All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

But the truth is, there’s little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. Prospective parents have no clue what their children will be like; no clue what it will mean to have their hearts permanently annexed; no clue what it will feel like to second-guess so many seemingly simple decisions, or to be multitasking even while they’re brushing their teeth, or to have a ticker tape of concerns forever whipping through their heads. Becoming a parent is one of the most sudden and dramatic changes in adult life.

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during the eighties, as women began their great rush into the workforce, sociologists generally concluded that while work was good for women’s well-being, children tended to negate its positive effects. Throughout the next two decades, a more detailed picture emerged, with studies showing that children tended to compromise the psychological health of mothers more than fathers, and of single parents more than married parents.

Ouch. (Also noted above that empty-nesters significantly happier than those with children still at home)

Matthew Killingsworth, a researcher at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, has found that children also rank low on the list of people whose company their parents enjoy. As he explained it to me in a phone conversation: “Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse, which is better than interacting with other relatives, which is better than interacting with acquaintances, which is better than interacting with parents, which is better than interacting with children. Who are on par with strangers.”

I don’t buy this one.

Drawing from 1.7 million Gallup surveys collected between 2008 and 2012, researchers Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone found that parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more lows, than those without children. (They’ve just submitted their results for publication.) And when researchers bother to ask questions of a more existential nature, they find that parents report greater feelings of meaning and reward—

Sounds more like it

we assign greater value to that which is rare—and those things for which we have worked harder. (In 2010, over 61,500 kids resulted from assisted reproductive technology.) As the developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan has written, so much meticulous family planning “inevitably endows the infant with a significance considerably greater than prevailed when parents had a half-dozen children, some at inauspicious times.”

by postponing children, many modern parents are far more aware of the freedoms they’re giving up.

THERE’S A SECOND REASON our parenting experience has recently become more complicated: our work experience has gotten more complicated. We carry on with our day jobs long after we arrive home and kick off our shoes

So true.

Today, we work hard to shield children from life’s hardships. But throughout most of our country’s history, we did not. Rather, kids worked. In the earliest days of our nation, they cared for their siblings or spent time in the fields; as the country industrialized, they worked in mines and textile mills, in factories and canneries, in street trades.

Children stopped working, and parents worked twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses.

the sociologist Viviana Zelizer came up with a far more pungent phrase. She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

In 1971, for instance, a trio from Harvard observed ninety mother-toddler pairs for five hours and found that on average, mothers gave a command, told their child no, or fielded a request (often “unreasonable” or “in a whining tone”) every three minutes. Their children, in turn, obeyed on average only 60 percent of the time. This is not exactly a formula for perfect mental health.

the average age of a college-educated woman at first birth is now 30.3 years old. The report added that college-educated women “typically have their first child more than two years after marrying.” The consequence of this deferment is a heightened sense of contrast—before versus after. These parents now have an exquisite memory of what their lives were like before their children came along.

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 sleep?”

I try desperately hard not to yell, mostly because it’s not at all effective, partly because it just teaches children to yell (also undesirable). Either I do it rarely enough or I’m too little self-aware, but I rarely feel guilt over it. But it does feel like I’ve copped out when I do resort to yelling.

The grown-up response is to put a stop to the child’s mischief, because that’s the adult’s job, and that’s what civilized living is all about. Yet parents intuit, on some level, that children are meant to make messes, to be noisy, to test boundaries.

Tension between knowledge that children should play, roughhouse, make messes and wanting to keep things sane, safe, unbroken. I struggle with this too. Usually draw the lines around safety and furniture/floor integrity. And make sure to explain why I’m halting a behavior (not that it seems to stick ;) )

“One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child.”

Boredom also came up in the ECFE classes I attended, including Jessie’s, with the instructor herself confessing that she found it dull to play “My Little Pony” when her daughter was small. “That was the most negative emotion I experienced as a father,” recalls Gilbert. “Boredom. Throwing the ball back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The endless repetition, the can-you-do-it-again, the can-you-read-the-same-story-one-more-time. There were times I just thought, Give me a gun.”

I don’t remember this happening often, even when children really young. Perhaps my memory fails me though. Definitely fight against monotony and endless repetition (of books, movies, games). Help stimulate invention of new games and activities. And it’s fascinating to watch children learn and evolve and have pure joyful fun.

“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.”

Yes

She could forgo the money, forgo the satisfaction. In so doing, she could at least find relief in consolidating her time and energy into one main project—her kids—and focus on that alone, rather than feel dogged all the time by a sense of guilt. Or Jessie could make a different choice: she could scale up her business and get out of the house entirely.

Why don’t we even mention the obvious alternative: that her husband take a break in his career to let her business get off the ground? She can’t really start-stop a one-woman business and expect it to pick up right away again in eight years. However, I’d guess her husband could more easily do so because he’s /not trying to run a company/. Ugh. Or they could go the nanny route (but I’m guessing that’s not financially favorable for them?)

“My husband has the ‘I make the money, you should do everything else’ complex,” said yet another. “He’s like, ‘I’ve worked all day,’ and I’m like, Gee, I wonder what I’ve done.”

“Just, the resentment builds up,” said Angie. “And then I’ll talk to him about it, and he’s like, ‘Well, you need to do this and this and this, and then maybe I’ll feel better, and I’ll take more responsibility for the kids.’ ” “Does he know it’s not a barter system?” asked a fourth.

In 2009, four researchers analyzed the data of 132 couples from a larger study and found that roughly 90 percent of them experienced a decline in marital satisfaction after the birth of their first child—though the change, to be fair, had mainly “a small to medium negative effect” on their functioning.

How long did effect last? Till they moved out?

Still others suggest that levels of marital satisfaction are a function of how old the couple’s children are, with the early years being an especially challenging time, followed by a period of some relief during the elementary school years, followed by another plunge during the slings and arrows of adolescence.

a study that shows “household division of labor being a key source of contention between spouses.” (Mothers of children ages zero to four, they add, report the most acute feelings of unfairness.)

The researchers found that the more time fathers spent in leisure activities while they were at home, the greater their drop in cortisol at the end of the day, which came as no surprise; what did come as a surprise was that this effect wasn’t nearly as pronounced in mothers. So what, you might ask, did have a pronounced effect in mothers? Simple: Seeing their husbands do work around the house.

This is gold. Why haven’t more of us heard about this study?

Funny: I once sat on a panel with Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F**k to Sleep. About halfway through the discussion, he freely conceded that it was his partner who put his child to bed most nights. That said so much, this casual admission: he may have written a best-selling book about the tyranny of toddlers at bedtime, but in his house it was mainly Mom’s problem.

Um.

Data also make clear that a larger proportion of a mother’s child care burden is consumed with “routine” tasks (toothbrushing, feeding) than is a father’s, who is more apt to get involved in “interactive” activities, like games of catch.

Good point. But if you really work at it, you can make routines fun too. Add tradition. Or silliness. I play the silliness card. A lot.

When fathers attend to personal matters, they attend to personal matters, and when they do child care, they do child care. But mothers more often attend to personal matters while not only caring for their children but possibly fielding a call from their boss. In 2000, just 42 percent of married fathers reported multitasking “most of the time”; for married mothers, that number was 67 percent.

They found that mothers, on average, spend ten extra hours per week multitasking than fathers, “and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and childcare.” (When fathers spend time at home, on the other hand, they reduce their odds of multitasking by over 30 percent.)

Why is this (plus the one above)?

As it is, most mothers assume a disproportionate number of deadline-oriented, time-pressured domestic tasks (Dress kids, brush their teeth, drop them off at school; pick them up, take them to piano lessons at 3:00, soccer practice at 4:00, and get dinner on the table by 6:00.)

This definitely is unfair. Even if you’re the most patient and understanding parent, deadlines aren’t.

Fathers, meanwhile, feel no more rushed than men without children.

Surprises me that it’s zero difference. Believe the directional results completely though.

Women, on average, assigned a significantly larger proportion of their self-image to their mother identity than the men did to their father identity. Even women who worked full-time considered themselves more mother than worker by about 50 percent. This finding didn’t surprise Cowan and her husband—nor were they surprised, years later, when they came across a similiar study showing that mothers who carry the child in lesbian couples give over more mental real estate to their maternal identity than their partners.

The real surprise to me, however, was the testimony of stay-at-home fathers. Almost to a man, the stay-at-home dads I met in Minnesota described how challenging it was to find a network of compatriots in their brave new role. “The first year, I was incredibly isolated,” a father told his group in a fairly representative moment. “I felt weird about hanging out with other moms. I didn’t feel like I could approach them in the same way. I mean, if my wife were staying at home, she could have. But me . . .” So what did he do? “I was really, reaaaaaally nice to other dads I met at the park.”

This doesn’t surprise. I’ve mused about stay-at-home-dadness and I think this is the biggest discouraging factor. Not so might that there aren’t more men out there, but that the mothers’ circles (formal and informal) would feel so off-limits. Many mothers’ groups do not allow men (which, by the way, for two-father families is a complete blocker)

If you dive into it, you’ll discover that all American parents, even well-adjusted ones, spend a staggering amount of time each day trying to get their toddlers and preschoolers to do the right thing—as often as twenty-four times an hour, according to some studies—and that toddlers and preschoolers, even well-adjusted ones, spend a staggering amount of time resisting these efforts.

Sounds about right. I find distraction to be a great tool to use. Distract and then the steadfast resistance usually disappears when you come back to the issue at hand (usually the refusal to do something or to do something right was completely arbitrary and more about control through “no” than anything). Still, maddening.

almost all of these efforts to get children to comply are made by mothers, not by fathers, and this asymmetrical dynamic can add a low-frequency hum of resentment to a relationship, because Mom gets the job of family nag. She didn’t seek this job either. It’s a simple matter of numbers: if mothers spend more time with their children than fathers do, they’re bound to issue more commands.

Especially when mother is responsible for the deadline-driven activities, as mentioned before.

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.

(This was being compared with French system: $150/month from 18 months to 3 years, at which point they can start public school, which can extend till 5pm—wow, seems like that might bridge a fair bit of that achievement gap problem we have?).

the French and American women differed in one very significant way: the French enjoyed caring for their children a good deal more, and they spent a good deal less time doing it. In his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman speculates that this may be the case because French women have greater access to child care and “spend less of the afternoon driving children to various activities.”

“Whenever the kids are doing something where I don’t have to interact with them,” he says, “I use the time to do daily chores.”

I absolutely know how much you deal with at night, but—whether or not you’ll like to hear this answer—it’s because you wanted it that way.” Angie gives him a sheepish look. “Because of the whole cry-it-out method that I don’t want to do.” “Yah.” Angie says nothing. “After two years, you let me do it with this one”—Clint points to Eli—“and it was done in two weeks. But you didn’t want to do it with this one.” He gestures at Zay. “You had your method, and I let you have your method, but that method entails getting up very, very frequently. I didn’t want to be a part of that, just like you didn’t want to be part of cry-it-out.”

This is classic

“Okay. But I think it’s more like, you want me to endure the stuff that you’ve endured, rather than getting it done.”

More classic

This may be the reason Clint believes he does 50 percent of the child care. 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. And Angie herself is complicit, to some degree, in this increase in her workload. Before leaving for the hospital, she fretted about the relative state of disorder she’d left for Clint.

She should drop this. Also have a feeling that she is doing more. She’s still probably the default parent, sounds like especially at night.

The day before, for example, when Clint walked through the door, he was a bit miffed to discover that the kids weren’t napping. “They should be sleeping right now,” he told me after Angie had gone, looking slightly defeated. That pressure Angie feels to give Clint his free time is not imagined.

He should drop this

Though he may be unaware of it, Clint is exploiting Angie’s guilt, or at the very least recognizes he benefits from it.

Yes, sounds like it. Also gets him out of night duty, which is probably the most taxing on Angie’s sanity. Maybe they /should/ set up a cot for her so she doesn’t hear the crying. It’ll last only a week or so.

In his parenting memoir Home Game, Michael Lewis shrewdly notes that all it takes for a couple to start fighting, really, is for them to go out to dinner with another couple whose domestic division of labor is slightly different from their own. “In these putatively private matters, people constantly reference public standards,” he writes. “They don’t care if they’re getting a raw deal so long as everyone is getting the same deal.”

Not universally true. Many couples more mature than this, but can be source of some pointed humor and elbow-jabbing. Maybe that can lead to small changes too?

Overscheduling has earned more than its share of critics, who fear it makes kids anxious and robs them of the glories of imaginative idling and unstructured play. But few critics think to ask what kind of harm such overzealous planning might be doing to children’s parents. Yes, those parents are usually the ones responsible for the family schedules and are therefore complicit in the problem.

Yes, self-imposed problem. To what ends?

according to Shelley Correll, a Stanford sociologist who looks at gender inequities in the labor force, the wage gap between mothers and childless women who are otherwise equally qualified is now greater than the wage gap between women and men generally.

Any gap at all for fathers/childless?

It was a woman in Minnesota who clarified this shift for me. She pointed out that her mother called herself a housewife. She, on the other hand, called herself a stay-at-home mom. The change in nomenclature reflects the shift in cultural emphasis: the pressures on women have gone from keeping an immaculate house to being an irreproachable mom.

I would’ve pointed out the wife vs mom bit. One has house, the other home, which doesn’t seem to me a big difference. But point still makes sense. Time has shifted from housework to parenting for many women.

today’s fathers work longer hours than their counterparts without kids (forty-seven hours per week versus forty-four) and that they’re far more likely than non-dads to do fifty-plus-hour workweeks (42 versus 33 percent). Most surprising, however, is the report’s finding about work-family conflict: today men are more apt to experience it than women, especially if they’re in dual-earner couples.

Parents probably wouldn’t be so frantic about making children happy if their children had more concrete roles within the family. Writing in 1977, Jerome Kagan remarked that the modern, useless child cannot “point to a plowed field or a full woodpile as a sign of his utility.” Hence, he predicted (with uncanny prescience), children were at risk of becoming overly dependent on praise and repeated declarations of love to build their confidence.

Interesting. But don’t children have concrete achievements in their activities, sports, academics, hobbies? Or is there some need for children to have “adult” achievements?

Parenting pressures have resculpted our priorities so dramatically that we simply forget. In 1975 couples spent, on average, 12.4 hours alone together per week. By 2000 they spent only nine. What happens, as this number shrinks, is that our expectations shrink with it. Couple-time becomes stolen time, snatched in the interstices or piggybacked onto other pursuits.

Ask the Children: What America’s Children Really Think About Working Parents. The data were quite clear: 85 percent of Americans may believe that parents don’t spend enough time with their kids, but just 10 percent of the kids in Galinsky’s survey wanted more time with their mothers, and just 16 percent wanted more time with their dads. A full 34 percent, however, wished their mothers would be “less stressed.”

Time with parents may be largely nagging and shuffling them about so perhaps children don’t even have pleasant associations with time with parents? Also, not surprised that the teenager portion of the cohort 8-18 year olds in survey) would say no to more parent time ;)