How Parental Stress Affects Your Employees and How You Can Help

Here is one of the least surprising sentences you’ll read today: parenting is stressful. It is fulfilling and incredible…hard and stressful…all at the same time. It’s also a long-term consideration. While the way parenting is stressful can change over the decades of parenting a child at home, in college, or into adulthood, stress is stress. And it’s common.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), parents of children under the age of 18 have been consistently more likely to report high stress since 2013 — to the tune of 33% of parents rating their stress as an 8-10 on a 1-10 scale in 2023, compared to 20% of non-parents — the fact that a minimum of 20% of the studied population rated their stress as high deserves its own conversation as well.

Parental stress and employee health and wellbeing

Stress has impacts beyond the short-term emotion of it. Acute stress can cause momentary — though still severe — mental and physical health symptoms, but chronic stress such as that which comes with parenting can have significant, lasting impacts. The APA likens the effects to your body’s alarm system being constantly on alert. They say:

“The long-term activation of the stress response system and the overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones that come with it can disrupt almost all of your body's processes. This can put you at increased risk for a variety of physical and mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, digestive issues, headaches, muscle tension and pain, heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, stroke, sleep problems, weight gain, and memory and concentration impairment.”

Additionally, chronic stress can lead to poor coping behaviors such as poor eating habits, drug and alcohol use, smoking, and more, including thoughts of self-harm or suicide.

How individual stress affects an organization

These individual impacts can be felt by employers and coworkers as well. The mental burden increases the likelihood of employees burning out, affecting the quality of their performance and increasing burdens on their teams and leaders to pick up the slack. It can also cause increased burden if the burnout leads to turnover and lower retention rates as talent acquisition teams have more work and coworkers cover for gaps on the team.

Absenteeism — mental health days, sick days, or leave when recovering from a stress-caused health event — can also burden teams, increase healthcare costs for employers and employees alike, and reduce productivity.

How organizations can help

The good news is that employers can take impactful steps to support their employees. Below are just a few ways to address stress in your workforce. But however it looks for your organization, the most important thing is to take the first step.

Providing easy-to-use physical and mental health resources

By partnering with mental health and primary care experts you can make it much easier for employees to engage with the care and support they need, from counseling and clinical mental health support to chronic condition management and more. Primary care can also help detect when stress is impacting health and can be a key source of referrals and an entryway into mental health support.

Build a culture that allows employees to say they need help

Stress is easier to manage when you don’t feel alone. If employees feel like they can raise their hand and ask for help, even if the stress isn’t work related, you can help to support them in the moment as well. Leaders can listen to their employees, help make plans to support them in the work environment, and help encourage them to make use of the mental and physical health resources available to them.

Set the example

As an executive leader, your actions and words directly impact the likelihood of your employees being open about stress or burying it deep down. Even an off-hand joke at the beginning of a meeting can have a lasting effect on whether an employee trusts in the culture you’ve built or benefits programs you’ve invested in. As such it’s important that you set an example and lead the conversations. Use the resources yourself and talk about it. Share your own experiences about when stress impacted your life and how you got help. Encourage other leaders to do the same. You’ll see the positive impacts this has on your teams.

Learn how Marathon health can help you support your employees with mental healthcare.