Daily Inspiration Quote by C. Everett Koop

Koop’s line lands with the blunt moral clarity of a public servant who spent a career turning private hardship into a public health concern. It’s not poetry; it’s triage. By choosing “stressed” as the lead adjective, he frames single parenthood less as a lifestyle category than as a chronic condition produced by pressure: economic, emotional, logistical. “May be working two jobs” is careful phrasing that sounds modest, almost bureaucratic, yet it smuggles in an indictment. The qualifier “may” protects him from overclaiming while still inviting the listener to picture an exhausting, common reality: long shifts, patchwork childcare, and the constant fear that one missed paycheck unravels everything.

The subtext is a rebuke to the tidy morality plays Americans like to tell about family stability. Koop doesn’t romanticize resilience; he points to the cost of demanding it. “Keep the family together” is the emotional hinge. It implies that the family is already under strain from forces outside the home, and that cohesion is labor, not a given. In the late-20th-century policy climate Koop operated in, debates about welfare, “family values,” and personal responsibility often flattened single parents into symbols. His sentence resists that flattening by relocating the story in the body and schedule of a caregiver.

As Surgeon General, Koop’s authority came from insisting that social conditions have medical consequences. Here, the intent is to widen the frame: if we want healthier children and communities, we can’t treat single parents as an afterthought or a cautionary tale. We have to treat stress as evidence - and two jobs as the symptom.