Laurie Santos first noticed something amiss with parents a few years ago.
“I saw how anxious and worried parents were when connecting with their kids at Yale,” said Santos, the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology, who served as head of Silliman College from 2016 to 2022.
“We’d have parents calling to check in on students all the time,” she said. “Some parents still acted as their kids’ alarm clock. Even though their kids were now sophomores in college, the parents were still calling to wake them up.”
Those parents stayed in the back of Santos’ mind as she developed the course “Psychology and the Good Life,” which instantly became the most popular in Yale’s history, and its online counterpart, “The Science of Well-Being.” In 2023, she launched a version of the course for younger learners called “The Science of Well-Being for Teens” — and immediately saw that another spin-off might be necessary.
“We saw a lot of parents enrolling with their teens and enrolling by themselves to learn how to help their teens,” Santos said. “It made us realize that we actually needed a course just for parents.”
That new course, “The Science of Well-Being for Parents,” launched May 5 on Coursera. Developed in conjunction with the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale, the new course offers evidence-based strategies for improving mental health, tailored for modern-day parents.
The course is also available on YouTube. “We wanted to make it as easy as possible for parents to access,” Santos said.
Modern-day parenting: stress, burnout, and guilt
Today’s parents are navigating new territory.
“Parents are facing stressors today that they’ve never faced before,” Santos said. “It’s made an already challenging job even harder, and to top it off, this is the first time in human history we have parenting influencers giving updates all the time, making many parents feel like they’re not doing enough.”
The increasing stress isn’t just anecdotal: former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy noted increasing rates of parental stress in a 2024 report, which called out a number of contributing societal factors.
To zero in on the biggest issues, Santos surveyed her previous Coursera learners, asking what challenges parents would like to discuss in a new course. “Within a week, we had over a thousand folks respond to our survey with suggestions,” Santos said.
In addition to filming parents in question-and-answer sessions held on campus at Yale, Santos and a film crew traveled to high schools around the country — in California, Ohio, Illinois, and Massachusetts — to film before a live audience of parents. Each school had used material from the “Science of Wellbeing for Teens” in their own curricula.
The parental concerns centered on issues of balancing time; navigating negative emotions; dealing with technology and social media; and managing stress.
“The whole class is built to directly address these problems,” Santos said. “So much parenting advice is just a bunch of platitudes, but we’re offering evidence-based content that draws on the latest psychology and neuroscience to explore how kids learn most effectively, how parents and kids can regulate emotions, and how the stress response works.”
There’s never enough time
“Over the last ten years, parents have begun working more hours than ever before while also putting more time into childcare than ever before,” Santos said. “There is no give-and-take.”
Unstable economic conditions and global competition for jobs, as well as increasingly competitive college admissions, are all putting the squeeze on parents.
“Kids are facing new academic stresses that also fall on their parents,” Santos said. “Right from the start, parents are wondering what counts as enrichment for young children and how do you prepare your kids for the difficult economic landscape they’ll be going into.”
In the new course, Santos shares techniques to help parents strike a better work and life balance, with the goal of creating more quality time both for their families and for themselves.
Riding the emotional roller coaster
“Another big parental concern we discovered was navigating negative emotions,” Santos said. “Lots of parents are dealing with guilt these days — ‘Am I doing this parenting thing right? Am I getting it wrong?’”
Adding to the strain are the high levels of anxiety and depression reported among young people today.
“We talk about techniques you can use to boost your own emotional well-being and also handle your kids’ negative emotions,” Santos said. “We explore how parents can model healthy emotional regulation strategies for their kids.”
The perils of technology
Perhaps no single issue has caused this generation of parents more angst than technology, especially social media. Many of the ill effects of screentime on children have been well documented. The question is how to manage — and possibly reduce — time spent online.
“There are some really basic strategies for how to create tech-free zones at home, and also how parents can model healthier digital habits,” Santos said. “We also talk about strategies for finding more leisure and fun in the real world.”
Taming the stress dragon
With so much change and so many obligations, parents need help slowing down, stepping back, and reorienting, Santos says.
“We go through a whole set of techniques parents can use to hack their nervous systems, breathe a little bit easier, and feel better,” Santos said. “We also explain health tips for rethinking how you approach stress in daily life.”
In the end, Santos hopes parents gain both fresh understanding and practical help from her new course.
“It’s really just us saying that we get it,” she said. “Parenting is really hard, and here are some easy strategies you can use to feel better.”
Parents can watch the episodes in order or go straight to the topics that interest them most.
“We hope this won’t be a one-and-done course for parents,” Santos said. “We want it to become a go-to resource that moms and dads can come back to as their kids get older, and they face new challenges.”
