Professor Melissa Milkie’s work on parents’ stressors was featured on the front page of the Sunday New York Times recently, where she was quoted about why parents today may be more exhausted and stressed than in the past. The Times story covered the U.S. Surgeon General’s newly-issued advisory “Parents’ Under Pressure” which cites Professor Milkie’s decade-in-review article co-authored with long-time collaborator Professor Kei Nomaguchi of Bowling Green State University. The review piece, published in 2020 in Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) is the most cited JMF article of the past decade, with close to 600 citations in only four years time! The article discusses the importance of understanding social aspects of parental wellbeing given its importance not only for parents’ own welfare but also because parents’ mental health is linked to children’s development, to fertility and to the health of society as a whole. Using their Demands-Rewards perspective, Professors Nomaguchi and Milkie reviewed hundreds of articles and analyzed scholarship on changing parenting cultures and structures affecting distress, variation in parental wellbeing across social statuses, and parents’ health across the life course. They also reviewed macro- and meso-level supports and policies that are vital for parental mental health. Congratulations to Professor Milkie for her excellent research and analytic work about parents’ lives – it is having great public impact!
Melissa Milkie is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Tri-campus Graduate Department. and recently served as President of the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN). Her research centers on gender, work-family intersections and well-being, with a unique focus on time use and culture. She can be reached at melissa.milkie@utoronto.ca.