In recent years, the pressure has grown worse, said Professors Milkie and Nomaguchi, who wrote a review of scholarship on the intensity and stress of parenting since 2010.

Parents feel they need to make up for what their children lost during the pandemic.

Social media has made comparisons with other parents inescapable.

Technological change has made it harder to prepare children for future work.

Americans have less faith that the political system can address families’ problems.

Though mothers feel much of the pressure to parent intensively, fathers increasingly feel it too.

Although they are spending more time with children than they used to, they’re also likelier to say it’s not enough.

Behind it all is the American belief that parenting is an individual task, not a societal one.

While many Americans experience loneliness, parents are more likely than nonparents to say that they do, and that no one understands the extent of their stress.

“In the U.S., it’s this sense of individualism: You chose to have kids, so go raise them,” said Professor Milkie, who works at the University of Toronto.

“Parents need the village, but people are not as available as they were.”

Unlike other rich countries, the United States has few universal federal family policies, like paid leave or child care subsidies.

During the women’s movement of the 1970s, the country considered the idea that government and employer policies could help parents work and care for their families, as Kirsten Swinth, a history professor at Fordham, has written.

But the Reagan era ushered in a different idea — that the government should not interfere in family life.

“This was very compelling — ‘I want control over how I raise my kids,’” said Professor Swinth, who studies women’s and economic history.

“But practically, it meant that the systems that would aid parents, especially as women went into the workplace, like after-school and summer care, didn’t get funded.”

Conservatives still generally prefer that instead of taxpayer-funded government programs, people in families’ communities — relatives, neighbors, church members — mostly fill the gaps.

But there has been a decline in the informal community networks helping to raise children.

Attendance at community meeting places like churches has decreased.

Mothers are likely to work for pay, rather than be home keeping an eye on children — their own and their neighbors’.

Parents with higher education are more likely to move far from grandparents to pursue careers.

The increased demands of raising children, combined with responsibilities like paid work and elder care, have come at the expense of mental health, leisure time, sleep, and time alone or with a spouse.

“We’re crushing parents under an enormous burden, for the benefit of society, and we’re sort of free-riding” on them, Professor Swinth said.

The advisory called on policymakers, employers and health care providers to better support parents, including through family policies like paid leave and child tax credits.

But Dr. Murthy said that a pro-family America would also require a cultural change — one that envisioned parenting as a societal good, and therefore the responsibility of the whole society, as important as paid jobs.

And, he said, talking more openly about the demands of parenting could eventually change cultural expectations about whether all this time and money is needed for children to succeed.