Parents stressed out? Blame the parents!

From the German newsroom of bunk headlines, we bring you -- drum roll -- come on, a bit more -- better -- today's national news headline is:

Study: Parents create their own stress

Spoiler alert! The study isn't much of a study, it looks and feels like a survey. Like an employee satisfaction survey, only for parents.

One good news is that the study was actually performed on German families. Don't think for one second that this is the rule for studies touted as relevant to parenting in Germany. More often than  not, you get a rehashed American study. Which always contains issues of different nature or weight.

The bad news: the academics who performed the study do blame parents for being too stressed about raising children.

Of course, if you have been around for a decade or two, you have seen parental freakouts, not just around the big holidays but in everyday situations. But does it justify laying the blame on parental stress squarely on the parents?

Hell no.

If we look at the data points in the article, we see all the usual things: parents would love to be able to relax a bit more, they would love more financial support from the government.

One figure, though is important in the context of the policy debates in Germany about work life balance, or rather work parenting balance. Politicians of all colors have stressed the importance of balancing work with raising children. The study says that only 22% of parents feel their stress is caused by work pressure.

70% of parents report that they frequently or on occasion fail to meet their own expectations.

This is why the study blames parents for being stressed about raising their kids. Pressures related to the myriad of social norms, schooling, or legal liability considerations are not mentioned in the article.

The clincher showing the overall direction of the study, however, is this:  it blames the fact that the roles of men and women are no longer clearly distributed for an increase in parental stress.

Read this again and weep.

Really.

The fact that mom wants to work and dad wants to have a say about raising the kids is bad for the parents because it means they discuss everything.

Can we please have a minute of silence for the trees that were sacrificed for this crap?

Yes, we do know that parents with fewer children tend to stress more about parenting. But that's been known since we looked at China's one child policy, and blaming the parents as individuals isn't quite appropriate there either.

Give modern parents some credit, they have done better than the last generation and worlds better than the one before. In case you haven't noticed: leather belts today are primarily worn on pants to contain the extra pounds of modern day life.

The dedicated belt on the coat hangar in the hallway, or the closet for the more face saving bourgeois, are over. Canes and walking sticks are used for walking, yeah!

[update] added "survey" vs."study", which is really the crucial point of the debate.