The chaos of summer is over. Kids have gone back to school. But fall brings a whole new set of challenges. We parents have spent the past few weeks creating complex matrices — schedules for child care, after-school activities, and car pools. But by next week, someone will get sick, or a babysitter will quit, and the house of cards will come tumbling down. Fear not, though: The surgeon general has our back.

A new report from Vivek Murthy classifies parental stress as a public-health problem and proposes a slate of policies to mitigate it. In his words, parenting today often poses “daunting challenges and significant, sometimes relentless, stress.” But Murthy’s medicalization of the problem is unlikely to help, and his nanny-state solutions could make matters worse.

Murthy comes to us as a father himself, who says the work of parenting is “sacred.” He describes the stress not only of finding child care but also of affording basic necessities, our fears of social media, of kidnapping, and school shootings, and our concerns about whether our children are falling behind their peers. And parents don’t have enough support — from employers, other parents, and the government — to cope with the challenges of modern-day parenting. All of these stressors, Murthy claims, have created a crisis of loneliness and an epidemic of mental illness among parents.

The facts do not bear this out. First, a measure of meaningful stress is good for us. It endows our lives with greater purpose. Sacrificing our time and resources for our children may improve our sense of well-being. Data reflect this. According to a recent YouGov survey, 83 percent of parents describe life as “meaningful” compared with 75 percent of nonparents who do so. As the psychologist Paul Bloom observes, raising children often appears to satisfy “our hunger for attachment, and for meaning and purpose.”

Second, parenting does not make us lonelier. Fifty-nine percent of nonparents say that “life is lonely” some, most, or all of the time, compared with only 45 percent of parents who say the same. This finding would not surprise most parents who find that walking around with a stroller invites conversations with strangers (perhaps even more than walking a dog does). And enrolling kids in day care, school, youth groups, or other activities invariably means becoming part of a community. Indeed, much of the conversation in these communities consists of complaining about how busy and stressed we all are.

Murthy observes that parents seem especially stressed about whether they are doing enough for their children — whether they will be enrolled in the right schools and whether they will eventually become happy, well-adjusted adults. And while social media may have exacerbated our tendency to compare our lives and our children’s prospects with those of others, as he notes, keeping up with the Joneses is not a new or diagnosable condition. It is part of human nature. And the childless feel it too.

The solutions that Murthy proposes for these problems will sound banal to anyone familiar with the Left’s political playbook of the past few decades. They include paid family leave, medical leave, subsidized child care, cash assistance, and affordable housing. It is true that parents — like childless Americans — are stressed about the cost of living and that more should be done to make family life affordable. But arguing that parental stress is a public-health crisis that can only be solved by new and expensive government programs begs questions about the effectiveness of such programs, not to mention their impact on inflation.

Murthy also wants employers to implement “training for managers on stress management and work-life harmony.” We have gone through a record-breaking labor shortage in recent years. If employers find this kind of counseling to be helpful for retaining staff, they should go for it. But most parents (including managers) would probably prefer to have a few more hours with their families rather than be forced to watch another training video and complete another quiz. Finally, Murthy asks communities to “foster open dialogue about parental stress.” But what is the evidence for the idea that talking more about parental stress can reduce parental stress? If anything, maybe we need to talk about it less.

If we really want to find ways to combat this problem, it might be better to look at the groups that seem to be happiest. Not only are parents happier than nonparents, married parents are happier than single and cohabiting parents, according to the 2022 General Social Survey. Forty percent of married mothers are “very happy,” compared with only 17 percent of unmarried mothers. And 35 percent of married fathers are “very happy” compared with only 12 percent of unmarried ones.

Nowhere in Murthy’s report does he mention the declining marriage rate as a problem. Indeed, a section on “family structure” focuses instead on discrimination against LGBTQ families, “separation due to immigration policies,” and “parental incarceration.” And while he acknowledges that single parenthood can be stressful, he does not acknowledge that matrimony protects parental mental health and promotes children’s well-being. “Something has to change,” the surgeon general writes. Too bad he has the wrong thing in mind.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Brad Wilcox, a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is the author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.