Why We Chose BetterHelp

BetterHelp particularly shines for its provider network, which consists of more than 28,000 providers, according to the company. All of its providers are licensed and experienced psychologists, marriage and family therapists, clinical social workers or licensed professional counselors. Where BetterHelp may fall short, however, is that it doesn’t accept insurance, potentially making the platform inaccessible to some individuals seeking mental health support. Still, $280 per month for four video therapy sessions comes out to $70 per session, a competitive rate for online therapy.

In March of 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a proposed order to ban BetterHelp from sharing consumer data with third-party advertisers, such as Facebook and Snapchat, including sensitive information about mental health and health data. To settle these charges, the order also called on the company to pay $7.8 million to consumers. In May 2024, BetterHelp agreed to pay the $7.8 million, notifying approximately 800,000 customers of refund eligibility. Refund payments began going out in June of 2024 and remain ongoing as of April 2025.

At the time of publishing, BetterHelp has also recently been accused of its providers using artificial intelligence (AI) in communication with its clients. While it appears this situation is ongoing, a report from Blue Orca Capital includes accounts from multiple “whistleblower” clients who claim BetterHelp providers used AI in live chat and messaging during online therapy care via the platform.

Our Experience with BetterHelp

Our platform tester, Carley, had an overall positive experience using BetterHelp. While the registration process was a bit in-depth, it connected her to a therapist well-matched to her needs. However, the therapist didn’t have availability until over a week after initial registration, and toward the end of the appointment, she felt the therapist took over the conversation.

“I noticed that when I logged onto the platform for the session, [the therapist] had messaged me two days before asking if we could move it, which I didn’t see until it was too late. She still ended up being online for me, but explained that she had a friend in town who she doesn’t get to see often. That made me feel a little bad at the start, but it wasn’t really a big deal. I thought she was very kind and had good insight for my situation.”

Carley found the initial questionnaire to be somewhat long. “It was simple but lengthy. It asked a lot of in-depth questions that either required one answer or allowed multiple boxes to be checked as a response, and sometimes it was hard to make a decision as to what response was right for me in some areas (as I can be a bit indecisive),” she explains. While Carley had an overall pleasant experience, she felt that she was unable to speak her mind later in the session. ”I think my only con of the whole experience was that later in the session, it got to be mostly the therapist talking and me nodding and listening. I really liked her actually, but I would’ve liked her to look for a little further insight into my background and who I am. However, I get that with the first session, she was just making sure she had some takeaways and techniques to leave me with.”

– Carley, platform tester

Update 8:20 p.m. Feb. 28, 2025: Officials from the Department of Early Childhood sent a memo to providers and families Friday afternoon that all cost containment strategies are paused until further notice. It said the department is actively working with the Joint Budget Committee to explore solutions, taking into consideration concerns that have been raised.

An abrupt announcement by state officials that services for babies and toddlers with disabilities will be slashed starting next week drew condemnation Thursday from the state Capitol’s powerful joint budget committee. At the same time, they signaled a desire to find money to reverse some of the cuts.

Officials from the state’s Early Intervention Program, which provides physical, speech, behavioral and other services to young children, told providers Tuesday that a $4 million budget shortfall meant big changes. They would limit children to four hours of therapy a month, and children who are on Medicaid would no longer get certain therapies.

The news sparked an outcry Wednesday from providers who serve some of the most vulnerable, high-needs children in the state: premature babies who don’t know how to eat, children who can’t walk or talk, toddlers with severe emotional or behavioral challenges stemming from autism.

Two webinars hosted by the state with providers this week attracted more than 1,000 people. An official said the department has received hundreds of written questions. Families, as of Friday, had not been officially notified of the changes but began reaching out to state lawmakers after media coverage.

Joint budget committee members were swift in criticizing officials from the Department of Early Childhood for not notifying them earlier of the budget crisis.

“For some reason, the department didn’t think we were worthy of knowing how serious this issue is, I find that incredibly insulting,” said Republican state Rep. Rick Taggart. “Not only to us but to give providers six days before changing services. How do you do something like that? And before telling them that, why didn’t somebody come over here and say, ‘We got a perfect storm. We need your help.’ Nothing, crickets.”

Democratic Sen. Jeff Bridges said the committee wasn’t given the chance to make a choice about whether the cuts were needed, “to balance this against other priorities.”

Jeanni Stefanik, chief financial officer for the Department of Early Childhood said “the issue was not fully realized until just a few weeks ago.” She cited higher-than-anticipated referrals, caseloads, and costs as reasons for the announced cost-cutting measures.

By the end of the hearing, the committee had identified one option to help restore some Medicaid services. But the committee’s hands are tied as to how much money it can find because it must cut $1 billion this year to balance the budget.

A department letter said the cost-containment measures will continue into the next fiscal year, with additional strategies to be shared over the course of the next few months.

Families meanwhile, are gearing up for a prolonged advocacy campaign, starting with a petition asking lawmakers to bridge the funding gap has attracted more than 2,600 signatures. They’ve started sharing their stories.

These are some of the people cuts would impact:

Michelle Young’s son Zaia, 2, has a sensory processing disorder, suspected autism, and a condition where his knees and hips tilt inward making walking difficult. He can’t communicate verbally, and works with four different specialists who each come for one hour a week.

Young said these services are crucial to getting Zia developmentally where he needs to be to enter school. She took her son to his regular doctor’s appointment this week.

“The number one thing she said is how all of this therapy and help he has had since he was so young, has made such a difference in his progress, his speech, he’s doing sign language,” she said.

Young’s services would be cut from four times a week to four times a month. Medicaid covers occupational therapy, speech language pathology and physical therapy. It doesn’t cover developmental intervention, social and emotional services including mental health and behavioral support, registered dieticians or a number of other therapies. Up until now, families have gotten those critical services through the state. The state’s letter to providers said families can no longer get the services.

“I’ve been in tears,” said Young. “It’s not fair how this will affect the kids.”

Young, who is a single parent, met with her son’s developmental therapist, who has been with him since he was 10 months old, for the last time Thursday.

“We have to say goodbye,” she said, crying. “We need them. This isn’t a want. It’s a medical need.”

Cassidy Norcross’s son August, 2, started getting services for autism in October. He has therapy three times a week with a speech therapist, an occupational therapist and a developmental therapist. August wouldn’t look at his parents, couldn’t communicate, and wasn’t responding socially as he should.

“He would have just terrible meltdowns because we could tell he was trying to communicate with us but he didn’t have the ability to tell us what he wanted…and he was unable to understand what we were saying to him,” Norcross said.

Courtesy Cassidy Norcross Cassidy Norcross with her son August, 2. “His providers have gifted us the knowledge and the techniques so that we can help him thrive…there’s just so many things that we’ve been taught by them.”

But August has made tremendous progress in just the few months he’s had services.

“Just a few weeks ago, for the first time he came up to me and said he wanted ‘eggies’… eggs. I cried because it was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’ it was such a breakthrough for him to tell me what he wanted.”

The therapists introduced the family to many techniques, such as using printed pictures as a way to communicate, modeling calm behavior during emotional outbursts, and modeling language they want to hear from August.

“Before we started, I was just so scared and overwhelmed, and I just felt so helpless. His providers have gifted us the knowledge and the techniques so that we can help him thrive … there’s just so many things that we’ve been taught by them.” – Cassidy Norcross

Supporters of Head Start are worried about the program’s future as it faces Trump administration calls for budgetary cuts ahead of the next school year.

The free, federally funded program for low-income families provides education for infants through preschoolers and had enjoyed bipartisan support for most of its 60-year history.

But worries are mounting for both Head Start staff and parents.

The Project 2025 blueprint calling for deep federal cuts proposed Head Start’s elimination, and while calls to cut its budget have diminished, advocates don’t feel the program is safe.

The administration also is looking at enrollment changes that could impact students lacking permanent legal status who are covered by Head Start.

“A lot of people have called this death by a thousand cuts, what we’ve seen in the past six months,” said Casey Peeks, senior director of Early Childhood Policy at the Center for American Progress.

Head Start seemed to escape the worst possible fate after a report earlier this year by USA Today that said the White House was ready to adopt the Project 2025 blueprint and eliminate it.

Despite the fears, President Trump’s final proposal didn’t include an increase or decrease in Head Start funding. It kept the program at the same funding level as last year.

Other early preschool programs, Preschool Development Grants and the Child Care Access Means Parents in Schools, were cut in the budget.

Still, the flat funding could hurt as more families seek to use Head Start in an era of rising costs.

“We do have concerns that flat funding … would equate as a cut to Head Start and Early Head Start programs, given cost of living, inflationary costs, as well as just higher costs of operating services, the needs to be able to provide a competitive wage in order to have staff,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director for the National Head Start Association.

A report last week released by the Government Accountability Office found a temporary funding freeze to Head Start at the beginning of the administration was illegal. The move put programs into chaos, and some even briefly shut down during the pause.

While funding was mostly spared, Head Start has watched the Trump administration target staff and enrollment changes.

In April, around 50 percent of staff at the Office of Head Start were cut and all staff at regional offices of Head Start were fired.

“We’re also seeing a lot of chaos and panic among Head Start staff. They don’t know if their jobs are as secure as they once were, which is really causing a problem, because it’s not just Head Start, but across the early childhood sector there is a workforce shortage and these types of concerns, lack of reliability, it really doesn’t help with the retention issues that are already a problem in normal circumstance,” said Peeks.

The latest curveball thrown at Head Start was a notice from the Department of Health and Human Services that said undocumented students can no longer participate in the programs.

The directive did not come with any clear instructions, sending programs into confusion as immigration status was never considered in Head Start’s history.

Twenty Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit against the directive while the federal government argued it “ensures that public resources are no longer used to incentivize illegal immigration.”

“There’s still a lot of confusion about what exactly it means, and we’re encouraging people not to take action until there’s more guidance or clarity on who exactly it affects and what the Head Start programs are required to do,” said Melissa Boteach, chief policy adviser for Zero to Three.

“But I think an important point is that it has a chilling effect, regardless, and that if you’re [an] immigrant family, regardless of what your status is in terms of legal permanent residence, or mixed status family or refugee or whatever it is, you’re legitimately scared of sending your child to an Early Head Start or Head Start program,” she added.

Some fear this is just the beginning of an effort to go after the program despite previous bipartisan support, including during the first Trump administration. In Trump’s first four years in office, Head Start received funding increases and greater support, especially at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are signs the program could come under more pressure from Republicans who say Head Start has not been accountable enough in how it has spent money.

Days after Trump came into office, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce highlighted a report by the Government Accountability Office regarding abuse and negligence in Head Start programs, including child safety concerns and lack of oversight over classroom materials.

“These programs continue to suck up millions in taxpayer funding without serious accountability or oversight. We have an obligation to protect these children and end this gross negligence immediately,” Committee Chair Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) said at the time.

Proponents of Head Start argue there is data to show it helps lower crime rates, reduces health care costs and increase tax revenue.

“This is proof of the effectiveness of Head Start, and the effectiveness and the impact of the investment that Head Start has been making,” said Sheridan.

“And so, we believe that there’s really no sound reason to interfere with that, and we believe that Congress and the administration should come together and really commit to building on the 60 year of bipartisan support that Head Start has had, and double down on that fundamental commitment that our country has made to children and to our collective future.”

Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.

LEGISLATIVE ACTION HERE. THAT’S RIGHT. YOU KNOW, THERE IS MAJOR CONCERN OVER THESE PROPOSED BUDGET CUTS TO BEHAVIORAL SERVICES ON EVERY LEVEL AND ACROSS THE STATE OF MARYLAND. AND ADVOCATES TELL ME HERE IN ANNAPOLIS TODAY THAT THIS COMES AT A TIME WHEN DEMAND FOR CARE IS AT AN ALL TIME HIGH. THIS IS A CRISIS. AND IT’S ONE THAT WE HAVE TO TAKE SERIOUSLY AND THAT WE HAVE TO FUND RESPONSIBLY. TUESDAY. STATEWIDE, BEHAVIORAL HEALTH ADVOCATES ARE SPEAKING UP. THEY’RE CONCERNED WITH MORE THAN 116 MILLION IN PROPOSED CUTS TO MENTAL HEALTH AND SUBSTANCE USE CARE. ORGANIZATIONS SAY THE CRITICAL PROGRAMS SERVE PEOPLE OF ALL AGES ACROSS THE STATE, AND UNLESS THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY ACTS SWIFTLY, PROGRAMS INCLUDING THE 988 HELPLINE AND BEHAVIORAL HEALTH CARE FOR CHILDREN WILL BE CUT DRASTICALLY FROM SCREENING AND EARLY INTERVENTION TO TREATMENT RECOVERY SUPPORTS AND CRISIS SERVICES. THEY’RE CALLING ON THE GOVERNOR AND LAWMAKERS TO RESTORE FUNDING FOR MARYLAND’S 988 HELPLINE AND CRISIS SERVICES. SCHOOL, MENTAL HEALTH AND CERTIFIED COMMUNITY BEHAVIORAL HEALTH CLINICS, AS WELL AS PROTECT THE 1% RATE INCREASE FOR BEHAVIORAL HEALTH SERVICES INCLUDED IN THE 2026 BUDGET. AND PROTECT AGAINST PROPOSED CUTS TO MEDICAID. I ENDED UP TURNING TO NINE, EIGHT, EIGHT AND THAT GENUINELY SAVED MY LIFE. WITHOUT THAT COUNSELOR BEING THERE TO TALK ME OUT OF THE CRISIS I WAS IN, AND ALSO FORWARD RESOURCES THAT WERE LOCAL TO ME TO HELP ME FIND SHELTER, TO FIND A THERAPIST, AND EVEN JUST GENERAL RESOURCES THAT I COULD USE AND UTILIZE. I PROBABLY WOULDN’T BE HERE. ADVOCATES TELL ME THEY’LL DO EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO TRY AND SAVE THESE FUNDS. WHILE THE LEGISLATORS HERE TODAY. THEY TELL ME THAT THEY’RE GOING TO HOPEFULLY KNOW MORE BY THIS MARCH 14TH DEADLINE. FOR NOW, L

Advertisement ‘This is a crisis’: Advocates, lawmakers decry proposed cuts to critical behavioral health programs Maryland faces almost $3B budget shortfall Editorial Standards ⓘ

Life-saving services in Maryland could be cut by more than $116 million, according to leading behavioral health advocates who joined together Tuesday to sound the alarm in Annapolis.”This is a crisis. It’s one that we have to take seriously and that we have to fund responsibly,” said Baltimore County Delegate Jessica Feldmark, D-District 12A.Organizations said the critical programs serve people of all ages across the state, and unless the General Assembly acts swiftly, programs — including Maryland’s 988 helpline and crisis services and behavioral health care for children — will be cut drastically. Other critical programs include screening and early intervention, treatment, recovery support and crisis services.The cuts come as the state faces a budget shortfall. People called on Gov. Wes Moore and lawmakers to restore funding for 988, school mental health and certified community behavioral health clinics. They want to see the state protect a 1% rate increase for behavioral health services included in the FY 2026 budget, as well as protect against proposed cuts to Medicaid.”I ended up turning to 988. That genuinely saved my life,” said Gus Hughes, an advocate for the National Alliance on Mental Illness Metro Baltimore. “Without that counselor there to talk me out of the crisis I was in and also forward resources that were local to help me find shelter, to help me find a therapist and even just general resources I could use and utilize, I probably wouldn’t be here.”Legislators supporting the call to restore and protect funds include Feldmark and Baltimore County Sen. Shelly Hettleman, D-District 11.Advocates include Behavioral Health System Baltimore, Sante Group, Mental Health Association of Maryland, The Horizon Foundation, Community Behavioral Health Association of Maryland, NAMI Metro Baltimore and Cornerstone Montgomery.Advocates said they’ll keep working to save the funds while legislators said they’ll know more by the March 14 deadline.

The U.S. Surgeon General is ringing the alarm bell on parents’ mental health. 48% of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, nearly double what childless adults reported.

Guests

Robyn Koslowitz, clinical psychologist who treats parents, families and kids. Author of “Post Traumatic Parenting.”

Tovah Klein, professor of psychology at Barnard College. Director of the Barnard Center for Child Development. Author of “Raising Resilience.”

Also Featured

Mia Smith-Bynum, professor and chair of family science in the school of public health at the University of Maryland.

Christopher Mehus, research associate professor in the department of family social science at the University of Minnesota.

Transcript

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Parents in America are stressed out.

(LISTENER MONTAGE)

LISTENER #1: I just think it’s so much harder to raise human beings than it was when I was younger. I have to worry that my kids might get shot at school today. I have to think about that every day. What if I’m the one that gets shot today while I’m at work? How are they gonna live?

LISTENER #2: And then, some of us are still exhausted from COVID. Oh yeah, and add on the new parenting experience of policing kids on screens.

LISTENER #3: I feel like amidst everything going on with my health that I haven’t made my kids feel as important or loved, and I do my best to do that, but I do feel like it’s just never enough.

LISTENER #4: The day-to-day stresses of dealing with the outbursts and the yelling and the screaming, it just wears me and my husband out.

LISTENER #5: Surprisingly, even though my son is 35, I’m still very stressed out because I worry about him every single day.

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LISTENER #6: I’d say a lot of us Millennials reach for our phones to destress, whether that’s social media, playing games, and alcohol being a temporary band aid through the stressors.

LISTENER #7: I’m a stressed-out parent. I would love help, and I’ve reached out, but I believe it is an epidemic and it’s a little reassuring to hear that other parents are struggling as well.

CHAKRABARTI: You just heard On Point listeners Bonnie, Christine, Vaughn, Samantha, Heather, Mary, Ginny, and Carrie, calling us from Georgia, Colorado, Indiana, Utah, and Washington State.

Now, according to the American Psychological Association, 48% of parents say, most days, their stress is, quote, completely overwhelming. That’s nearly double what childless adults reported. Now, this isn’t a huge surprise. In fact, back in late August, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a nationwide advisory on parental stress and well-being.

They were ringing the alarm bell on a mental health crisis that the Surgeon General says was not getting enough attention. So what’s going on here? Why are parents so stressed out? What’s different now about parenting than before? And more importantly, what can be done at both a policy and an individual level to relieve some of this stress?

Now, I just want to say, before, I already know, some of you are just rolling your eyes and you want to leap at the phone or the radio to turn off this episode, don’t do that just yet. Because I promise you, we are also going to, a little bit later, address head on the simple fact that parenting has never been easy.

We will talk about that, but first of all, let’s just talk about the stress that’s reported by people today. And so joining me now is Robyn Koslowitz. … She is a clinical psychologist who treats parents, families, and kids. She is also the author of the book, Post Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be.

Robyn, welcome to On Point.

ROBYN KOSLOWITZ: Thanks so much for having me, Meghna. I’m so excited.

CHAKRABARTI: And I apologize for mispronouncing your name. I’m just going to blame it on the parenting stress I experienced this morning. With my own kids, which was actually somewhat intense, but I’m going to put that aside.

KOSLOWITZ: We’ve all been there.

CHAKRABARTI: So first of all, tell me, you heard a whole variety of On Point listeners sharing the various responses they have to their stress or the sources of it. What were you thinking as you heard those voices?

KOSLOWITZ: The first thing that struck me was the mom who said I want to make my kids feel loved. And I so get that, because there’s so many voices on social media making it sound like it is the parent’s responsibility to curate their child’s emotional experience, but you can’t actually make another human feel anything.

You can set up the building blocks towards that, but that’s a very, very high bar when we’re also coping with a very different world than the world we were expecting to parent in.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so how did we get to that high bar, where we feel like we have so much control over other people, or our world, that we can magically engender feelings of joy and love in our children no matter what?

KOSLOWITZ: So I think social media has a lot to do with it, in the sense that never before have we been able to access so much content about parenting, about the emotional experience of children, about how attachment works. And, you know, parents are turning to social media as their, so to speak, village without the practical help.

You know, so if you’re looking on social media at someone’s beautifully curated, you know, playroom or her organic menu for her children. Or, you know, the wonderful joy experiences she has with them, you are, you know, not actually getting practical help from that person. That person’s not coming into your playroom and helping you organize yours.

So on the one hand, it’s nice to get ideas and inspiration. I certainly have learned a lot on social media. But then on the other hand, we’re trying. There’s a part of our brain that’s trying to compete with the best of everybody, as opposed to, I can perhaps serve those organic dinners and leave my playroom messy, or I can have a gorgeously organized playroom.

I mean, I can’t, because I’m not a very visual person, but theoretically, I could, but then I wouldn’t be playing with my kids because I’d be keeping that playroom neat. I can’t do all of the things all of the time, but social media makes it seem like we can.

And stay calm.

CHAKRABARTI: Exactly. So there’s a false sense of what is actually possible in reality created by these aspirational social media feeds. But also on the other hand, there’s the whole other part of sort of especially like, the mama sphere on social media, which is nothing but motherhood is a hellscape of depression, loneliness, and exhaustion, right?

I mean, there’s like a lot of negative feedback on social media as well.

KOSLOWITZ: Right. And well, how could it not be? If the bar is so high that we are supposed to be perfectly emotionally regulated, you know, and be kind of like the parents on Bluey, where we’re always socially, you know, so perfectly regulated. And, you know, able to co regulate with our children at all times, while also juggling, for many of us, a career, other children, competing economic priorities, maybe hybrid work since COVID, right?

And somehow, we’re supposed to do all of that. And be calm, we’re gonna burn out. So then you get that like mommy wine culture, you get that. And of course, I’m gendering it, but it’s parents. The idea of taking care of a child all day, every day, while being perfectly regulated and doing all the things.

It’s a bit much. So yeah, you’re gonna burn out.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So coming back to this, 48% of parents surveyed said that they feel overwhelming stress on a daily basis. I’m going to return to the sort of artificial expectations and the cultural piece of this. But I want to be a little surgical in probing for the real sources of stress also, right?

Because, you know, turning off of your phone is a pretty simple solution to the social media part. But it’s harder to come by solutions to be able to afford childcare. Right? To be able to find a way to get your kids into the best school district that you possibly can, but also, you know, commuting to wherever your job is.

Maybe you’re having to work two jobs. Maybe your partner’s also working a number of jobs. I mean, there’s some real economic, and I’ll focus on that, sources of stress, which are inescapable for millions of parents in this country. And that’s not such an easy fix.

KOSLOWITZ: Definitely. And those are the kinds of things where when you look at the Surgeon General’s advisory on parental stress, there’s a lot of defining the problem, but there’s not a lot of defining the solution.

I find the hardest thing is that parents really can’t access a lot of mental health support, a lot of stress support where we could possibly help. Like parenting classes and parenting like support groups can be so helpful and they should be economically feasible for people, but they aren’t. The economics of just managing kids’ lives and our own lives.

Things are just much more expensive, but we’re also not making the support like childcare, like mental health support any more accessible.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, you know, even though I’m definitely in the camp of parenting has always been hard. I also fully recognize the fact that ever since we had the American culture moved towards having many more women in the workforce and many more women in professional jobs, as well.

That coupled with the ever-increasing cost of childcare, like especially those first five years of a child’s life, are a sort, there are unique sources of stress, which it doesn’t seem as if, we, as a nation are taking seriously enough to like to help. I mean, I’m just comparing us to the fabled Northern European countries, where paying for childcare isn’t a stress that parents have.

KOSLOWITZ: Right. And that, you know, I remember myself being in graduate school and having small children and learning about attachment theory, right, and child development, and that stress of finding childcare, that was going to be up to the standard that I needed it to be, was really difficult for me.

And a lot of parents, especially, you know, when you’re dealing with people being in the workforce, and this is something that I say to employers all the time when I do corporate consulting, if you could figure out a way to support your young parents who are starting their career, the talent you want to nurture, and you could support them with those parenting struggles, whether offering parenting support, better child care. Or even offering, you know, parenting classes, help, because there’s so many things, when we learn how to parent, you know, smarter, not harder, then there are so many things that you can just learn and then your parenting gets easier.

You can systematize the mental load. There’s just a lot of practical information. If you could give that to the beginning of your workforce, you wouldn’t lose that talent.

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CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I mean, to that point, I don’t know why every corporation that can afford it, which I would argue is almost all of them, doesn’t have onsite childcare.

You know, in their facilities, because in terms of the long-term economic benefit to the company, just as you said, keeping talent, you know, in house, nurturing that talent, and by the way, freeing them mentally so they can do better work during the hours they’re on the job. It just seems like a no brainer to me, but maybe this is part of the issue.

There are a lot of no brainers that we as a society can do to help parents, but for whatever reason, we’re not. So, Robyn Koslowitz. Did I get it right that time, Robyn?

KOSLOWITZ: You got it right. We both have difficult to pronounce names.

CHAKRABARTI: I am getting past my stress room this morning. Robyn, hang on for just a little bit.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: 48% of parents recently surveyed said that they are overwhelmed by stress almost every day. And we’re talking about why? What’s different now than it was, say, a generation or two ago?

Or what’s the same? But more importantly, let’s take parents at their word. If it’s overwhelming, what can we, as a society, do to help, if anything? So I’m joined today by Robyn Koslowitz. She’s a clinical psychologist who treats parents, families, and kids, and also author of Post Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be.

Now, that 48% number means that the stress that parents are feeling cuts across America in any way you can imagine, geographically, economically, by race, etc. So with that in mind, we also spoke with Mia Smith-Bynum. She’s a professor and chair of family science in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland.

And she’s a clinical psychologist who directs the Black Families Research Group. And Professor Smith-Bynum says all parents in America are struggling right now, but Black parents even more so. For example, she says Black parents have to deal with the fact that the suicide rate among Black youth ages 10 to 19 is rising.

According to federal data, in 2022, the suicide rate among Black youth surpassed their white peers for the first time ever and is increasing faster than any other racial and ethnic group.

MIA SMITH-BYNUM: It’s a major public health concern because there is a long bit of lore that was largely true in the Black community that Black folks don’t commit suicide.

So when you think about the sort of the penetration of social media, it’s easier for people to be bullied and so on and so forth. Those financial stressors that affect all parents because of the racial wage gap, and so on and so forth, and the harmful effects of economic stress on everyone, it’s compounded for Black people.

CHAKRABARTI: According to 2022 data from the Economic Policy Institute, the median income for Black workers is 21% less than the median income for white workers. Professor Smith-Bynum says Black parents also have to deal with the racial content their kids are exposed to online.

SMITH-BYNUM: This access to social media and the likelihood of seeing racism online, either directed at them personally or seeing videos of things.

I think sort of the worst, most recent example of that is the murder of George Floyd. I mean, nothing like that would even have been possible in, like, 1975 or 1980, or it would have been filtered to such a point is you’re only really talking about sort of the big three networks. And newspapers, which kids may or may not be consuming. And that kind of stuff, once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

CHAKRABARTI: And then there are even more real-world stressors from interactions with law enforcement, to trying to give their kids better educations.

SMITH-BYNUM: Sometimes, Black parents will place their kids in private schools or well resourced, predominantly white public schools, because the track record for those schools is so great.

And they want their kids, like all American parents, to have the best shot possible. What I’ve found is for Black parents, that cost can be too high. That for the kids, they are tender, they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Black children have to develop a positive Black identity. And this is very different from like, on the flip, which would be sort of like a white supremacy piece. Is that the large message that American society sends Black people is that you are subhuman and that you’re worthless.

And so a positive Black identity is necessary psychological armor for those kids. You have to teach those kids that it’s wonderful to be Black. You have to teach them the history. And then the flip side is if these spaces are too toxic, especially for kids, you got to get your kids out of those spaces.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Mia Smith-Bynum, Professor and Chair of the Family Science Department in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland. Robyn, I just wanted to give you a quick chance to respond to that. Because I mean, I’m not going to want to put you in the position of advising Black parents, but this this idea that, again, there are actually real factors.

Today that parents have to cope with, from a variety of backgrounds, that perhaps weren’t the same as they were 50 years ago.

KOSLOWITZ: I think it’s extremely accurate that we are so much more aware, the kind of casual cruelty that children experience on social media, that parents experience on social media. You know, it’s correct.

In the ’70s and ’80s, you just didn’t have that volume where any child could post something on TikTok and get a million immediate comments about every single aspect of their appearance, of their cultural heritage, of their race, of their ethnicity.

I mean, that kind of, that level of toxicity that we have to help our children navigate is in some ways much higher than any other generation. I would say it happened in other ways, perhaps in real world encounters, but you didn’t have that volume that children are dealing with today.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And you know, when Professor Smith-Bynum says trying to create spaces for Black children in particular, where they can develop a positive Black identity. But if the space that they’re in, whether it’s, you know, online or not, is too toxic, trying to get those kids out of those spaces, I completely understand that impulse.

But the question is, is there then a positive place for those kids to go, whether online or in the community? Do you think we have enough of those alternative places for parents to go and say, Hey, you know, spend some time here and you’re going to get a totally different message about what being alive in the 21st century is?

I think we don’t have enough of that. I will tell you that the formative experience for my book was, I was, when I was on my internship, which was about 20 years ago, I was giving a court mandated parenting class for parents. It was actually pretty progressive for the time, where if your child had any brush with the law, you would come and get a parenting class as sort of a diversion program.

And one mom raised her hand and said, you know, I don’t know what a normal childhood is. I didn’t have one. I was on a boat, you know, from another country, like, you know, eating like vegetables, trying to get to this country. And then I worked at a restaurant and didn’t go to school. And I’m supposed to raise kids now with a normal childhood.

What is a normal childhood? And I kind of scrapped the curriculum. And I asked everybody in the class, because I had that exact same question. I had a traumatic childhood. And every single person in that room raised their hand, which was interesting, because it was a court mandated class. We had people from pretty much every socioeconomic group, every race and culture possible, in a large urban setting.

We just had people from all over and everyone had this question that, you know, my childhood was traumatic, and it’s not a childhood I would want my kids to have. It may have given me some advantages, but it was traumatic in some ways. And now I don’t know how to parent, because I don’t know what normal is.

So being able to give parents that sense, because when you lack that sense of discernment, right, our attachment system was supposed to be, let me sort of do what my parents did. So if like, what my parents did was great. And I do it too, then fabulous. But what if I don’t want to do what my parents did? Or, you know, like in my case, my father was very sick my whole life.

What if I want to raise children with two healthy parents? How do you do that? Like, what’s a house where you’re not having medical emergencies all the time, like? That is why I wrote my book, because I felt like so many of us had traumas in childhood, or in adulthood, like COVID, where we’re left depleted, we don’t have the psychological resources to do all the gentle parenting stuff in the way it’s presented to us, so now what?

Right? And we need that space.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And also, even in the best of circumstances, sometimes endless gentle parenting only, it just repeats a different kind of cycle. But Robyn, hang on for just a second here, because you’ve led us to a very, very interesting point, and I want to bring Tovah Klein into the conversation now.

She’s a professor of psychology at Barnard College and a director of, excuse me, the director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development, also author of Raising Resilience: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty. Professor Klein, welcome to On Point.

TOVAH KLEIN: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so I think Robyn has really got us to a place where we can learn a lot. And that is, well, when we’re thinking about not just the causes of stress, but the stress that comes when thinking that we’re somehow less than what we believe to be an ideal, normal family or parenting life. It calls into question, what is normal?

Like, what is a normal family life? What is normal parenting? Maybe perhaps the problem is right there, that we think there’s any such thing as one normal path to parenting.

KLEIN: Yeah, it’s such a big misnomer, because what children need is love and support, what we call a secure attachment. But there are so many ways to give that, to show that, to be available to a child.

But we live in a society that Robyn and you have already discussed, that has this standard or what we think is the norm, which is essentially perfection, which is impossible. And what we don’t do is think about, what do I want for my child, or myself or what supports would help me? And we don’t do that because there’s so much out there that says there’s one way to be the perfect parent.

And that really undermines every parent out there, whether it’s social media, whether it’s messages from your family, whether it’s messages from society or the community, the message is, do this alone. We don’t have a lot of policies that support families and do it well. And I think the other misnomer really is that being a parent is going to somehow be a cakewalk.

It’s good, it’s bad, it’s rotten sometimes, it’s joyous and wonderful sometimes, it’s all of the above. And when we shift to that narrative, we can be less hard on ourselves.

CHAKRABARTI: You know, this idea that parenting is going to be a cakewalk, it reminded me of one of our listeners we heard at the top of the show, who says, and I’ve heard this frequently, I’ve heard this from a lot of people, who said, I think it’s just much harder to raise human beings now than it was when I was younger.

Well, first of all, I mean, I’m not sure that, like, this person’s parents were asked that question, whether it was stressful or not, but how did so many people come to that conclusion that it’s just harder now than it was when I was little?

KLEIN: Yeah, I’m not sure that there’s any evidence that it’s harder, right? I mean, go back and ask your parent, if you have a parent to ask. You know, we know that in the literature on women and motherhood in particular, because fathers weren’t really focused on till more recently. The good news is that we focus on both parents, but it’s always been a struggle for women.

You know, when women really couldn’t be so much in the workforce unless they had to be. Working class women have always been in the workforce, but women have more career options now. But when women felt very much stuck at home, it wasn’t their choice to be home. They were miserable. There’s lots of accounts of those generations.

And raising a human being is hard work. There’s no question about it. Or caregiving. You know, you could just think of caring for others. So that could be a sick person, an elder parent. Being a parent is hard, but I don’t know that that conversation is so helpful, because we know that being a parent is hard.

And now we have an awareness of it. So I feel like that shift, if we can say, okay, it’s always been hard, but that doesn’t negate that it’s hard. And finally, we’re elevating it to say, this is a hard task. It’s life work. We love our children, and we can talk about that it’s good and it’s hard. And then we’re not alone in it.

And then hopefully the communities can become more central to helping parents, but also policies. You know, so whether that’s in your school district or your neighbors, you know, or our government, it takes, you know, there’s that saying, it takes a village to raise a child. It truly does. It takes a society to raise a child.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Robyn, let me bring you back in here. Because another thing that we frequently hear is that the modern world, which the argument, it is different than a couple of generations ago. It contains some unique uncertainties. There’s income gaps.

First of all, we covered that and in fact, to put some numbers on it, there was a 2022 survey that found that one in four … U.S. parents reported that there had been times in the past year that they did not actually have enough money for basic needs like food, rent, or health care, or childcare.

And two thirds of parents overall are very consumed by financial worries, so keep, like, that is real. But there’s also other stresses that people point to, you heard them in in our opening little montage there, gun violence, climate change, you know, social disruption.

Wars worldwide, not being able to afford college. I mean, in terms of not their uniqueness, but the sum total of the stresses these uncertainties have on parents, is it different now than before, Robyn?

KOSLOWITZ: It has a unique flavor now. I think that when I read the Surgeon General’s, you know, statement, I thought like, wow, you don’t need to have medical degrees from Yale and Harvard to say that parenting is stressful, and it always has been stressful.

We know this. And I think what Professor Klein is saying is very true. That it’s always been stressful, but the unique flavor right now, we know about it more.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. So, but then how would you, when you’re working with families, whether you’re working with parents and they just say, there’s so much I can’t control.

I’m so worried about the future with climate change. I’m so, you know, I’m genuinely worried about gun violence in schools. It’s this inability to cope with uncertainty, which I think is, it’s shot through American life. I mean, everyone that we’ve talked to over years in this show, and the pandemic did not help with that.

Right. So, how do you advise them to cope with uncertainty?

KOSLOWITZ: I mean, the idea is we can only control the controllable, right? We say this in anxiety therapy all the time. The imperative of parenting is to keep the little humans alive. And there are so many stressors about, maybe my little humans won’t stay alive, whether it’s economically or physically, that it is a lot to deal with.

But I can control the controllable. Right. Recently, one of my children’s schools, there was a debate about, you know, teaching them the ALICE protocol for school shooters and some parents felt it would scare them. And the idea that, well, but let’s set them up for success in the unimaginable thought, that perhaps something would happen.

I want them to be, rather than scared, I want them to be prepared. So setting them up for success, and then acknowledging that I can’t actually control this child’s fate once, you know, life takes over. But I can control the controllable and that’s all I can do.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Klein, do you think that these high levels of stress that parents are feeling, whether it’s for, you know, concrete financial reasons or this sort of, I can’t control the world, or I can’t achieve perfection sources of stress, is that contributing to the huge spike in child mental health struggles that we’ve been seeing over the past many years?

KLEIN: Yeah, absolutely. Because we know that parents are the buffer between stress and child wellbeing. So that, again, that doesn’t have to be an overly heavy burden, but what we know is that the parental role is protection, and that protective factor says, I’m going to help my child navigate a world, no matter how complex.

And as Robyn was saying, control what I can control.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so Professor Klein and Robyn, I have now reached the point where I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and let’s have some real talk, right, between the three of us. Because first of all, I feel great deals of, a humongous amount of compassion for every person who is a parent in this country. No matter how you came about that parenting, right?

I don’t want to presume it’s just biological children, right? So just anyone who is a parent figure, I have a great deal of compassion and gratitude for you. And I hope eventually that same compassion and gratitude is shared with me at the same time. All week long, I’ve been having to hold my tongue, because I was just like, it’s always been hard!

It’s always been hard! Stop moaning! I mean, it doesn’t surprise me at all that the generation, that not that long ago was tweeting about how adulting is hard, is now complaining that parenting is hard. I mean, is there something about how, sorry, millennials. But how they were raised, that somehow it has led them to be not fully prepared for the new normal challenges of every life stage.

Professor Klein, I’m gonna hand that hot potato to you.

KLEIN: Thank you. I’m happy you did. Yeah, I mean, absolutely every parent deserves compassion. All right? I’ve worked with a lot of parents over 30 years. And what’s so hard, whether it’s with this generation or this time in America, is that holding two concepts is difficult.

Being a parent is wonderful, and being a parent is difficult. Those two have to go together.

CHAKRABARTI: Isn’t that life, though? I mean, why is it hard?

KLEIN: Absolutely, that’s life. Because we’ve given a message that if it’s not perfect and beautiful and easy and joyful all the time, then it’s not good and it’s not good enough.

And what we have to get back to is being a parent has to be good enough, and that enough is the important word, not perfect. When we disconnect with our children, when we yell at them because we are stressed, it’s our job to go back and say, Hey, I’m having a hard day. Sorry. I handled it that way. I still love you.

Let’s redo that. It doesn’t have to be perfection. And in fact, it’s impossible, but also, we have to accept our own faults. We are not perfect, nor should we be, and stress is a part of life. But we’ve made this narrative that if you don’t somehow interact every moment, in some perfect way, we’re ruining our children. And nothing.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Children learn about life through their relationship with their parents or their guardians or their main people. And that means they learn how to deal with the good and they learn how to deal with the not so good. And the not so good is when we don’t handle things well, or when they’re stressed and we try to help them with it, but we don’t always get it right.

We don’t always understand.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me go to a word that’s in the title of your book. Resilience.

KLEIN: Mm hmm.

CHAKRABARTI: And you’re free to completely reject the theory that I’m offering here, but I do wonder with Millennials, for example, we had a generation that was one of the first to be clearly identified as one, as many kids who experienced helicopter parenting, right?

So, A, they had the model of like constant parental attention, right? So that’s their norm, which was probably causing their own parents a great deal of stress, but B, did it somehow make that generation of folks on average less resilient to what you’re just identifying as the normal parts of all different aspects of adult life, including its both joyful and really hard parts of parenting.

KLEIN: Yeah, I mean, like —

CHAKRABARTI: You can tell me I’m wrong!

KLEIN: I’m gonna push back on this in this way. There’s such a variety in any generation. Like I know that we love these terms, millennials, but within any group of parents I see of any age, I see such a variation. But I think what we’ve really done to hurt the people who are the children, because I had them in my program, I’ve had those children then through their teen years and now they’re parents.

And I see them, they become my college students at Barnard and Columbia and then they become parents. I get to see these generations go. What we forget is that social media also came into play, right? So we love to blame parents and then we’re blaming mothers.

Really. Let’s think about it. We’re not blaming dads, we’re blaming mothers. And the message to a certain generation was being there means being there 24/7. But also remember a huge number of women were already in the workforce. So nobody was there for their kids all the time, even though we call it helicopter parenting.

And so I don’t want to pull out these extremes and say that’s what everybody got. But we have messaged very clearly. There’s only one way to parent. And if you had a parent at home, usually a mother, sometimes a father, and they were with you most of the time, and they made your lunch, and they made your snack and they talk to your teachers when any little thing went wrong. Then yes, we have a generation of people who feel like everything needs to be perfect for me.

And when it’s not, I’m going to complain or I’m going to panic. And it’s that panic that is not good for the person. It is not good for children. So yes, I think we have hurt people in general, but I would say most people did not have helicopter parents. Most people had parents who were stressed, maybe working two jobs, as you mentioned before, maybe having to move a lot, because of financial pressures.

And they weren’t being helicoptered, but they were certainly being messaged that there’s only one right way to raise a child. And that’s not fair. That’s not fair.

CHAKRABARTI: Robyn, you’ve been gracefully silent as this grizzled, cynical Gen Xer is beating up on millennial parents. So, but I do want to note that I do believe there’s evidence or data, Robyn, that suggests that working mothers now spend as much time with their children as stay at home moms did in the 1970s.

So there is a difference in the intensity and time commitment of direct interaction with children now, versus in previous generations, Robyn.

KOSLOWITZ: Absolutely. Parents are very mindful of the need to spend time with their kids, whereas you could have had a stay-at-home mom, perhaps in the eighties, who was putting her kids in front of screen time when screen time wasn’t even a debate. And, you know, spending the afternoon on the phone with her friends.

And now, those working parents are mindfully sitting down and playing Montessori toys with their kids because we know more. But I just want to say, you know, adulting is hard. And adulting is particularly hard if you never childed, like the parents I work with. But adulting, but parenting is adulting on steroids.

But I want to push back on the notion that hard is bad. It is hard. Every single thing. Think of every training montage in every movie. It’s always about you push through the hard to achieve something worthwhile. And I think it’s a cliche because it’s true. Yeah, it’s supposed to be hard. If we had the message that somehow it’s supposed to be easy and joyful, while also worthwhile, that’s kind of somebody selling you something.

It’s hard and worthwhile at the same time.

CHAKRABARTI: Right. So that is, I’m so glad both of you brought up these points. Because that gets us back to, again, the dichotomy between like the real-world stressors, right? We talked about them earlier, financial, racism, things like that, but also then the internal stressors we create for ourselves as parents, right?

I’m thinking about the listener at the top of the show who said all I want to do is have my children feel loved, but I feel like whatever I do, it’s just never enough. That is a stress that a parent is putting on herself there, right? So, Robyn and Professor Klein, and Robyn, I’ll start with you.

It sounds like we’ll talk about societal level improvements that can be made, but how do we adjust expectations for ourselves? Because I feel for this mom, I’m like, well, what would enough look like if everything you do right now you think is not enough for your child? How do we adjust our expectations, Robyn?

KOSLOWITZ: So I think we adjust our expectations, it’s such a good question, right? By simply saying that we don’t have to curate their emotional state at all time. We don’t have to optimize their childhood. As Professor Klein said, right, good enough really is good enough. The same person, D. W. Winnicott, who spoke about good enough parenting, also spoke about this idea that even the beneficial is toxic in the excess.

That even if you are that perfect parent, and that was way back in the 50s, right, way before any of these pressures now, right, even that don’t try so hard to be perfect because it actually leads to burnout and it actually leads to disconnect. Good enough really is good enough.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Klein your thoughts on that. How do we adjust our expectations? Yeah, go ahead.

KLEIN: Yeah, absolutely Well, I would add to that, the piece on good enough. Is that children actually learn how to deal with life when they face negative. So it doesn’t have to be toxic negative, but, you know, the clothes they wanted to wear today are in the laundry, upsets them.

Something goes awry at school, upsets them. And that when we help children handle negative things, little, medium, we prepare them for life. We prepare them to face adversity. It’s why I wrote the book I did, Raising Resilience. It really started with uncertainty. How do we help prepare children for the uncertainties of every day, whether their friend wouldn’t play or there’s a crisis.

And so I think if parents know that, children know how to be happy, right? Give them a lollipop. They’re going to be happy. But it’s really our role is to be there when things go awry. The whole goal of working with parents and writing this new book was to say, look, I’m going to help you exhale because the message is it’s going to be hard all the time.

And, as Robyn said, hard is not bad. But it doesn’t, not only does it not have to be good all the time, it can’t be. And because of that, children learn how to handle life. And so the more we can say that to ourselves, I hope the more parents can exhale and say, Hey, I’m doing good enough. Did I have a shared joy moment today?

Maybe it was, you know, when my child came home from school and told me something and I smiled with them, you know, maybe we laugh together. It’s not going to be all the time.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, so the internal changes that we can make, I have to say they’re hard though, right? Because you want to do the best that you can for your children.

You want to be as perfect as possible. But the other thing that’s different now. And I do believe this is true, because we just have a lot of evidence for it. Is that the resources perhaps that 50 years ago or a century ago that were in place, we’ve said the cliche, it takes a village, right?

Community resources just aren’t there the way they once were, in terms of like, do people even know all their neighbors, or communities of faith. So there must be other ways to try and generate sources of support and we just have a quick example here.

Christopher Mehus is a research associate professor at the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. And he’s got this NIH funded study that are looking, that’s looking to increase access to care and support for struggling parents. And when parents come to him or the program, they’re referred to therapists who’ve specially been trained on a six session child behavior support system.

CHRISTOPHER MEHUS: So the therapist meets directly with the parent, and the program’s provided online so that the parent doesn’t need childcare. And it’s six sessions, it’s billed to insurance like therapy sessions would be. And the goal is to both increase access by linking it to primary care. Which all parents interact with when they have young children, and to increase accessibility by providing it online and providing it through existing healthcare systems.

CHAKRABARTI: So two really important factors there. And right now, though, only parents in Minnesota can access this care, but Mehus hopes that will change.

MEHUS: If we can show that this is possible, even within existing healthcare systems with all of the messiness and limitations that exist, including funding and insurance reimbursement.

If we can show that this is possible and document what the barriers are, and what challenges need to be overcome and show that it’s effective and that it’s cost effective, then hopefully we can continue it going in Minnesota and give an example folks in other states could follow.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s Christopher Mehus at the University of Minnesota.

We’ve only got about two minutes left and I loved this example of trying to find ways within existing systems, like primary care, like Professor Mehus said. To provide additional support for parents, but Professor Klein and I want to hear from Robyn as well, give you both like 30 seconds or so. As a final thought, what would you ideally have us improve both personally and societally to reduce the amount of stress that people are feeling?

KLEIN: Yeah, I would say schools are central. Because every child goes to school every day, and so having school-based supports and community and also parental leave policies at the government level are key. Because we need time to raise our children, and then childcare. So childcare schools are the center of a family’s community, and we really need to increase support in both those domains.

CHAKRABARTI: Agreed. And Robyn, your thoughts on those same questions? Agreed.

KOSLOWITZ: So I would say on, I agree with what Professor Klein’s saying, but I would say on a federal level, if parenting could be a mandated covered condition, you know, you want to access psychotherapy, you’re a parent, you get a certain amount of sessions covered, whether or not there’s quote-unquote medical necessity, I think would be super helpful.

I also believe that access to parenting education, whether through the primary care system, or whether through schools, is critical. Not so much the behavioral support, although that’s helpful too, but for parents who are not struggling with behavior, but really need education and support, and the support of a group of other parents who get it facilitated by a professional who could help.

I think that would really fill a gap.

CHAKRABARTI: And thinking back to our listeners at the top of the show, there was one who said that a lot of people reach for their phones to de stress. I’m going to suggest not do that. It may be hard. But maybe don’t reach for the phone and instead take a walk, or make yourself a cup of coffee, whatever, but the phone, as we’ve been talking about, is also a part of this picture in terms of causing parental stress.