ever gets to stop.

This is what researchers call the “mental load.” It is the constant background running, looping thoughts, 89 browser windows open, of: Did I reschedule that appointment? Is she ok, she seemed off today. I need to remember to call the school about that thing. When was the last time the dogs got a haircut? He needs new shoes. Did I respond to that email? Is there enough in the account? What’s happening next week that I’m forgetting? It never stops. Even when you’re theoretically resting, it’s running. And because it is invisible, it rarely gets acknowledged by partners, by the world, and sometimes even by the person carrying it.

UN Women estimates that women globally perform at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men every single day.^[6] A 2024 study published in European Societies found that even in couples who described themselves as egalitarian, women consistently managed the majority of tasks involving anticipation and monitoring (the constant, invisible, exhausting act of always knowing what comes next for everyone).^[7] A 2025 study in Frontiers in Sociology confirmed that high levels of emotional mental load are directly tied to emotional exhaustion, sleep disruption, and decreased wellbeing even in dual-income households where the physical tasks are more evenly shared.^[8]

I know it is not always women carrying this. I know there are men in this, too, and I see you. I know there are non-binary parents, and I see you. The research does consistently show that this load falls most heavily on mothers, but the experience of carrying it, and what it does to a nervous system, belongs to anyone who has ever been the person who holds everything together while everyone else goes about their lives.

It Looks Different for All of Us. The Body Feels the Same.

If you are a single parent

There is no handoff. There is no one to tap in when you hit the wall, no second nervous system in the house whose calm might quiet your own at the end of the night. Every decision is yours. Every 2 a.m. waking is yours. Every worry about money, about the future, about whether your kiddo is ok, all comes to rest entirely on you. The 2024 Surgeon General’s advisory specifically identified single parenthood as one of the highest-risk situations for parental mental health challenges.^[1]

People will tell you how strong you are. And you are. But I need you to know that strength deployed without relief is not sustainable. It is a slow burn. And you deserve more than to be admired for how long you can hold it before you break.

If you are co-parenting

Co-parenting can offer breathing room. It can also introduce a specific kind of stress that is genuinely exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it. Navigating a relationship with someone you are no longer partnered with, managing inconsistency between households, absorbing your kiddos’ confusion and grief, maintaining your own life through all of it, requires a nervous system that is always bracing for the unexpected. The advisory found that stress is highest among recently separated and divorced parents, and that when one parent is less involved, the demands on the primary parent multiply significantly.^[1]

What often goes unseen in co-parenting is how alone you are in the fullness of it. There is another parent, yes. But there is rarely someone who holds the whole picture with you. Who knows all of it. Who gets it without you having to explain. And a nervous system that is always bracing, always bridging, always absorbing, without that kind of witness, is a nervous system that never gets to rest.

If you are partnered and still feel alone in it

This one is maybe the least talked about and the most common thing I see. You are not alone in your house. But you are alone in your experience of your house. Your partner may be there physically and not there in the ways that regulate you (not emotionally available, not sharing the invisible load, not functioning as a co-regulating presence for you, even when they are sitting across the room).

This is a tough one, but the nervous system does not respond to proximity. It responds to felt safety. And a relationship that has slowly stopped being a safe landing place (for whatever reason, whatever the complicated dynamics are) can leave you lonelier than being actually alone. Because at least then, you are not also grieving the gap between what you have and what you hoped for.

Social Media and the Shame Spiral It Creates

We are in major denial about the role social media plays in our lives.  The research is there, the signs are there, we may acknowledge it, but we are not doing much to change our behavior. 

A 2023 survey of 1,000 U.S. millennial parents found that 85% believe social media creates unrealistic parenting expectations.^[10] Eighty-five percent. Most of us know this. And yet there we are at 10 p.m. watching someone’s impossibly peaceful morning routine and wondering what is wrong with us.

Research published in JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting in 2024 found that parenting-related social media use consistently produces idealized images of parenting that trigger comparison, depressive symptoms, and negative emotions in parents who are already depleted.^[11] A 2025 systematic review found that exposure to these idealized images is associated with higher anxiety, lower perceived parental competence, and lower life satisfaction, and that even parents who knew the content was unrealistic did not experience meaningful improvement in their well-being from that knowledge alone.^[12]

Here is what social media does not show you: the fifteen minutes of absolute chaos before that peaceful morning. The partner who stepped in so the reel could be filmed. The three days of burnout on either side of the one beautiful afternoon. The therapist. The medication. The tears. The messy, human reality behind the curation.

So why do we keep scrolling? Why do we keep posting the version of ourselves that needed forty-five minutes and three retakes to exist? I think somewhere along the way we got the message that our real, unfiltered, exhausted, figuring-it-out-as-we-go lives were not enough. Not shareable. Not worthy of being seen. And so, we curate. We perform. We show the highlight and hide the cost. Because I genuinely believe that if we could see each other’s real lives for even one week (the snapping, the crying, the surviving on “I don’t look good in orange” and stubbornness, the putting everyone else to bed, and then sitting alone in the quiet, wondering if you are doing any of this right), we would feel so much less alone. We are all hiding the same mess. We are all performing for an audience that is also performing. Authenticity did not disappear. We just got really good at apologizing for it. And meanwhile, the nervous systems underneath all of that performance are quietly falling apart, desperate for someone to just be honest first.

Be honest first. Someone has to be.

Your nervous system does not know that other people are performing. It just compares your insides to everyone else’s outsides and concludes that you are failing at something other people have figured out. And that shame.  Oh, the shame.  That quiet, persistent sense of not being enough burns through the last of the resources you had.

The Surgeon General named this specifically: an “intensifying culture of comparison, fueled by social media” as a distinct and new stressor that this generation of parents is facing that prior generations simply did not have to navigate.^[1]

You Cannot Give What You Were Never Given

I say this with the deepest compassion; many of our grown-ups did the best they could, but still caused harm, pain, and even trauma.  And someday, our kiddos may say the same about us.  There is no guidebook.  When we know better, we do better.  And when we mess up or cause harm, even if it wasn’t our intention, I sure hope we try to reconcile and see how our behavior may have impacted our kiddos.  With that, many of the parents who are struggling the most to regulate, be patient, and hold space for their kiddos’ big feelings never had any of that modeled for them. Not because they don’t love their children enough. Because they are trying to give something that is foreign to them.

The research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) makes this intergenerational transmission measurable. A review published in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse in 2023, looking at 68 studies, found that nearly all of them demonstrated that a parent’s childhood experiences could affect their children’s outcomes, directly or indirectly through the parent’s own mental health and emotional regulation.^[13] Another study found that children of parents with four or more ACEs had a 3.25-times higher risk of experiencing four or more ACEs themselves.^[14]

And a 2025 study published in Frontiers in Global Women’s Health brought it into sharpest focus of all: a parent’s own difficulty regulating their emotions was found to statistically mediate the connection between their childhood trauma history and their child’s ability to regulate their emotions.^[15] What that means in plain language is that unhealed emotional wounds in a grown-up are being felt in the bodies of their kiddos. Not because those grown-ups are bad. Because the cycle has never been interrupted.

This is not about blame. It is about understanding. Your grown-ups did the best they could with what they had. And what they had may not have included emotional intelligence, healthy regulation, or any model of what it looks like to feel your feelings safely and move through them. So they passed on what they had. And now here you are, trying to give your kiddos something nobody gave you, with a nervous system that was never taught how, in a world providing almost zero support for any of it.

That is not a personal failure. That is a generational and societal one.

The Systems That Taught Us to Be Small About Our Needs

There are deeply embedded cultural messages, for women especially, that say: “Do not ask for too much. Do not need too much. Handle it. Be strong. Do not burden people with your exhaustion. Smile. Keep going. If you are struggling, do it quietly and fix it privately.”

These messages did not come out of nowhere. They were built into the structures that organized our families, our workplaces, our communities. Men were told that needing support was a weakness. Women were told that seeking help was inconvenient. Kiddos learned from both that having needs was a problem to be managed, not a truth to be spoken.

Those kiddos are now parents. And they are still being small about their needs. Still suffering in silence. Still apologizing for being human.

Research on parental burnout across individualistic societies consistently finds that the cultural expectation of self-sufficiency (the norm that says “good parents handle their own stress without burdening anyone”) is itself one of the strongest predictors of burnout severity.^[9] The expectation of not needing anything is literally making people sicker.

We built a world that rewards the performance of coping. We forgot to build one that actually helps people cope.

What Regulation Actually Requires (And It Is Not What Instagram Told You)

I am not going to give you a five-step morning routine. I am not going to tell you to journal more or meditate for twenty minutes before your kiddos wake up. (I mean, do those things because nervous system habits do help. Truly. I am a nervous system and somatic coach.  Definitely do those things.  But, if they feel like one more chore and one more thing to stress about, other things must come first, and that is what I am talking about right now.)

The research says, with remarkable consistency, that what protects parents from burnout is not individual coping strategies, but rather social support.^[3] Other people. Real connection. The felt experience of not being alone in it. The Surgeon General’s advisory calls for investment in what it describes as “social infrastructure at the local level,” concrete programs and community structures that bring parents together and create conditions for co-regulation, not just better self-management.^[1]

You cannot regulate your way out of conditions that require structural change. You can build skills, and I deeply believe in that work. But skills operating in a vacuum have limits. You can breathe all the right breaths and still come home to a house where you are the only adult who holds anything, where the invisible load belongs entirely to you, where the village that was supposed to be there simply isn’t. And breathing will only take you so far inside those conditions.

What can we actually do?

We start by naming it. Out loud, to another person. The loneliness, the overwhelm, the anger that surprised you, the numbness, the crying in the car (yes, you too). Naming it to someone who can hear it is co-regulation in its most basic form. It is two nervous systems in contact with each other. It is not a solution, but it is a beginning, and sometimes a beginning is everything.

We stop performing fine. Please. I mean it. The people around you who look like they have it together are also crying in their cars. I am crying in my car. And in the bathtub. And in the kitchen. We are all figuring this out as we go, from bodies that were largely unprepared for it, in a world that was largely unprepared to support it. The performance of “okayness” is costing us more than we realize, and it is keeping us from the very connection that our nervous systems are desperate for.

And if you are in a position to seek support (therapy, a group, a coach, a honest conversation with someone who can actually hold it) please do. Not because you are broken (that is such a buzzword). Healing is a team sport, and none of us were designed to do it alone. This is the work that interrupts the cycle. This is how the pattern changes. Not just for you. For your kiddos. For their kiddos.

A final thought:

You were not designed to do this alone. Not the 2 a.m. wakings. Not the invisible logistics. Not the emotional labor. Not the weight of raising another human while quietly managing your own unraveling or healing or humanity. The fact that you are doing it without adequate support is not evidence of your strength. It is evidence of a gap that should not exist. And you are not the gap. You are the person being asked to fill one that was never yours to fill alone.

The strength is real. The exhaustion is real. The loneliness is real. And none of it means you are failing. It means you are human, doing an enormous thing, in conditions that were not built to support you, with a nervous system that has been running on reserve for longer than you probably want to admit.

The village did not disappear because you were not worthy of one. It disappeared for reasons that had nothing to do with you. And the grief of that, the quiet, persistent grief of doing this without the support you deserved, is real and it is valid, and it does not make you weak to feel it.

You are allowed to put the weight down. You are allowed to ask for help. You are allowed to be a full, messy, struggling, loving, trying-their-best human being and still be a wonderful parent.

I see you. I really do. And I am glad you are here.  And, I also said all of this to myself as much as I said it to you.

Sources & References

1. Office of the Surgeon General. Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; 2024. hhs.gov
2. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. 2022;16:871227. doi:10.3389/fnint.2022.871227. PMC9131189
3. Ren X, Cai Y, Wang J, Chen O. A systematic review of parental burnout and related factors among parents. BMC Public Health. 2024;24(1):376. doi:10.1186/s12889-024-17829-y. PubMed 38317118
4. Brianda ME, Roskam I, Mikolajczak M. Hair cortisol concentration as a biomarker of parental burnout. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2020;117:104681. ScienceDirect
5. Holt-Lunstad J. Social connection as a critical factor for mental and physical health. World Psychiatry. 2024;23(3):312–332. doi:10.1002/wps.21224. Wiley
6. UN Women. The Invisible Labor of Women: Uncovering Unpaid and Undervalued Work. 2026. gender.study
7. Luthra R, Haux T. The gendered division of cognitive household labor, mental load, and family–work conflict in European countries. European Societies. 2024;26(3):828–854. MIT Press
8. Vettoretto E et al. Understanding the dimensions of mental labor: the invisible load of Italian mothers. Frontiers in Sociology. 2026. doi:10.3389/fsoc.2025.1683261. PMC12893982
9. Matias M et al. Profiles of parental burnout across 36 countries. Cross-Cultural Research. 2023;57:499–538. Cited in: Noti G et al. PMC. 2025. PMC12249155
10. Lurie Children’s Hospital. Millennial Parenting Statistics. Survey of 1,000 U.S. millennial parents, December 2023. luriechildrens.org
11. Mertens E et al. Parenting Information on Social Media: Systematic Literature Review. JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting. 2024;7:e55372. PMC11541157
12. Praveen SM, Dharani M. Navigating the Digital Sphere: A Systematic Review of the Impact of Parenting-based Social Media Influencers on Maternal Mental Health. SAGE Journals. 2025. doi:10.1177/09731342251340521. SAGE
13. Zhang L et al. Intergenerational Transmission of Parental Adverse Childhood Experiences and Children’s Outcomes: A Scoping Review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. 2023;24(5):3251–3264. PubMed 36205317
14. Madigan S et al. Intergenerational Associations between Parents’ and Children’s ACE Scores. Children. 2021;8(10):926. PMC8466272
15. Freeman SE et al. Parent emotion regulation difficulties statistically mediate the association between parental ACEs and child emotion regulation. Frontiers in Global Women’s Health. 2025;6:1587786. PMC12698609
16. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Mothers Work 300 More Hours Per Year than They Did 40 Years Ago. November 2019. Available at: iwpr.org/mothers-work-300-more-hours-per-year-than-they-did-40-years-ago
17. Dotti Sani GM, Treas J. Educational Gradients in Parents’ Child-Care Time Across Countries, 1965-2012. Journal of Marriage and Family. 2016;78(4). doi:10.1111/jomf.12305
18. Pew Research Center. Modern Parenthood: Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as They Balance Work and Family. March 2013. Available at: pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/03/14/chapter-5-americans-time-at-paid-work-housework-child-care-1965-to-2011