Why Your Stress Matters

Our local JCC has a very popular camp, and members get the first crack at signing up a week or two before the general public. This year, they released spots at 2 pm on a Sunday in January—and they were already waitlisting people by 2:02 pm. One mom commented on a Facebook page that this camp signup frenzy was “the most stressful 10 minutes of the year.” I’ve been writing a lot about summer camp this month, and I think we too often brush aside the very real stress it poses alongside many other child care challenges.

But what if stress wasn’t seen as a personal problem and, instead, seen as the result of social policy failures? What if, as a society, we worked to remove the stressors of motherhood rather than give glib advice to “treat” the symptoms?

These provocative questions were sparked by the work of Molly Dickens, PhD, a stress physiologist who’s attempting to map the sources of maternal stress and do a major reframing of how we address it. 

This quote from a recent New York Times Op-Ed she co-wrote called “What the Childcare Crisis Does to Parents” stopped me dead in my tracks:  

Unpredictability itself is a source of stress. Even when parents manage to secure care for their children, it can be unreliable, and they never know when it might go away. Child care precarity — a state of insecure and unreliable child care — has been linked to negative mental health outcomes for mothers for at least six years afterward.

I feel so validated by this research, and I bet some of you do, too. A child care crisis was a tipping point for a mental health spiral I had in 2021, and I am very much here for how Molly is interested in reframing stress as a social and community problem rather than a personal one.

I asked to talk to her more about her work. Here’s an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

In the map above, Dickens is connecting the dots between the many stressors that have a particularly harrowing effect on mothers.

Molly Dickens: The Maternal Stress Project is a thought experiment [and] initiative that is really aiming to essentially map the stressors related to modern American motherhood. It’s a visual map, but we want to go beyond that. And the mapping process is one just getting something down and letting it evolve. The next stage of it is: how do we then layer on the evidence that these [situations] are indeed stressors? The other part of that is to have the conversations around solutions.

Katherine Goldstein: It sounds like a lot of it is also about changing the narrative of how we see these issues as separate or social issues, and you're trying to showcase that they're all connected and have underlying health implications. That feels different to me.

Molly Dickens:  Where it started was with this moment when Build Back Better was being proposed, there was a lot of the debates around child care and paid leave, as an economic argument, an equity argument, and a justice argument. The conservative rebuttal to that is, “Why are mothers working in the first place?” So [I thought], how do we just neutralize this and make it so that it's not a “working mom” problem? We saw this during COVID. When you take away child care, it doesn’t matter if someone’s working or not working. It's still really freaking stressful to lose it, and it still affects health. So how do we just neutralize this and start from the point that this is an “everyone” issue?

I love what you wrote in one of your first articles about how the Maternal Stress Project aims to distribute that responsibility at all levels of relationships, communities, and society. Tell me more about this goal specifically. 

Molly Dickens: I can't stand how stress is used in everyday language. I think it is overused and not helpful at all because we use it to describe how we are feeling. And then the solutions that we are fed back are exactly what you might expect: Nap, meditate, exercise more. And you're like, “I just need child care. I just need better mental load distribution. I just need to not be playing secretary [at home] when I'm an executive in my workplace.” 

I'm working on this project with Lucy Hutner, who's a psychiatrist, and we have been talking a lot about the term stress it's used in clinical practice and how to make it more effective. You have to see it on that generalized label, you have to change the language around how we see stress. When the solutions are on a personal level, it again almost adds stress, right?

It's not considering what stress is in a physiological way, like how our body is taking in information from the outside world, feeding it through our brain, processing it physically, and causing those physical changes that then impact our health down the line. That is a biological, psychological, and physiological response. When you consider it at that response level, the solutions that exist are ones that essentially take it away from the beginning.

So [our goal should be] that you are not being fed that external stressor at all. The real way to deal with stress is addressing the underlying situations—so you don't lose your child care spot or you don’t only have three weeks of paid leave. If you had all of these things removed from that external side, your body would not even be processing those stressors. You wouldn't be reacting to those stressors. You're not having the health impacts of your body reacting to those stressors. There are so many other solutions that exist before it gets to that point. That is how I want to shift the language and that responsibility. When you recognize it, it’s almost like that precursor level. Then we can distribute that responsibility more evenly.

It sounds like the difference between preventative medicine at the sign of symptoms vs. an ER visit when you have a raging infection. 

Molly Dickens:  One hundred percent. That's exactly what it is. This is absolutely preventive medicine. But It's hard to work on that preventive side because it's much easier to say, “You are sick. Here is the diagnosis. Here is the treatment.” That's why the language around stress tends to be about diagnosing and treating. But stress is not an illness. 

What would be the best outcome of the maternal stress project? 

Molly Dickens: That narrative reframe that we were discussing; I see an opportunity to just have a reframe and let people know that stress is a societal problem, not a personal one. There are a lot of people working on aspects of this, and being able to pull it all together and just speak the same language would be a really good outcome.

If you enjoyed this conversation, stay up to date on the latest from the Maternal Stress Project by checking out Molly’s Substack.