Opinion: Parents are stressed out. Set 'lower ambitions for your kids.'

It didn't really matter where I took my four children, who are roughly two years apart in age. The comments from strangers were the same.

On Capitol Hill, perusing the Smithsonian Museums or, later, after we moved to Texas, at the Stockyards in Fort Worth, people didn't hold back on their opinions of my family. "Wow! You've really got your hands full," a stranger would quip, looking at my kids ages 7, 5, 3 and 1. "Don't you know how to stop that?" others would ask with a wink.

Having a large-ish family is somewhat unusual these days. Only 12% of adults have four or more kids. Now that three of my children are teens, the size of my family isn't something that crosses my mind. I'm too busy raising them.

I'm not only working, but I'm shuffling them to school, sports practices and doctor's appointments. I'm also attending concerts, soccer games and parent meetings while trying to have as much quality one-on-one time with them as possible.

"If you want to know what it's like to have a fourth," comedian Jim Gaffigan says in a particularly hilarious sketch, "just imagine you're drowning and then someone hands you a baby." The struggle is real.

Of course parents are stressed

As I was pulling up a photo to show a friend recently, she saw my calendar open on my phone. "Oh my gosh!" she said, observing every day packed to the point that it was almost unreadable. "How are you doing that?" I just laughed.

Isn't every parent's schedule full?

I had the same reaction when Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, recently published a dire warning on the declining health and mental well-being of parents, aptly dubbed " Parents Under Pressure ."

"Over the past decade, parents have been consistently more likely to report experiencing high levels of stress compared to other adults. In 2023, 33% of parents reported high levels of stress in the past month compared to 20% of other adults," the report read, citing American Psychological Association research .

Nearly half of parents said " most days their stress is completely overwhelming ."

It seems obvious that parents are more stressed than childless adults. They're caring for other human beings, after all, and that's a huge responsibility.

Good parents feel the weight of that responsibility and it translates as stress, even if they are healthy, organized and financially stable. It's like the warnings on coffee cups at fast-food joints: "Coffee is hot." Tell us something we don't know.

It's also hard to admit sometimes that we feel overwhelmed. After all, most of us wanted children. I specifically wanted a lot of kids. So, isn't this what I get?

Yet, living with this level of stress for 25 years, as children grow from infants to fully functional (we hope) adults, does seem untenable. I've heard dozens of my peers who are parents say something like, "We just didn't think it would be this hard or this busy!"

The surgeon general's report noted that parents (and caregivers) are struggling with "financial strain and economic instability, time demands, concerns over children's health and safety, parental isolation and loneliness, difficulty managing technology and social media, and cultural pressures." I can say with certainty that I've experienced all of these and so have my friends who are parents.

The sense that parenting is overwhelming has undoubtedly deterred adults from having children. The birth rate has dropped dangerously low. You can almost hear childless adults look at the rest of us and ask themselves: Why would we want to do that? They look stressed, tired and broke.

Should parenting be this hard?

It's not parents' inability to handle stress or even the task of raising children that's the problem. It's often personal, family and social expectations that create the most stress.

In his book " Family Unfriendly ," Tim Carney, a Catholic father of six and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, argues that our culture has made raising kids harder than it needs to be. One example is an outsized focus on busyness and excellence, seen most obviously in the obsession with kids' travel sports, which cost parents tremendous amounts of money and time.

Carney argues that other factors contribute to an anti-family culture, like how neighborhoods are no longer walkable, kids lack community and multigenerational family connections we once had have virtually vanished.

As a parent of four, I couldn't agree more with Carney's observations of modern American life. He longs for a simpler way and suggests solutions that don't make it sound like the only way to improve parenting is to live on a farm and churn our own butter.

In an email, Carney offered his take on the newest report. "The surgeon general is correct," he wrote. "Parents are overwhelmed, and that is probably driving down the birthrate. He is also correct to cite community collapse as a cause. Raising children is not an individualistic undertaking. It takes a village, to borrow a phrase. As we become more isolated and atomized, raising children becomes harder."

In his book, Carney suggests policy changes for a more family-friendly America, like parental leave. He's huge on pushing a pro-marriage and pro-child tax code: "A government should be partial toward children, because a government should be partial toward humans. Ours is a government for the people, not for the puppies."

Parents, get perspective. It's normal to feel overwhelmed.

Most parents don't live and think in the policy realm. They aren't powerless to affect a lawmaker's position on the tax code, but let's be real: Some of these solutions may be difficult to enact, at least at the behest of parents.

In observing my friends and my own parenting ups and downs, it's helpful to get some perspective. Parenting is a season like anything else. Some discontent is normal, according to the U-shaped happiness scale , which found people are happiest in childhood and young adulthood, then least happy in their 40s − not coincidentally, when many parents are raising adolescents and teens − and dips back up again in a person's 60s.

So it's normal to feel overburdened and overwhelmed during the parenting years. However, misery doesn't have to be the default. My parents still say the best years of their lives were when they raised my brother and me. I'm halfway through parenting my four, and I'd say that is true for me as well.

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One of my favorite lines by writer Shel Silverstein is from the poem " How Many How Much ": "How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live 'em."

I try to challenge myself to reframe feeling overwhelmed as a parent as an opportunity to love my kids in the best way possible. That doesn't necessarily mean doing more or signing them up for more events but focusing on quality time and interactions. Parenting can be fun and joyful as well as busy and hard. Your mindset is key.

"Have lower ambitions for your kids," Carney wrote to me. "Put them in the local rec league instead of the travel program. Skip the extra violin lessons. Prioritize fun and let them be bored."

Carney also suggested "immersing yourself in community − ideally a church." Finding support inside a community can improve everyone's health and reduce the stressors parents worry over.

Parenting is overwhelming and hard, but it's also an incredible blessing and opportunity. Both can be true at the same time.

Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track , and get it delivered to your inbox .

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Parents are stressed out. Set 'lower ambitions for your kids.'