How the science of child development can help parents stress less this holiday season

A recent advisory from the United States Surgeon General has made it clear — parents and caregivers are burned out.

In a 2023 poll of more than 3,100 American parents, nearly 50 per cent reported experiencing debilitating levels of stress most days. Other recent surveys from Canada and the U.S. also found between 20 to 30 per cent of parents are experiencing moderate to severe levels of anxiety that could warrant a clinical diagnosis.

When the tasks of the holidays are piled onto this baseline stress, it’s easy to see how the “season of joy” may feel more like the “season of overwhelm.”

How can both our society as a whole and parents as individuals dial back the pressure? Structural changes are essential. But scientific insights about child development can also help parents prioritize what matters most and shift how they respond to things that may otherwise trigger anxiety.

What’s causing parent stress?

Much of what is making parents stressed these days is structural in nature: things are more expensive, it’s hard to find affordable child care, parents are more isolated, work is taking up more of parents’ time and children’s engagement with ever-evolving technology brings a range of serious health and safety concerns.

These factors disproportionately affect parents who experience poverty, racism, violence or trauma. Addressing them will require substantial political and cultural shifts.

But there are smaller factors to tackle as well. Parents today have more access to information than ever before. It’s not just a pediatrician or family member they can turn to for advice, but endless blogs, forums and social media platforms.

While online sources can build community and confidence, they can also contribute to information overload as panic headlines and contradictory advice often compound parents’ feelings of anxiety and being overwhelmed.

These platforms also tend to showcase idyllic situations that lead parents to create unhelpful comparisons and unrealistic expectations, contributing to feelings of shame and guilt.

To counteract these feelings, it’s helpful to remember a few things: children’s development is influenced by many things parents can’t control, there are many benefits to imperfect parenting and independent play and parent wellness matters more than most else.

1. It’s more than just parenting

It’s common for people who haven’t experienced discrimination or unexpected challenges to attribute children’s behaviours and outcomes to parents’ choices and efforts. This is an example of “attribution bias,” a bias towards a particular kind of explanation.

Developmental science helps dispel this bias by highlighting that children’s development is influenced by many factors other than parenting and beyond parents’ control.

First among these is genetics. For example, twin studies have found that genetic factors explain 57-76 per cent of child/adolescent mental illness, 60-84 per cent of picky eating and 60-85 per cent of school achievement.

Another is exposure to adverse or positive experiences, such as witnessing violence or being supported by friends and non-parental adults. These types of experiences have substantial effects on children’s physical and mental health. But they are inequitably distributed, based on factors such as income and race.

There are big differences in children’s temperaments and how they respond to their environments. The same parenting strategy applied to two different children can lead to two very different outcomes, as you may have observed in siblings.

This is why the next time you catch yourself feeling shame or judgment about a child’s behaviour, it’s important to remember parenting choices might not be to blame.

2. Parental imperfections are opportunities

Psychologists and pediatricians often recommend certain parenting strategies to support children’s development. But rarely do these providers suggest parents must follow their advice 100 per cent of the time to achieve the desired effects. It’s what happens most of the time that matters.

Even when parenting “imperfections” happen, like breaking routines or uncharacteristically snapping at children, they can be seen as opportunities.

When “rupture” is followed up by “repair” in the form of acknowledgement, apologies, explanations and/or moments for restoring connection, it can benefit the parent-child attachment relationship and help children build their emotion-regulation skills. By using repair after the overwhelming moments that often happen during the holidays, parents can transform these moments from sources of shame to reasons for pride.

3. Benefits of independent play

Over the past few decades, parents’ worries about children’s physical safety have grown, while children’s unsupervised play time has declined. Many parents are spending more time with their children, hovering or helicoptering over them rather than promoting independent play.

No doubt, playing with the support of a responsive adult has many benefits for children’s learning and development. But when it comes to parent involvement in play, sometimes less is more.

Research shows that unstructured play — play that isn’t organized by adults and doesn’t have defined goals — is a “fundamental necessity” for children’s well-being. Outdoor risky play has enormous benefits for children’s physical and mental health that outweigh many of the perceived safety risks. There are also many unique benefits of playing with peers for both academic and social skill development.

Read more: Keeping kids active despite the weather: Promoting outdoor activity all year round

With this in mind, if you are a parent who is regularly your child’s main playmate, it may be time to seek more opportunities to take a step back. The holidays can be a great time to start.

4. Parent well-being is paramount

News and social media feeds are full of panic headlines that can make it seem that certain foods, toys or parenting habits are what make or break children’s life outcomes. It’s easy for parents consuming this media to feel anxious or even want to change their purchases or behaviours in response to every new study.

But most headlines overstate the findings of weak studies or small effects. And if following the headlines comes at the cost of parental well-being, it could be doing more harm than good.

This is because one of the most consistent and strongest predictors of children’s well-being is having safe, stable and nurturing relationships with caregivers — as both the Canadian and American Pediatric Societies have stated. Children need present and responsive caregivers more than they need any specific foods, presents or new parenting fads.

This is why it may be worth considering what you can do to support yourself or other parents’ well-being this year. This could mean providing practical or social support to the parents around you or just making them feel heard and understood.

With high parental stress, it’s more important than ever for everyone to replace judgment with empathy and advice with real support.

And for parents, let’s try to distinguish what we can and can’t control, practise self-forgiveness in tough times, allow ourselves moments to do less and focus in on what matters most. It might help us experience more moments of joy in this holiday season and through all the seasons of parenthood.

Nina Sokolovic has worked in several roles at non-profit and government organizations that support the well-being of children and parents, including her current as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Ontario Public Service. She previously received funding for her research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.