American Family Life Should Not be This Volatile

by Elliot Haspel

The Atlantic

July 27, 2023

Welcome to the age of tremors.

Parenthood has always involved unpredictability: wake-ups at 2 a.m., calls from school, the dreaded words my stomach hurts. This daily variance frequently stems from a sick or scared child, and is part of the basic dynamic of family life. Yet today’s parents in the U.S. also face rising external disruptions and a degradation of the institutions that are meant to provide stability. The result is that many families are regularly knocked off their feet by problems that are more than inconvenient but less than catastrophic. This breeds parental stress, insecurity, and exhaustion. Americans have entered, in short, an age of tremors.

The nation has been on this course for the past half century. Starting in the 1970s, a series of economic- and social-policy decisions led to what the political scientist Jacob Hacker has termed the “great risk shift” from government and corporations onto households. Hacker’s idea mainly refers to economic changes, such as the private sector’s shift from guaranteed pensions to stock market–dependent 401(k)s. But this notion of a “DIY society” can extend to the numerous ways parents—especially mothers—are asked to “hold it all together,” the University of Wisconsin at Madison sociologist Jessica Calarco told me. For example, the rise of double-earner households was not met with policies like affordable child care or mandatory paid leave. Instead, families have been forced to navigate confusing and competitive marketplaces to acquire basic services such as day care and summer camp, and they are largely on their own to deal with any breakdowns.

What’s new in the 2020s is that these breakdowns are occurring more frequently. Consider the series of challenges families have faced in recent years. There has been a terrible shortage of infant formula, as well as children’s medicines such as Tylenol, amoxicillin, and Adderall. Child care has become even more expensive and scarcer—and, because of staffing shortages, programs regularly close or reduce hours with little notice. Extreme heat has forced school closures; wildfire smoke from Canada has caused some U.S. summer camps to delay their start times.