In a recent article for PureWow, lifestyle writer Rachel Bowie points out a troubling trend that she finds hard to ignore among her millennial friends and peers:
“They both work. They have kids. Every day is a relay race of school pickups, doctors’ appointments, dinner prep and the endless mental load of keeping a family running. By the time bedtime rolls around, the thought of curling up together for even one episode of The Bear feels impossible. They’re both so burnt, they’d rather retreat to their phones….They’re not falling out of love, but they’re running out of energy.”
“Research suggests this isn’t just anecdotal,” Bowie continues, referencing two recent studies, one in Healthcare and one in the Journal of Marriage and Family, which support her argument that parental burnout and exhaustion are prevalent – and that they can lead to marital dissatisfaction and breakdown.
What is burnout?
Burnout is a type of exhaustion caused by feeling constantly overwhelmed and swamped. It’s an overload of physical, emotional, and mental fatigue, often associated with job and career – but it can show up in other areas of life, ultimately impacting your health and wellbeing.
The “Parenting” trap
“Modern parenting feels like too much,” Psychotherapist and professor Ilene Strauss Cohen, Ph.D, wrote for Psychology Today in March. She says she hears this from her clients every week, and feels it within her own marriage and family life. “We are overstimulated, burned out, and constantly worried we are failing our kids.”
Cohen explains that the expectations placed on parents have changed dramatically in recent decades. “A few decades ago, providing food, shelter, and safety was the main goal of raising kids. Now, the baseline has shifted.”
Cohen points to everything from the intense level of emotional support we show our kids, to juggling their sports and activity schedules, to monitoring their screen time and social media use, and helping them get good grades – all while also doing grown-up things like managing our careers, trying to stay fit and healthy…and, oh, yes, be married.
“Just writing about it is exhausting,” says Cohen.
“Nowadays, when you enter a partnership, you have two people who are performing in their careers, super motivated, ambitious. Then, you enter the child-rearing years where there’s just so much more labor than in the past,” Melissa Paul, a Brooklyn-based relationship and couples therapist, told Bowie.
Developmental Psychologist and author Alison Gopnik argues that even the term “parenting” – the very idea that it’s a verb – is a modern construct, having only developed in the late 20th century, as a result of cultural shifts. Until then, Gopnik says, human beings tended to live in large, extended, multigenerational family units where everyone contributed to child rearing. Big siblings and older cousins helped care for the littler ones, learning organically how to raise children.
As families have gotten smaller and more mobile, Gopnik says, people are less likely to live around relatives. In addition, many parents today start families later, having focused on schooling and career first. They may have no meaningful practice caring for children when they become parents – but they’re go-getters with lots of education and work experience. “Parenting,” then, may be viewed like a job, and tied to ideas of success – with a right way to do it, a roadmap, things to accomplish. It becomes task-oriented and goal-directed, a kind of project management.
The key takeaway, from Gopnik’s perspective, is that, ultimately, this intensive parenting (chiefly aimed at shaping a child into a certain kind of adult) is as unproductive for children as it is exhausting and anxiety-producing for parents.
Modern parenting is draining for couples – especially moms
According to “Is The Success Trap Crushing Millennial And Gen Z Moms?” a February 2026 article in Forbes, “Recent studies confirm that burnout is widespread among parents. In a clinical paper surveying over 1,200 working parents worldwide, 65% reported burnout, with mental health challenges significantly associated with parental stress.”
“What makes this even more striking,” says Forbes, “is the generational context. Millennials and Gen Z were raised with a strong drive for achievement and purpose. Yet, far from being rewarded with stability and work-life balance, many enter adulthood confronting unstable careers, high living costs, intense scrutiny from social media, and limited family support infrastructure, a perfect storm.”
Research also shows that the burnout issue falls especially hard on women.
Forbes continues, “Millennial and Gen Z moms are living in a paradox: they are more educated, career-driven, and ambitious than previous generations. Yet ironically, research shows that they’re burning out at historically high rates….On one hand, women strive for careers, leadership roles, and financial independence. However, they are also expected by partners, families, and society to manage the emotional and logistical demands of childcare with little institutional support.”
In her research report, “‘Utterly heart-breaking and devastating’: Couple relationships and intensive parenting culture in a time of ‘cold intimacies’” Dr. Charlotte Faircloth, Department of Social Science, University College London, focuses on how “new parents face competing narratives around two competing ideals: those around relationships and those around parenting,” and examines “the difficulty of reconciling tensions between partnering and parenting.”
Her study highlights certain gender disparities in parenting – as well as the ways those disparities within the larger culture of intensive parenting – can erode marriage relationships.
Faircloth’s premise echoes Gopnik’s: “The magnitude of the increase in expectations around raising children, particularly in the US and the UK and particularly since the mid-1970s – the fact that we even use the term ‘parenting’ as a verb at all – is striking” – not only in the pressures that it puts on parents, but that it fuels a massive industry of classes, guides, experts. AND that the parenting marketing is disproportionately aimed at women.
Faircloth, whose study followed 15 couples, found that even – or especially – for couples whose ideal is to be equal partners in parenting (rejecting gendered expectations), the realities of childrearing were challenging. “For those couples who were most explicitly committed to an ‘equitable’ division of labor…navigating this gap was harder than for those who had anticipated a more traditional gendered set up.” (It’s worth noting that Faircloth’s study was broader, and included LGBTQ couples, but this paper analyzed a sample of 15 heterosexual couples).
Faircloth says that spouses who were able to live ‘almost identical lives’(both having careers, etc.) before children may find it disruptive to their intimacy as a couple when certain, almost inescapable gender-role differences arise after a child is born. In addition, Faircloth says, raising a child that needs love and attention 24/7 can create a “zero-sum” competition for intimacy within the marriage.
But, she emphasizes, “The precarity of the relationships highlighted here is not necessarily to do with the idea of finding a better romantic partner…but rather about not being able to reconcile the tension of balancing ideal partnering with ideal parenting.”
This echoes what Paul told Bowie: “Whenever I have a minute of relaxation—you know, when our kids are asleep, and I’ve had time to decompress, and my husband and I are laughing about something stupid, I’m like: ‘Oh right, I really do like you.’
Bowie says, “Sometimes the problem isn’t that love has disappeared. It’s that we can’t keep our eyes open long enough to see it.”
Coming soon in Part 2 of Running on Empty: Signs that you’re facing parental burnout… and tips for helping love and marriage survive it
The veteran attorneys at SFLG have been helping families navigate sensitive family law issues for over 40 years.
By Debra Schoenberg
