New Data Reveals The Unexpected Feeling 66% Of Parents Experience Regularly

Like most parents of young children, Anne Helms juggles a lot of responsibilities throughout the day. She works full time in human resources for Ohio State University and cares for her 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.

“We’re in the throes of it, that’s for sure,” Helms told HuffPost.

Yet, in spite of spending every hour of the day with her children, husband, co-workers, sisters or friends, Helms realized that she was experiencing a parent-specific variety of loneliness.

“I have all these people around me,” she explained. “I wasn’t lonely in the traditional definition.”

But when it came to parenting struggles, such as her son’s resistance to riding the school bus to kindergarten, Helms felt “like I was the only one thinking so deeply into certain aspects of parenting.” Her husband was confident that their son would figure out his fear of riding the bus, but instead of feeling reassured by this, Helms felt alone in her anxiety.

It turns out that a majority of parents have experienced this sense of isolation. In a recent poll conducted by Ohio State University, 66% of parents reported that they sometimes or frequently feel isolated or lonely when facing the demands of parenthood. In addition, 62% said they felt burned out, and 38% felt that they didn’t have anyone to support them in their parenting role.

It isn’t necessarily the lack of interactions in parents’ lives that causes the feeling of isolation — although it can indeed be isolating when your only conversation partner for the day is a toddler — but rather the types of interactions that parents are having.

“We have all been in a situation where we have been in a room full of people and still felt lonely,” Kate Gawlik, a professor at the Ohio State College of