All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

Putnam, like his colleagues studying time use, also describes a sensation of “pervasive busyness” among Americans today, a sense that we are chronically and forever feeling rushed.

Believing in marriage, at least if you’re in one, turns out to be the most powerful aphrodisiac of all.

But to leave Zay to cry would only compound Angie’s terrible sense that she’s not doing all she can do for him, and she feels bad enough going off to work three or four nights a week—the second the kids catch sight of her in her scrubs, they start to cling.

Omg its me

So while she’s at home, she doesn’t put Zay on the ground or in the Bumbo.

Instead, she works one-armed and lopsided, straining her back and making the awkward progress of ...

Angie approaches parenting intuitively, from

the inside out, while Clint approaches it from the outside in.

I hear this a lot from parents. One—usually the mother—is more alive to the emotional undercurrents of the household. (In A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham writes: “She knows something is up. Her nerves run through the house.”) The result is that the more-intuitive parent—in this case Angie—sometimes feels like the other parent is not doing his or her fair share, while the other parent—in this case Clint—feels like the intuitive parent is excessively emotional.

When really, what may be going on is that the couple is experiencing time differently, because each person is paying attention to different things.

Fifty-fifty and seventy-thirty is a big difference—especially given how little daylight there is between Angie and Clint over everything else. Why, given how sensitive and attuned they are to one another, should this be?

does the state have an obligation or moral imperative to help out mothers and fathers?

One hates to invoke Sweden at this moment—it really is the most predictable cliché—but some of the happiest parents on the globe are, in fact, in Scandinavia and the other northern European countries with large social safety nets.

“in general, the happiness that people derive from parenthood is positively associated with availability of childcare.”

This was especially true in places where child care is available for children between the ages of one and three (France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia). In those parts of the world, mothers are consistently happier than nonmothers.

“These countries,” Aassve tells me, “are scoring on a whole range of categories that make people feel optimistic or safe about raising children.”

Meanwhile, a report from Child Care Aware of America notes that in 2011 it cost more for families to put two children in day care than it did for them to pay their rent—in all fifty states.

the French enjoyed caring for their children a good deal more, and they spent a good deal less time doing it.

ME TIME. SUCH A simple phrase, and yet it reveals a universe of difference between Angie and Clint, and possibly between most mothers and fathers. The majority of parents feel like they don’t have enough time for themselves, but mothers are especially burdened by this feeling.

Painfully aware of the time they’re not spending with their kids, working mothers are more likely to say that they should always be interacting with their children once their heels are off.

Omg

But she also believes that she is not doing enough, and can never do enough, and that she should be doing everything all the time.

He counts it as child care if he’s doing one thing and the kids are doing another, so long as they’re safe.

Whereas Angie feels obliged to immerse herself completely in their world.

“I try to get them both to be napping when he comes home so that he can have some free time to go to his office or go onto the computer.”

It isn’t only Clint who is protective of his free time, in other words. Angie protects his free time too.

I am angie

There’s increasing pressure for men to be actively involved in the affairs of the home, but there’s no precise standard for how much involvement is enough.

The problem with modern parenting, he says, is that “there are no standards and it’s possible that there never again will be.”

wives do . . . Lord, that bar is as high as a bird’s nest. Women spend more intensive time with their children today than they have in the last fifty years. Pamela Druckerman’s solution to these excesses is to emulate the French. In Bringing Up Bébé, she marvels at how French parents, mothers especially, resist what William Doherty calls (in his own book about marriage) “consumer parenting,” that insidious style of American child-rearing that makes it possible for a kid to lay claim to a mother’s or father’s attention twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The French, she argues, have no qualms about firmly asserting their leisure prerogatives and protecting their adult needs (like peace and quiet, for instance, or uninterrupted conversation with other adults).

Angie, meanwhile, says she never knows if she’s doing things the way they ought to be done. When asked if she’s a good mother, her answer is one word: “Sometimes.” She’s wrong. Angie’s a great mother. If she could just say, “I am the standard,” maybe she would breathe.