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.
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........