As a technical matter, everyone has parents. Most people even have parents who are alive. One of the big features of American culture that I've noticed that makes parenting harder is that unlike nearly everywhere else in the world, Americans go out of their way to avoid getting help from their parents.

Now, of course not everyone has parents who can help and sometimes life makes it very hard to live near one's parents, but we have this very entrenched cultural phenomenon where older folks live by themselves and are lonely while younger folks live by themselves and complain about the hassle and expense of child care.

The show "Everybody Loves Raymond" is really illustrative. When I was a small child in Bangladesh, my mom lived in the same city with her sisters, brothers, and mother. The idea that living near your in laws could be the premise of a running joke would've gone over their heads.

Re: saying that parenting is easy--I never said it was easy, and I'm not speaking from my vast experiene as a parent for all of one month. I'm speaking from my experience as a child who grew up with non-American parents who didn't have the same cultural expectations about parenting.