"So the surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, put out an advisory. These are rare warnings. Past ones have been for things like cigarettes or gun violence."

"And this time what he's saying is that today's parents are not okay. They're too stressed, not the normal amount of stress. But what he's saying is that parenting has become so difficult that it's become an urgent public health crisis.... And he does say parenting has always been something that brings both joy and challenge at the same time. But what's really different now is that we have entered this new era of parenting. Social scientists call it intensive parenting.... The basic idea of intensive parenting.... is that kids need to be sort of constantly educated and enriched and engaged.... And so that's, like, when you take a walk and you notice that the leaves are changing, you say to your child, look, the leaves are changing. Do you know what drives that? Do you know why that's happening?... So when this style of parenting started, it was certainly an upper middle class phenomenon, but a variety of research has shown that it has spread across the income spectrum, across racial groups...."

From today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily," "The Parents Aren’t All Right" (audio and transcript at Podscribe).