How Employers Can Stop Failing Parents

Dual dangers are threatening the national workforce: a child care crisis and a mental health crisis. The connection between the United States’ inadequate child care system and parents’ mental health struggles is so significant that the U.S. Surgeon General highlighted it in an advisory released in August on the mental health and well-being of parents. But employers that support employees experiencing child care issues have an opportunity to address a key factor affecting employee mental health and positively impact their business as a result.

In a recent report, McKinsey identified stress as a modifiable driver of health that employers can target to improve workers’ lives and asserted that doing so could have a return in economic value as high as $11.7 trillion globally. While focusing on stress reduction in the workplace may seem to be a logical strategy for addressing the problem, programs designed to directly affect stress levels have had mixed results. However, targeting a key source of stress for working parents — child care precarity, the state of unreliable and insecure child care — will have a real impact.

Stress is a psychological hazard in the workplace: It accounts for higher turnover, reduced productivity, increased accident rates, acute physical illness and mental health issues, and absenteeism. In a May 2022 survey, 68% of working mothers said they were experiencing burnout. The stress of child care issues, especially in the context of a worsening child care crisis in America, further contributes to parental mental health decline. Day-to-day child care precarity has a long-lasting health impact on mothers, increasing the risk of negative mental health outcomes for years. Working mothers’ health is already worse than that of any other employee category, and a continued lack of child care will only expand the gap.

Employees experiencing mental health issues often have reduced attention, a reduced capacity to focus, and diminished performance due to fatigue. In addition, long-term disability leave related to mental health can account for as much as 60%-70% of an organization’s overall disability-related costs. Adding to these expenses, employees with fair to poor mental health have approximately 12 days of unplanned absences over the course of a year, costing the U.S. economy over $47 billion in