U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy’s recent piece on parenting that was posted in the New York Times has received considerable media coverage. Politico titled its article on his op-ed, “Parents Can’t Function, They’re So Stressed, Surgeon General Warns.”
Indeed, Murthy claims that from his own experience, parenting has been “more stressful than any job I’ve had.” He notes that his view is shared by parents across the nation.
After painting a dour picture of parenting, he explains, “That’s why I am issuing a surgeon general’s advisory to call attention to the stress and mental health concerns facing parents and caregivers, and to lay out what we can do to address them.” He further says that we must identify “policies” and “programs” to improve matters.
This should give us pause. To be sure, parenting is stressful—there is nothing new about it—but so is work. It’s part of the human condition. Mature adults learn to deal with it. So why has the surgeon general decided that we are now at the breaking point and something must be done to alleviate parental stress?
If Murthy were a researcher, what he said would not raise red flags. But he is not. He is a senior federal employee, appointed by the president, and his answer to this problem is to create a committee to advise him what to do. Only the naïve would conclude that this would not involve state action.
This is a familiar pattern. Government officials announce they are going to fix a problem that is largely of their own making. They are good at contriving issues that demand an expansion of the government.
Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and Wendy Wang is a director of research at the Institute for Family Studies. They examined the data from the 2022 General Social Survey on the subject of happiness. Here is what they found.
- Married men (ages 18-55) in America are about twice as likely to be very happy, compared to their unmarried peers.
- Men and women who have the benefit of a spouse and children are the most likely to report being “very happy” with their lives.
- A combination of marriage and parenthood is linked to the biggest happiness dividends for women.
Now if these same people were asked if it is stressful to raise children, no doubt they would agree. So what? Experiencing stress does not negate the possibility of being happy.
Winning the World Series or the Super Bowl is stressful for the players. It is also a source of tremendous happiness. The two emotions are not necessarily contradictory.
Back to Murthy. He is teeing this issue of parental stress up for his bosses, the president and the vice president.
When President Biden spoke at the Teacher of the Year event in 2022, he told teachers that their students are more than that. “They’re all our children…. They’re not somebody else’s children; they’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.” Also in 2022, Vice President Harris told Seth Meyers that “When you see our kids, I truly believe that they are our children, they are the children of our country, of our communities.”
Wrong. Children belong to their parents. Period.
Marx and Engels insisted that parents should not be allowed to raise their own children. Their position was not only implemented in the early years of the Russian Revolution, it has become a staple in the ideological arsenal of the Left ever since. To this day, left-wing intellectuals and activists argue that children are not the “property” of parents, and should therefore be raised communally. This is part and parcel of the “they’re all our children” mentality.
The Biden administration is on record saying it is okay for administrators and teachers not to tell parents that their child is going to transition to the opposite sex. It’s okay for agents of the government to know—they can even affirm the decision of the troubled student. But the parents can be kept in the dark. It’s easy for the Biden team to come to this conclusion. After all, “they’re all our children.”
Murthy has sounded a false alarm. Married men and women with children are the happiest people in the nation. They don’t need the prescriptions of a government advisory board to deal with the stress that comes with parenting. What they need is a government that knows its place and does not encroach on their rights.
Contact: surgeongeneral@hhs.gov
