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
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