All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

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 hard part is to make peace with that misty zone and to recognize that no life—no life worth living anyway—is free of constraints.

René Descartes once said that a person has to start over in order to do philosophy properly. “That is hard for adults,” writes Matthews, who taught philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for more than three decades. “It is unnecessary for children.” Children have nothing to unlearn. Matthews gives a perfect example—the concept of time—and quotes St. Augustine: “What, then, is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. But if I want to explain it to a questioner, I am baffled.”

Children, in a funny way, became the first true members of the information economy. Schoolwork, which corresponded little to the life skills needed to run the house, became their area of greatest expertise.

As far as a child is concerned, Mead writes, “all one can do is to make him strong and well-equipped to go prospecting for himself.”

In her work, Nancy Darling offers a nuanced analysis of what, precisely, makes the adolescent struggle for autonomy so contentious. Most kids, she notes, have no objections when their parents try to enforce moral standards or societal conventions. Don’t hit, be kind, clean up, ask to be excused—all this is considered fair game. The same goes for issues of safety: kids don’t consider it a boundary violation if they’re told to wear seat belts. What children object to are attempts to regulate more personal preferences, matters of taste: the music they listen to, the entertainments they pursue, the company they keep. When children are young, these personal preferences don’t tend to cause parents too much anxiety because they’re benign in most cases. Barney? Annoying, but unobjectionable. That little boy across the way? A little rowdy, but a decent kid. The Jonas Brothers? Cloying, but a little syrup never hurt anyone. The problem, says Darling, is that during adolescence questions of preference start to bleed into questions of morality and safety, and it often becomes impossible to discern where the line is: That kid you’re hanging out with? I don’t like how he drives or the stuff he’s introducing you to. Those games you’re playing? I don’t like all the violence and disgusting messages they’re sending about women. Even an issue as banal as wearing jeans to church, Darling writes in one of her blog posts on this subject, is a humdinger. Is that a matter of personal expression? ...

Long gone are the days when the fights started with, “I got the baby last night,” or, “What were you doing all day?” Either directly or indirectly, the fights increasingly revolve around who the child is, or is becoming. Projection is now possible. Identification is now possible. Which means that competitiveness, envy, disgust—all are possible, all can rear their heads. These aren’t feelings evoked by younger children. They’re brought on by other adults.

Steinberg likens teenagers to cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes. “And then parents are going to get into tussles with their teenagers,” says Steinberg, “because they’re going to try to be the brakes.”

Complicating matters, adolescent brains are more susceptible to substance abuse and dependence than adult brains, because they’re making so many new synaptic connections and sloshing around with so much dopamine. Pretty much all quasi-vices to which human beings turn for relief and escape—drinking, drugs, video games, porn—have longer-lasting and more intense effects in teenagers.

There have always been mothers leafing through their daughters’ diaries and fathers poking around their sons’ rooms for hidden cigarettes. But snooping now feels obligatory, rather than desultory, and therefore extra-intrusive; it’s also work. There’s usually more than one device or platform to consider monitoring (Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, phone texts, phone photos, Twitter feeds, Xbox hours), and almost all require a touch of savvy to do it. The women at Deirdre’s went around and around about this question, debating the ethics of surveillance (or “creeping,” as kids call it). One woman said she promised her daughter that she’d never read her Facebook page and stuck to it; another said that she never made such a promise and spied all the time. But it wasn’t until Deirdre spoke that a larger emotional truth seemed to crystallize for all of them: the challenge, they realized, wasn’t just about giving themselves license to snoop, but about accepting what they’d find.

Meaning, joy, and purpose come from a great variety of sources, not just children. But what’s important here is Marilyn’s more basic observation: a single word, “happiness,” often cannot fully capture these feelings—or countless other emotions that make us feel transcendently human. The awed, otherworldly feeling you get when your infant looks directly into your eyes for the first time is different from the sense of pride you experience when that same kid, years later, lands a perfect double axel, which in turn is different from the sensation of warmth and belonging that consumes you when your widely dispersed family gathers for Thanksgiving. You can try to quantify each of these feelings with a number, certainly, and I don’t underestimate the value of such attempts, for the sake of figuring out ways to get more of them. But in the end, a number is just that—a digit, plotted on a graph. It may reflect the degree to which we feel something, but it entirely lacks dimensionality. These feelings do not strike me as the same in kind. Some, like joy, can hurt almost as much as they elate; others, like duty, run silently in the background, perhaps making our day-to-day lives more difficult, but making our overall lives more worthwhile and more consonant with our values.

Raising children makes us reassess this obsession and perhaps redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness is. The very things Americans are told almost daily to aspire to may in fact be misguided. (There’s that line in Raiders of the Lost Ark that Sallah and Indiana Jones utter in unison: “They’re digging in the wrong place.”) As we muddle our way through the parenting years—trying to make sense of our new role in the age of the priceless child, trying to execute that role in a culture that provides so little support for working and nonworking parents alike—it is very worth asking: what are we digging for, and what have we found?