Meanwhile, social support for parents has dropped. Childless friends and neighbors offer less help than in the past, though there are many more of them, relatively speaking: the proportion doing any child care at all was down to about 3.7 percent in 2016 (from 4.5 percent in 2004).6 According to a study that examined the longitudinal data of men and women from their late twenties to their midfifties, work is good for our mental health except when there are young children at home.
