Pamela Paul: American parents need much more than tax credits

Last month, Surgeon Seneral Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents. Too many parents, Murthy noted, are stressed out by the demands of parenthood in an environment dominated by gun violence, social media and drug epidemics. Murthy recommended policies to support parental mental health, improve child care access, increase parental leave and improve community support.

That’s nice.

As for Vice President Kamala Harris, if she becomes president, she wants to offer $6,000 child tax credits to families with newborns and make high-quality child care more affordable.

That’s also nice.

But it’s a drop in the bucket. Across the developed world, parents are stressed over social media and their kids doing well at school. But in many European countries, parents can afford to stress about those things because they have access to free or heavily subsidized child care, health care and education. (These countries also have sensible gun laws, but that’s another story.)

Here in America, we get none of that. If American parents didn’t have to sweat over saving hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for these larger things, they might have the time and mental space to attend to child-rearing’s ordinary challenges. If they didn’t have to panic over their kids’ futures being subject to these same expenses and a merciless job market, they wouldn’t be quite so frantic about their children’s education and whether it will adequately prepare them for an economically secure future.

My European friends think what American parents put up with is bonkers, but unlike many Americans, they don’t blame parents. They recognize that American parents are trapped in an impossible system.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book called “Parenting, Inc.: How the Billion-Dollar Baby Business Has Changed the Way We Raise Our Children.” That book was largely about how companies exploit parents’ fears to sell them products and services intended to make their children “succeed.” That market has since metastasized, but its underlying cause remains the same. “The cost of raising children is rising far faster than our earnings,” I wrote. “That leaves even couples who make decent salaries belaboring the decision to have children based on the bottom line.”

Republicans like Sen. JD Vance of Ohio have suggested a similarly meager tax credit in their push to get Americans reproducing. And even Democrats are too tentative to push for systemic change in health care, child care or education. The picayune proposals currently on the table amount to petty change, not to any material change at all.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.