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May 17 - August 7, 2018
parents are no happier than nonparents, and in certain cases are considerably less happy.
“We knew where babies came from, but we didn’t know what they were like
parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more lows, than those without children.
Children strain our everyday lives, in other words, but also deepen them. “All joy and no fun” is how a friend with two young kids described it.
Because so many of us are now avid volunteers for a project in which we were all once dutiful conscripts, we have heightened expectations of what children will do for us, regarding them as sources of existential fulfillment rather than as ordinary parts of our lives.
by postponing children, many modern parents are far more aware of the freedoms they’re giving up.
Many women can’t tell whether they’re supposed to be grateful for the help they’re getting or enraged by the help they’re failing to receive; many men, meanwhile, are struggling to adjust to the same work-life rope-a-dope as their wives, now that they too are expected to show up for Gymboree.
Children stopped working, and parents worked twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses.
She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”
(When I first read Phillips’s observations about the parallels between children and madmen, it so happened that my son, three at the time, was screaming from his room, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Wear. PANTS.”)
“I realized,” he said, “that being a parent consists, in large part, of correcting the growth pattern of a person who is not necessarily ready to live in a civilized society.”
“When couples struggle,” she writes, “it is seldom simply over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude.”
After examining parental well-being levels across twenty-eight European nations, he and his colleagues concluded that “in general, the happiness that people derive from parenthood is positively associated with availability of childcare.”
The information economy has made such a fetish of “knowledge work” that people no longer experience the joys afforded by knowing how to do things with their hands.
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.”
Nora Ephron put it this way in 2006: “Parenting [is] not simply about raising a child, it [is] about transforming a child, force-feeding it like a foie gras goose.”
It is unrealistic, I think—and by “unrealistic” I mean it is a demand that cannot be met—to assume that if all goes well in a child’s life, he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn’t make you happy; but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children, I think, suffer—in a way that adults don’t always realize—under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy, which is the pressure not to make their parents unhappy, or more unhappy than they already are.
