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From Parenting to Sharenting and the Death of the 'Village', How the Parenting Market Has Affected Parenting and Burnout

by R. Anthony Arnold
July 2024

In 2022, an Ohio State study found that 66% of parents reported burnout¹. Given the timing, it’s reasonable to think those numbers may have been inflated due to pandemic specific circumstances. But parental burnout was a subject of focus before Covid-19 entered our lives.

Researchers have been considering parenting as a unique form of burnout, separate from something like work burnout, since 2017². That’s when the Parental Burnout Inventory, a way of determining whether or not the condition is real, was developed. A year later the concept was expanded upon even further, as researchers began trying to decipher exactly which circumstances could lead to parental burnout³.

There have been many such studies over the last few years, but there’s one, from earlier this year, that I want to draw attention to. The results are so striking that they’re worth quoting directly.

“Recent studies have shown that parental burnout can be very destructive. As regards to the parents themselves, parental burnout can not only give rise to suicidal and escape ideations, but also may lead to external problems such as substance and behavioral addictions and sleep disorders. Prolonged exposure to this negative state results in a significant decrease in the individual’s life satisfaction and subjective well-being, and is highly likely to lead to depressive symptoms⁴.”

Challenging v. Hard

If you’re a parent, or a caregiver, or even just someone who has a passing familiarity with parenting, then it’s easy to imagine you nodding along to the next sentences. Parenting is challenging. It tests you. It forces you to develop new skills, discover new personal depths, and figure out ways of solving unexpected problems. When done with a partner, as I’ve been fortunate enough to do, it does become easier, but in some ways more complicated. Suddenly, you’re trying to balance kids with your obligations and responsibilities to another adult, one who may have competing, and in some cases wildly divergent, opinions on how to raise children.

When a child has a special need, as our oldest daughter does, the difficulties are magnified. Having a child with autism can place a unique strain on a household. The inability to communicate needs, combined with a cocktail of behaviors that can range from mildly annoying to terrifyingly aggressive, stresses even the most well-intentioned and well-read parents. For us, physical aggression has been a particularly thorny issue. While we’re largely over it now (our daughter is 21), there was a time, spanning years, where our household was frequently disrupted by outbursts that carried the possibility of becoming violent. Mental health, to say nothing of discipline, is hard to maintain under those conditions.

We joke about it now, but a child with the body and hormones of a 16-year old, and the impulse control of someone half her age makes the typical challenges of raising a teenager appear quite tame, by comparison. And according to researchers, parents with special needs children can experience higher rates of burnout than others.

Kids are wonderful, but they are work. The kind of work you can’t simply walk away from.

But, I don’t think that parenting being challenging necessarily leads to burnout. I think it’s because we’ve created a parenting marketplace in which we have made parenting hard, with our ever changing definitions and social expectations of what a good parent is.

Challenges are meant to be overcome; and while not always at first noticeable, there are often rewards for overcoming those challenges. But hard is just, well, hard, like pushing a boulder uphill both ways. It’s more than unpleasant. It can often feel unfair and make you feel beaten down, as if some outside force is conspiring against you.

Instead of treating parenting as a challenging and valuable role, one that’s vital to the well-being of our communities and nation, we’ve allowed it to become a hard solo/duo act that’s increasingly targeted by profit-driven markets. We often hear, on a bipartisan basis, about the need to develop “family friendly” policies that minimize the market’s influence on parents and the family. But those policies are slow to arrive, clearly showing us that American society is ill-designed to enable the kinds of legislation we profess to desire.

Our values, which are consumerist and individualistic, make some outcomes more likely than others. So in what ways do those previously mentioned values interact with parenting? How do they tilt the playing field towards certain results? And are those results the ones we wish to have?

Capturing the Mom

In August of 2019, Forbes published an article titled “The New Mom Economy: Meet The Startups Disrupting The $46 Billion Millennial Parenting Market”⁵. It’s an interesting read, and I encourage you to seek it out. The whole thing has that pro-business gloss that you expect from Forbes, who knows their target audience extremely well.

There’s also something disturbing about it. The images are friendly, with a smiling mom, a smiling kid, and a smiling business owner; and the words are all quite positive. It has the superficially pleasant style of something meant to be read while passing the time before a dental exam, or maybe perused during the layover between flights. But when you actually focus on the words you’re reading, you feel like Dorothy peeking behind the curtain:

“‘Capturing the mom at the point of starting a family is incredibly powerful,’ says Anu Duggal, partner at Female Founders Fund. Duggal notes that it’s at this point in a parent’s life that habits are being formed, so capture them once and a brand has them forever.”

I’ve known many moms in my life, and I have yet to meet one who would like to be captured. The point, which that quote plainly states, is to see moms not as people in need of support, whatever else they may say, but as a consumer market that hasn’t been exploited enough. The article notes, without the barest hint of disapproval, that the mom market has been “overlooked by the venture capital community.”

This “trend” is hardly new, though. Sixteen years ago the book Parenting Inc. came out. The subtitle of that book is “How the Billion Dollar Baby Business Has Changed the Way We Raise Our Children.” We’ve gone from a billion dollar baby business, to a $46 billion parenting market.

Of course, being the consumer is only half of the equation now. Parents are now encouraged to be not just purchasers of children’s content, but also the creators. And the object being sold is childhood itself.

Sharenting

The term “sharenting” may not have emerged in 2012, but an article in the Wall Street Journal that year titled “The Facebook-Free Baby” does seem, at minimum, to have driven it into the discourse. The author, Steven Leckart, wondered if it was possible to strike a balance between the natural desire to share images of your kids, and what seemed to be the “oversharenting” that many parents were guilty of, in his opinion. I don’t know where Mr. Leckart is today, but I can’t imagine he’s pleased with our current state-of-affairs.

From sharenting, and its problematic partner oversharenting, we’ve entered into the era of “commercial sharenting.” Parents sharing information, most commonly photos, about their kids for the purpose of profit. You can easily imagine the same Forbes friendly CEO who opined about the need for brands to capture moms being pleased to see parents capturing one another. It seems there’s a bit of Mr. Burns in many of us.

To the extent that commercial sharenting is discussed, it’s most often in legal terms. An excellent article from The Georgetown Law Journal last year, “Honey, I Monetized the Kids,” is the prototypical version of this⁶. For 44 pages, the piece goes through the various legal concerns around the trend; which, of course, is exactly what you’d expect from a law journal.

But even beyond the world of law, our thinking around this issue seems to begin at the same place: We’ve already conceded the main point, which is that commercial sharenting has a right to exist, and the only thing that remains is determining the structure the activity should take. This approach, which manifests itself around any number of issues, is the inevitable outcome of a society, where the individual is prioritized over the collective good.

In the United States, you’re free to pursue just about anything you’d like, so long as you don’t run afoul of the law. Even if the activity is harmful to you, harmful to other innocent parties, and likely ruinous for society, freedom means the right to do it. Absent formal constraints, the rule of the marketplace, which is “If the market exists we should sell the product,” will win out.

If there was no other force at play, the ones I’ve already mentioned would be more than enough. Taken together, there’s both a push factor, driving an increasing number of parents to see their kids in financial terms, and a pull factor, drawing parents towards the ever open arms of consumerism. But there are other forces.

Consider the following question: “In the context of parenting, what does individualism mean?” One possible answer is that it means parents are constantly expected to make choices, deciding what’s best for their families by looking at the world as an economist would. Rationally comparing many different possibilities, before choosing the “best” one.

The problem with that approach, and it applies to much more than just parenting, is “choice overload.”

Choice overload occurs when an individual has too many options from which to choose. Individualism and free markets assume that more choice leads, if not to more happiness, then to better outcomes. But in the context of parenting, the reality can be quite different.

From guides informing you of the best way to eat and sleep while pregnant, the best nursery design according to ‘color psychology’, the best parenting style, and how to raise an athlete, parents are flooded with advice. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. While there’s no doubt that most of this is well-intentioned, that doesn’t make it less taxing.

Especially for Mothers

Research I referenced earlier (Ren et al.), along with research from Japan⁷ and Belgium⁸, all find that mothers experience Parental Burnout more often than fathers. One driver of this is that mothers are more likely to strive for perfectionism. It’s easy to see how that combines with an overwhelming number of choices to produce a result that’s particularly harmful to the mental health of mothers.

There is one factor that does offer significant protection against all of this: social support. Unfortunately, we provide less of that than ever.

One of the most important books of the last 25 years is Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. In it, Putnam expands upon the ideas he first presented in his 1995 essay titled “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Thoroughly researched, Putnam shows participation in a number of organizations (churches, scout organizations, Red Cross, PTA, labor unions, etc…) dropped substantially over the preceding 30 years.

We think of social atomization, the process by which a society is transformed from a connected web into disconnected individuals, as a modern one. Cell phones, the internet, and other trappings of modern life have irreparably fractured us, or so the thinking goes. What Putnam’s research shows is that this answer, disconcerting as it may be, doesn’t go far enough. While new technology may have sped up the process, it likely began at least 50 years ago, which means it predates any of those previously mentioned factors.

Data specific to parenting tells a similar story.

Time use studies from 1965 to 2012 find that modern parents spend more time than ever engaged directly with their kids. This effect is increased among well-educated parents, who tend to be both more aware of research about parenting, and less likely to accept alternatives they feel are below their already elevated standards⁹. Like atomization, we assume that high intensity “helicopter” parenting is a relatively modern trend. Once again, our assumptions are unfounded.

By combining all of the previously mentioned factors (consumerism, free market individualism, atomization, high intensity parenting), a picture of modern parenting emerges. And it’s not an encouraging one.

Being a parent in the 21st century means being offered an endless stream of constantly changing information and research, often done for the purpose of selling you a good or service. It means being expected to choose between those options on your own, or with a partner, but often without a larger community to guide you. And after you’ve made a choice, you’ll walk your path alone, without civic or social groups that could help, and you’ll spend more time than ever doing it.

It’s little wonder that parental burnout exists.

Earlier I asked, “Are these results the ones we wish to have?” The answer is no. Whether you’re a parent, a would-be parent, or simply a concerned third party, it’s clear that parenting, as an institution, is not in a healthy place. The natural follow-up is, “what should be done to fix it?”

Typically, that question leads to a policy suggestion. And yes, there are policies, like parental leave or child subsidies, that would certainly help. But there’s a limit to how far you can go with legislation, and we’ll approach it far before we’ve solved this problem.

I mentioned how our values make some outcomes more likely than others. But they also make some outcomes flatly impossible.

Imagine a path. At a certain point the path forks. From far away, it seems as if you’ll have a choice. But as you approach the fork it becomes clear that while one path seems incredibly difficult, the other path is blocked off entirely by an invisible wall. You see through the wall, and it’s apparent that the path beyond it is better. But try as you might, there’s simply no way to make it. So you begin heading down the quite treacherous route, even while your mind can’t help but wonder what it would be like to walk down the other.

There are good people trying to make the path parents walk better. Trying to make it less difficult. But until we acknowledge that the best path, one built around the values of community, shared burden, and mutual benefit, is currently unavailable to us, we’ll continue to head down the one we’ve been walking for the last 50 years. Parents, children, and society will continue to suffer; and parental burnout will persist.

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