Growing Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Mothers, New Study Confirms

American mothers are grappling with a widespread, rapidly worsening mental health crisis, according to a new study published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Tracking self-reported health outcomes across an eight-year period from 2016 to 2023, the research confirms a consistent downward trend in maternal well-being. The survey included 198,417 female parents of children aged 17 and younger, and found that only 25.8% of respondents rated their own mental health as “excellent” in 2023. Just eight years prior, that figure stood at 38.4% — a sharp 12.6 percentage point drop in less than a decade.

While the share of mothers describing their mental health as “good” rose from 18.8% to 26.1% over the study period, the proportion reporting fair or poor mental health also increased, jumping from 5.5% to 8.5%. Mothers also reported a dip in physical health outcomes: the share rating their physical health as “excellent” fell from 28% to 23.9%, while the share reporting “good” physical health rose from 24.3% to 28.1%. Rates of fair or poor physical health remained largely unchanged.

This new finding is far from the first public alert about declining parental mental health in the U.S. In 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a stark warning about the scale of the crisis, highlighting how much higher parental stress is compared to adults without children. “Forty-one percent of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function, and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively),” Murthy noted in his 2024 advisory.

What the new JAMA study makes clear is that mothers are bearing the brunt of this decline: the share of mothers reporting fair or poor mental health is four full percentage points higher than the same share among fathers.

Unsurprisingly, socioeconomic factors play a major role in shaping maternal mental health outcomes. While mental health declined across all socioeconomic groups included in the study, authors noted that “mental and physical health status was significantly lower for single female parents, those with lower educational attainment, and those with publicly insured children.”

A range of overlapping economic pressures have exacerbated this crisis for parents. Inflation, trade policy impacts, and a volatile job market have driven up core costs for all households, but parents face unique burdens including skyrocketing childcare and food prices. Recent data puts the total cost of raising a child to age 17 in the U.S. at roughly $300,000, a 36% increase just since 2023. A 2025 analysis from the National Women’s Law Center adds that a household needs an annual salary of around $180,000 to comfortably afford childcare, a threshold most American families do not meet.

These prohibitive costs have pushed many parents — disproportionately mothers — to exit the formal workforce to care for children at home. But since most U.S. households require two incomes to cover basic expenses, many of these mothers do not stop working entirely. Instead, they balance full-time unpaid childcare with paid work (often remote or gig work), effectively holding down two full-time jobs at once. This constant, unrelenting demand creates a perfect storm of chronic stress that continues to erode maternal mental health across the country.