“Parenthood and the care of children is now a highly self-conscious affair in which the maintenance of a high standard is insisted upon, and the pitfalls are forever being exposed,” wrote the sociologist Hannah Gavron. The situation for parents, Gavron explained, is made more difficult because “The family today is an isolated unit unable and unwilling to seek assistance in its distress from wider circles of kin (as it has always done in the past).”
As a result, many of the 96 working and middle-class mothers Gavron surveyed for her book, “The Captive Wife,” felt like failures. “I felt that I was a failure as a person, too,” said one middle-class English mother about her early days raising children, and that the sense of flailing made her “feel lonely and displaced.”
This book was not written recently. Gavron, a young mother herself, died by suicide in 1965. I had never heard of her before reading a biography of Sylvia Plath, “Red Comet,” which made comparisons between the lives of the two women. Gavron was married to a successful publisher, and even after the two were estranged, she was comfortable enough to afford a nanny to watch her children while she taught and finished her book. Both Plath and Gavron died by the same brutal method: gassing themselves in ovens. Plath died just a few years before Gavron in London. “The Captive Wife” had originally been Gavron’s thesis, and was published posthumously in 1966, though it was reissued with a new foreword this year.
In some ways, Gavron was a product of the ’60s. Her son, Jeremy, wrote a book in 2015 exploring her life and death, called “Woman on the Edge of Time.” He told The Guardian: “It is clear to me that this particular moment in history was in some ways toxic for this particular person … Hannah was a woman who needed to fulfill herself the way men fulfill themselves. I think the trouble she got into was that she was too far ahead.”
Certainly, educated women in wealthy societies have come a long way since Gavron and Plath’s time. And as highly sensitive women, they were not representative of the whole population. But it struck me — as it always does when I read history — that our environments change but the emotional texture of being alive (and in this case, the experience of parenting) is eternal.
Gavron quotes a 1963 booklet published by Relate, then called the Marriage Guidance Council, which is surprisingly poetic on the range of parental feelings when dealing with young children: “It is the most extraordinary mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, the anxious and the funny, and it goes on and on. This is perhaps the stage of life when men and women have to work harder than ever before or afterwards.”
In a recent advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, notes that in the past 10 years, parents report feeling higher levels of stress than other adults. He cites both “familiar stressors,” such as economic anxiety, and worries about children’s well-being to newer challenges, like social media. Murthy calls for “a shift in culture, policies and programs to ensure all parents and caregivers can thrive,” including “access to paid family leave, improving early childhood education and child care and delivering historic investments in mental health care.”
I wholeheartedly agree with all of his recommendations. But I do think there’s an implication here that parenting today is somehow uniquely difficult — which it isn’t. Because discussion of mental health is ubiquitous now, parents may be more likely to admit that they’re struggling than they would 10, 20 or certainly 60 years ago, and I don’t know that studies can control for that kind of cultural and linguistic shift.
Furthermore, the average American has a level of comfort that would have been unimaginable to even the wealthiest humans 60 years ago. While the Covid pandemic was a major challenge in our lives, the women of “The Captive Wife” all mentioned the effect of World War II on their youth.
Many were evacuated from London and separated from their own parents: “At 4 I was evacuated for six years,” one woman explains in Gavron’s book. “They were not nice people and I can still remember how unhappy I was.” Gavron’s subjects also spoke of emotional and material challenges that today’s moms and dads will recognize: isolation, loneliness, boredom and the stress of poverty, in particular bad housing and unsafe neighborhoods.
Material conditions can always be improved. Especially in a country as prosperous as the United States, there is no reason any child should be homeless or food insecure. But even if all children have their basic needs met, life can be hard. Parents may feel like failures now and in Gavron’s day because there’s an expectation that if they do everything “right,” they can control outcomes for their children.
Part of making parenting more bearable is accepting that it has always been challenging and will always be so. We exist in an imperfect world filled with random cruelty and bad luck. There’s no policy fix for that.
Thank you for being a subscriber
Read past editions of the newsletter here.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.
The post Parenting Has Always Been Hard appeared first on New York Times.