All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

Children strain our everyday lives, in other words, but also deepen them. “All joy and no fun” is how a friend with two young kids described it.

SOME OF THE HARDEST parts of parenting never change—like sleep deprivation, which, according to researchers at Queen’s University in Ontario, can in some respects impair our judgment as much as being legally drunk.

That women bring home the bacon, fry it up, serve it for breakfast, and use its greasy remains to make candles for their children’s science projects is hardly news. Yet how parenting responsibilities get sorted out under these conditions remains unresolved. Neither government nor private business has adapted to this reality, throwing the burden back onto individual families to cope. And while today’s fathers are more engaged with their children than fathers in any previous generation, they’re charting a blind course, navigating by trial and, just as critically, error. Many women can’t tell whether they’re supposed to be grateful for the help they’re getting or enraged by the help they’re failing to receive; many men, meanwhile, are struggling to adjust to the same work-life rope-a-dope as their wives, now that they too are expected to show up for Gymboree.

Until fairly recently, what parents wanted was utterly beside the point. But we now live in an age when the map of our desires has gotten considerably larger, and we’ve been told it’s our right (obligation, in fact) to try to fulfill them. In an end-of-the-millennium essay, the historian J. M. Roberts wrote: “The 20th century has spread as never before the idea that human happiness is realizable on Earth.” That’s a wonderful thing, of course, but not always a realistic goal, and when reality falls short of expectations, we often blame ourselves. “Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken,” writes the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his 2012 collection of essays, Missing Out. “The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do.” Even if our dreams were never realizable, even if they were false from the start, we regret not pursuing them.

Having children enlarges our lives in loads of unimaginable ways. But it also disrupts our autonomy in ways we couldn’t have imagined, whether it’s in our work, our leisure, or the banal routines of our day-to-day lives. So that’s where this book begins: with a dissection of those reconfigured lives and an attempt to explain why they look and feel the way they do.

David Dinges, one of the country’s foremost experts on partial sleep deprivation, says that the population seems to divide roughly in thirds when it comes to prolonged sleep loss: those who handle it fairly well, those who sort of fall apart, and those who respond catastrophically. The problem is, most prospective parents have no clue which type they are until their kids come along.

The women who’d had six hours of sleep or less were in a different league of unhappiness, almost, than those who’d had seven hours or more. The gap in their well-being was so extreme that it exceeded the gap between those who earned under $30,000 annually and those who earned over $90,000. (In newspapers and magazines, this finding is sometimes re-reported as “an hour extra of sleep is worth a $60,000 raise,” which isn’t exactly right, but close enough.)

Bonnet adds that the sleep-deprived score higher on measures of irritability and lower on measures of inhibition too, which isn’t an especially useful combination for parents, who are trying to keep their cool.

For me, this finding raises a question: assuming that parents spend a great deal of time fighting off the urge to sleep—and the urge to sleep is one of the two most common urges that adults try to fight (the other being the urge to eat)—then what urges do parents later succumb to instead? The most obvious answer I can think of is the urge to yell, an upsetting thought—nothing makes a mother or father feel quite so awful as hollering at the most vulnerable people in their lives. Yet that’s what we do. Jessie confesses it’s what she does, in spite of her enviably mellow disposition. “I’ll yell,” she says, “and then I’ll feel bad that I yelled, and then I’ll feel mad at myself: Why didn’t I get enough

Small children send predictability out the window.

But young children, whose prefrontal cortexes have barely begun to ripen, can’t conceive of a future, which means they spend their lives in the permanent present, a forever feeling of right now.

early years of family life don’t offer up many activities that lend themselves to what psychologists call “flow.”

“They set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible.”

Most of life with young children does not have a script, and if a parent attempts to write one, children may not be inclined to follow it.

” To be in flow, one must pay close and focused attention. Yet very young children are wired for discovery, for sweeping in lots of stimuli.

Csikszentmihalyi also noticed that we enjoy ourselves most when we’re positioned “at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with [our] capacity to act.” Yet parents of young children often describe the sensation of lurching back and forth between those two poles—boredom and anxiety—rather than being able to comfortably settle somewhere in the middle. “To the extent that we are not maximally happy when we’re with our young children,” says Daniel Gilbert, the social psychologist, “it could be that they’re demanding things of us we find difficult to give. But it could also be that they’re not demanding that much.”

Interesting... The more i read the more i start to understand why parenting is so hard for type a/rigid people

be devoted exclusively to companionship with children is a somewhat boring prospect to a lot of good parents.”

“I looked at my responses, and one thing that suddenly was very strange to me was that every time I was

with my two sons, my moods were always very, very negative.” His sons weren’t toddlers at that point either. They were older. “And I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense to me, because I’m very proud of them, and we have a good relationship.’ ” But then he started to look at what, specifically, he was doing with his sons that made his feelings so negative. “And what was I doing?” he asked. “I was saying, ‘It’s time to get up, or you will be late for school.’ Or, ‘You haven’t put away your cereal dish from breakfast.’ ” He was nagging, in other words, and nagging is not a flow activity. “I realized,” he said, “that being a parent consists, in large part, of correcting the growth pattern of a person who is not necessarily ready to live in a civilized society.”

“Partly, the lack of structure in family

life, which seems to give people freedom, is actually a kind of an impediment.”

Flow is hard enough to achieve if your sole task is trying to care for your kids. But it’s even harder if you’re trying to care for your children and work at the same time.

Now, many professionals walk around with the impression that everything they do is urgent.

It’s as if we’re all leading lives of anti-flow, of chronic interruptions and ceaseless multitasking.

“There are days I’m able to put work behind me and just be with my son, and it feels awesome. But then there are days when all I’m thinking is, If I can get this kid taken care of, I can get back on the computer, and it feels terrible.”

Neurologically speaking, though, there are reasons we develop a confused sense of priorities when we’re in front of our computer screens. For one thing, email comes at unpredictable intervals, which, as B. F. Skinner famously showed with rats seeking pellets, is the most seductive and habit-forming reward pattern to the mammalian brain. (Think about it: would slot machines be half as thrilling if you knew when, and how often, you were going to get three cherries?)

The difficulty, in the words of Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, is that they allow “many professionals with children to work from home all the time.” The result, he writes in his book Elsewhere USA, is that “work becomes the engine and the person the caboose, despite all this so-called freedom and efficiency.” A wired home lulls us into the belief that maintaining our old work habits while caring for our children is still possible.

Then, during work hours, she’s doing work. Not rewinding Barney, not mopping yogurt off the dining room table.

But it would afford her a better chance to experience flow. She’d be a photographer at work and a mother at home.

Jessie has instead chosen the hardest path. She’s trying to do both, improvising all day long as she juggles her dual responsibilities, never knowing when her kids will require attention or when a work deadline will crop up.

If you’re Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former top State Department official who wrote a much-discussed story about work-life balance for The Atlantic in June 2012, you believe that the world, as it is currently structured, cannot accommodate the needs of women who are ambitious in both their professions and their home lives—social and economic change is required.

The sociologist Andrew Cherlin makes this quite clear in his very readable 2009 book The Marriage-Go-Round. In the New England colonies, he notes, individual family members hardly expected time to themselves to pursue their own interests. There were too many children running around to allow anyone much peace and quiet (families in Plymouth averaged seven or eight kids each), and the architecture of the typical Puritan home conspired against solitary endeavors, with most activities concentrated in one main room. “Personal privacy,” he writes, “one of the taken-for-granted aspects of modern individualism, was in short supply.” From the moment of birth, people were enmeshed in a complex web of obligations and formal roles, and throughout their lives, they were expected to follow scripts that helped fulfill them.

Over time, writes Coontz, Americans have come to define liberty “negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one’s wealth or time.”

this is how you conceive of liberty—as freedom from obligation—then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock.

Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modi...

change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost ...

No matter how perfect our circumstances, most of us, as Adam Phillips observed, “learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.”

The energy and goodwill of this group was partly a fluke, I’m sure, but also a by-product of living in the suburbs: these women described more social isolation than their peers who lived in denser areas, and they seemed more grateful to have a regularly scheduled social outlet.

I suspect that parents argue more aggressively in front of their children because children are a mute, ever-present reminder of life’s stakes. A fight about a husband’s lack of professional initiative or a wife’s harsh tone with her daughter is no longer just a fight about work habits or disciplinary styles. It’s a fight about the future—about what kind of role models they are, about what kind of people they aspire to be, about who and what they want their children to become.

“We’re in the same family with two different lives, two different views, two different opinions,” Angie tells me. “What I think is the situation and the hard parts, he doesn’t always.” And vice versa.

“Right now our life is such fragile chaos,” says Angie. “If there’s something a bit over the norm—Zay not sleeping at night, the dog getting sick, my back going out—it throws everything out of whack.”

“Yeah!” she exclaims, without hesitation. “And he was like, ‘Fifty-fifty! I want to do everything!’ ” I hear no bitterness in her voice. Just frustration. “It’s just that he’s still very selfish with his time. Whereas I’m like, ‘Kids first.’

“When couples struggle,” she writes, “it is seldom simply over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude.”

even more highly correlated with their own and their spouses’ well-being than was the fathers’ actual amount of involvement [emphasis mine].”

They determine fairness based on a combination of what they need, what they think is reasonable, and what they think is possible.

In Alone Together, the authors note that fathers guessed that they did, on average, about 42 percent of the child care in their families, based on a large national survey conducted in 2000. Mothers, by contrast, put their husbands’ efforts at 32 percent. The actual number that year was 35 percent, and it remains roughly the same today.

Being compelled to divide and subdivide your time doesn’t just compromise your productivity (as we saw in the last chapter) and lead to garden-variety discombobulation. It also creates a feeling of urgency—a sense that no matter how tranquil the moment, no matter how unpressured the circumstances, there’s always a pot somewhere that’s about to boil over.

Women, on average, assigned a significantly larger proportion of their self-image to their mother identity than the men did to their father identity.

THERE’S A LARGER BACKDROP to this loneliness. Today’s parents are starting families at a time when their social networks in the real world appear to be shrinking and their community ties, stretching thin.

the number of times married Americans spent a social evening with their neighbors fell from roughly thirty times per year to twenty,