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Today’s social climate has presented children with a host of obstacles and challenges, many of which make a parent’s job all the more anxiety-ridden. The quality of an environment can greatly impact the course of a child’s life, and for Black parents across the District of Columbia, city life bears its own burdens of stress and concern on their mental health and well-being.
In August, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released a “Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Parents,” underscoring the dire need to provide greater support to parents, caregivers, and families to encourage thriving communities.
“Parents have a profound impact on the health of our children and the health of society. Yet parents and caregivers today face tremendous pressures, from familiar stressors such as worrying about their kids’ health and safety and financial concerns, to new challenges like navigating technology and social media, a youth mental health crisis, an epidemic of loneliness that has hit young people the hardest,” Murthy said in the release.
Highlighting the significant stressors parents face today, a national survey released by Pew Center in 2023 outlined the top concerns of participating parents raising their children, largely based on the quality of their neighborhoods. Among the responses, the majority of U.S. parents (58%) rated their neighborhood as an excellent or very good place to raise children, while an additional 28% gave their community a ‘good’ rating.
However, more than 1 in 10 parents (14%) reported their neighborhood as only a fair or poor place to raise children. These groups of parents show higher levels of fear or concern for their children’s well-being.
The survey reports that “46% of parents who give their neighborhood only a fair or poor rating say they are very or extremely worried about their children getting shot at some point, compared with a far smaller share (18%) of parents who say they live in a good, very good or excellent area.”
The Pew Center’s 2023 survey supports the surgeon general’s advisory about parental stressors when raising children.
“Parents and caregivers experience a multitude of unique stressors from raising children, including children’s safety, children’s health, time demands, financial strain, economic instability, and poverty among other things,” noted the surgeon general’s advisory, according to data from 2023.
Parenting Today: D.C. Parents Talk Challenges, Achievements, Support
For parents in Washington, D.C., like Jay Clarke, a father of four, and Imani Banks, a mother of two, every day presents its own concerns and challenges.
“You have no control of their safety at school, when they are out with their friends, or even taking public transportation,” Clarke said.
Clarke, father of four, raised his first child in Washington, D.C. during the early 1990s with the help of his parents and family. Now, he restarts his journey with two young children and a stepchild, who he also raises as his own.
Despite his experience raising his oldest son, now 27, Clarke shared that fatherhood never gets easier as he continues to navigate parenthood through the dangers and concerns that surround his children in a largely Black, urban city.
“The older your kid is, I think you start to worry just a little bit more. You worry about them all the time, but then you start to worry about other things, like if they are watching out for their surroundings,” Clarke said. “What unexpected things they may run into. We as humans are so fragile. You can just sniff something that might make you sick, or could kill you.”
Banks, a Ward 8 resident, has some of the same concerns of Clarke, as she worries about her children experiencing bullying and violence in the city.
“I think initially my main concern was bullying, [as] bullying has been on the rise. Thankfully, I don’t think they’ve experienced much of that,” Banks explained. “But now as they’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to keep us in, I guess calmer and more vibrant– if there is such a thing– environments.”
She credits her selectiveness in her children’s schools of choice, as well as keeping her family in a close-knit space that helped keep her children away from the heightened safety issues often experienced in more violence-ridden parts of the city.
“The caliber of children [in the schools that I placed them in] are just a little bit different,” said Banks. “I felt like with the city changing, that there would likely be a certain type of environment in these schools that I chose, where it would likely limit the amount of exposure they would get in comparison to some of these other schools in higher poverty-stricken or urban areas, so to speak.”
Banks told The Informer she attributes some of the parenting challenges of today to the overall shifts in society. She says that mothers are working more than the older generation of women, ultimately taking time and opportunity away from their ability to parent their children.
“These younger mothers aren’t working the same way that the older mothers and our generation coming up were working. They had more solid jobs that had them out of the house between certain hours, where these younger parents are doing more shift work,” Banks said. “They’re gone at night because they’re doing security or whatever the case may be, and they’re [often] starting these families with no support. So, they are just figuring it out as they go along. There is no structure across the board.”
Positive community support is helpful in parenting, Banks and Clarke explained.
Clarke said that support from his family had a significant impact on the mental well-being and success of his first child. He told The Informer he hopes that the same village of support continues to protect his younger children as they navigate life today.
“When we were young, we had everyone from parents to aunts and uncles and grandparents steering us the right way, and also being a disciplinarian for the kids in their family,” Clarke said. “Without that guidance, these kids are having a hard time ahead of them when they step out of their family’s doors and into the real world.”
