Imagine you’re an exhausted parent making dinner while balancing a fussy baby on your hip. You’re stressed about a difficult work project and an email from your daycare announcing another tuition hike. Chaos erupts as the oven timer beeps, the baby starts crying, the dog barks to be let out, your toddler tugs at your leg for attention, the phone rings, and your spouse is running late.

If your blood pressure just shot up reading that, know that you’re not alone, nor is the overwhelmed parent who reaches a boiling point and experiences a visceral moment of rage.

Erin Wissler Gerdes, a PhD candidate in epidemiology at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, is studying the mental health of parents with young children. Her thesis examines how untreated anxiety contributes to parental rage and the protective role social support plays.  

Anxiety and Rage

Wissler Gerdes traces her interest in her thesis topic back to what she learned in the classroom.

“I got hooked on the topic of mental health and parenthood through some of the maternal and child health classes I took here [at Iowa], where I learned that there isn’t universal screening for anxiety in the postpartum period,” she explains.

She’s also well qualified to understand her research subject both personally and professionally; in addition to being a scholar, she’s also a mom to three children aged 4 and under.

Curious to hear from other parents, Wissler Gerdes initially conducted an informal poll of her peers on social media to ask what their experiences were around screening, diagnosis, and treatment for anxiety, specifically in their own postpartum periods.

“I found that very few people who responded to my informal poll were screened for anxiety,” Wissler Gerdes says. She then posed a follow-up question: What support do you wish you would have had? The overwhelming response was, “Other parents who are also in this stage of raising young children.”

Wissler Gerdes’s own experience of parental rage led her to seek out articles, podcasts, and books about parenting young children.

“One of the topics that kept coming up in these editorial accounts was ‘mom rage,’” she says. She searched for journal articles that addressed this term but found only one peer-reviewed paper that existed at the time.

“I thought, I’ve heard this term in all of these editorial accounts,” she says. “I know people are experiencing this. I’m experiencing this. My husband is experiencing this. Let’s put a number on it.”

That solidified Wissler Gerdes’s dissertation project of creating a formal survey to determine the prevalence of experiencing rage while parenting young children and explore how it is connected to anxiety.

A Common Experience

Previous research shows that parents experience higher levels of stress compared to other adults. As one example, a 2023 survey by the American Psychological Association found that 48% of parents said that most days their stress was completely overwhelming compared to 26% of other adults.

For her thesis, Wissler Gerdes surveyed 400 parents of children aged 5 and under. Of the respondents, which were drawn from the eastern Iowa area, about three-fourths were female and the remaining one-fourth male. The results showed that parental rage was common — about 77% of participants had experienced a rage symptom in the past month.

Wissler Gerdes defines rage in her research as “an experience of intense, overwhelming anger,” she explains. “It’s felt viscerally. A lot of people describe it as hitting a boiling point. In the interviews we’ve done, there’s color — ‘seeing red’ or ‘white hot rage’ — associated with it. It’s a short, intense period of anger.”

Although “mom rage” is the popular term, Wissler Gerdes’s survey showed that men also feel moments of intense anger.

“Seeing that both moms and dads are experiencing these symptoms of rage at an overwhelmingly high frequency was surprising and quite affirming,” she adds. “One of the interesting findings is that there were symptoms of rage experienced across a variety of different demographic characteristics. It shows that this experience of rage crosses all kinds of demographic lines.”

If parental anxiety and rage are such common experiences and are being discussed in popular media, why aren’t they better studied?

“Number one, I think anything that is considered more of a female-dominated health outcome is less likely to be funded for research as a whole,” Wissler Gerdes says. “But also, I think there’s a lot of shame, stigma, and guilt around these emotions in parenting — particularly with moms who are told we’re supposed to be able to do this with cool, calm, collected demeanors. So to even experience some of these emotions is taboo.”

The Importance of Support

Many stressors affect parents, including financial strain, time demands, health and safety concerns, technology and social media worries, and parental loneliness.

Wissler Gerdes’s formal survey revealed that one key characteristic of parents who experience anxiety and rage is having little to no perceived support. She is interviewing some of the respondents to gain a deeper understanding of what their social support systems look like and how support plays a role in the emotional overwhelm and drain of parenting young kids.

“What we’re finding is that parents are more isolated right now,” Wissler Gerdes says. “They’re feeling financially strapped. They have challenges with childcare and feeling like they’re never able to get a break.”

One important type of support that parents want is short-term breaks, such as dropping the kids off at a grandparent’s house for a few hours, Wissler Gerdes says.

“In addition to that, they want the support of other parents and communities where they’re able to talk about the stage of parenting that they’re in, the challenges and triumphs that come with it, and relate to their peers,” she says.

Another aspect that Wissler Gerdes’s research will explore is how parents repair their relationships with their children and partner after a rage experience.

Ultimately, Wissler Gerdes hopes that her work will help fill a gap in parental mental health research.

“If we can give parents of young children the support and confidence to not feel like they’re the only ones experiencing some of these more stigmatized emotions, then we can set them up to be more successful and confident parents throughout their kids’ lives,” she says. “If you have a mom or dad who is doing well mentally, then you’re going to improve health outcomes for your entire family.”