All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

She noted that when it comes to having a child, there is no equivalent of courtship, which one does before marriage, or job training, which one does before, say, becoming a nurse. The baby simply appears, “fragile and mysterious” and “totally dependent.”

women are more likely than men to feel “always rushed,” and that married mothers are 2.2 times more likely to feel “sometimes or always rushed” than single women without children. (Free time does nothing to ease mothers’ feelings of enervation either—it in fact makes things worse.) Fathers, meanwhile, feel no more rushed than men without children.

“The woman who chafes at the monotony of child rearing (and I’m assuming that most mothers do at times) is really beset from two directions: the separation from adult companions, and being bottled up with the continual demands of the children. I don’t think Nature ever intended the association to be quite so exclusive.”

They also create wormholes in time, transporting their mothers and fathers back to feelings and sensations they haven’t had since they themselves were young. The dirty secret about adulthood is the sameness of it, its tireless adherence to routines and customs and norms.

Reading curious George

“manual competence” are of great interest to Crawford. In his book, he argues that “the experience of making things and fixing things” is essential to our well-being, to our flourishing (to use his word), and that something happens “when such experiences recede from our common life.” He quotes the philosopher Albert Borgmann, who makes the distinction between “things” and “devices.” Things are objects we master; devices are objects that do the work for us. “The stereo as a device contrasts with the instrument as a thing,” Borgmann writes. “A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption.”

In addition, Steinberg has found that adolescence is especially rough on parents who don’t have an outside interest, whether it be work or a hobby, to absorb their interests as their child is pulling away.

As Mae was growing up, Gayle conveyed to her the idea that she could go to any college she wanted, so long as she worked hard enough. It was a useful illusion, one spun primarily out of love—to make Mae feel secure, to make her feel optimistic, to make her feel confident and powerful and motivated in a world that is in fact sometimes scary and hard to navigate.

happiness is an unfair thing to ask of a child. The expectation casts children “as antidepressants,” he notes, and renders parents “more dependent on their children than their children are on them.”

“It’s not a full happiness. It’s not a full sorrow. It’s a full parenthood. It’s what you have when you have kids.”

“Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight we put on experiences?” he asked the audience. “This is a bit hard to justify, I think.” But perhaps the answer is obvious: children. The remembering self ensures that we’ll keep having them. More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves.

But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.

He’s spoken to hundreds of adult men and women, collecting their narratives, looking for patterns. “And the most common high point for midlife adults,” he tells me, “is the birth of a first child.” That’s true for both men and women.

Feeling of elation optimism possibility when we first got home from hospital

the existential. What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal a life as possible, only with more pancakes.”

helped reduce the number of existential questions she had in the first place. She knew what she had to do each day, and why she was here. And the same was true of Sharon. Even at her weakest—even when she was well past the point of charging through the sprinklers at the splash pad or hoisting Cam onto a jungle gym—she knew exactly what she was supposed to be doing with her last moments of strength. She was supposed to be watching Curious George with Cam.