All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

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.

In 2004, five researchers, including the Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, did a study showing which activities gave 909 working women in Texas the most pleasure. Child care ranked sixteenth out of nineteen—behind preparing food, behind watching TV, behind napping, behind shopping, behind housework.

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.

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.

We’re all the sum of our experiences, and raising children plays an enormous part in making us who we are. For some of us, perhaps the largest part.

Even if our dreams were never realizable, even if they were false from the start, we regret not pursuing them.

“We can’t imagine our lives,” writes Phillips, “without the unlived lives they contain.” And so we ask: What if I just keep driving?

For me, this finding raises a question: assuming that parents spend a great deal of time fighting off the urge to sleep—and the urge to sleep is one of the two most common urges that adults try to fight (the other being the urge to eat)—then 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?”

They do not care, when told they can’t have another bag of potato chips, that life is long and teeming with potato chips. They want them now, because now is where they live.

“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.”

“work becomes the engine and the person the caboose, despite all this so-called freedom and efficiency.”

But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.

But our non-virtual ties are another matter. In 2006, a survey in the American Sociological Review famously reported that the average number of people with whom Americans could “discuss important matters” dropped from three to two between 1985 and 2004, and that the number of Americans who felt they had no confidants at all had more than doubled, from 10 to 24.6 percent.

Without the pop-in, without the vibrant presence of neighbors, without life in the cul-de-sacs and the streets, the pressure reverts back to the nuclear family—and more specifically, to the marriage or partnership—to provide what friends, neighbors, and other families once did: games, diversions, imaginative play. And parents have lost some of the fellowship provided by other adults.

“Everyone is moving at the same speed toward the future. But your children are moving at that same speed with their eyes closed. So you’re the ones who’ve got to steer.”

Perhaps the explanation for this is a simple one, anchored in a basic developmental reality: early childhood is when we first gain control of our bodies and develop our motor skills. But in some ways, that’s the point. Toddlers and preschoolers acquire knowledge in ways that are inseparable from their physical experiences. This is the time when it’s easiest to see what we human beings may truly be—“inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down,” as Crawford suggests. By spending time with young children—building forts and baking cakes, whacking baseballs and making sand castles—we’re afforded, in some respects, the opportunity to be our most human. This is who we are. Creatures who use tools, creatures who create, creatures who build.

Children remind us just how much of our implicit knowledge, which hums inaudibly in the background all day long, is stuff we once had to learn. They climb into the bathtub partially clothed, put half-eaten bananas in the refrigerator, use toys in ways the manufacturer never intended. (So you want to mix those paints rather than make pictures with them? Lay stickers on top of one another rather than lay them out side by side? Use dominos as blocks, cars as flying machines, tutus as bridal veils? Knock yourself out!) No one has yet told them otherwise. To children, the whole universe is a controlled experiment.

PAGE 1 OF The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis makes a distinction between what he calls Gift-love and Need-love. “The typical example of Gift-love,” he writes, “would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother’s arms.”

It took a while for it to occur to her that perhaps it didn’t matter, that her daughter would be just fine.

Lower-income parents, she noticed, give orders and directives. Middle-class parents give choices and negotiate.

More generally, writes Mintz, “one defining feature of young people’s lives today is that they spend more time alone than their predecessors.” They grow up in smaller families (22 percent of American children today are only children). They are more likely to have their own rooms than children in generations past, and to live in larger homes, which means the very architecture of their lives conspires against socializing with other family members. They also live in a nation of suburbs and exurbs, where neighbors and friends live farther away.

But because middle-class children today occupy privileged positions within the family, and because their parents have overextended themselves on their behalf, kids sense that they have the power to make their boredom their parents’ responsibility. Lareau noticed this immediately too. “Middle-class children,” she writes, “often feel entitled to adult attention and intervention in their play.”

It was enough that they mended their kids’ clothes, fed them, taught them to do good, and prepared them for the rigors of the world. It was only after parents’ primary obligations to their kids had been completely outsourced—to public schools, to pediatricians, to supermarkets, to the Gap—that the emotional needs of their children came sharply into focus. In Raising America, Ann Hulbert cites the 1930s sociologist Ernest Groves, who observed: “Relieved of having to carry out all the details of child-care in all their ramifications, the family today can concentrate on the more important responsibilities which no other institution can perform—direction, stimulation, and loving friendship.”

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.

It was as if the child, by leaving center stage, redirected the spotlight onto the parent’s own life, exposing what was fulfilling about it and what was not.

Inevitably, we see ourselves in our kids. And then we see our partner acting toward our child the way our partner acts toward us. Like, let’s say Mom is upset with Dad because he hasn’t been very ambitious—he’s a little lazy, hasn’t made it in the world the way he should have. And then she sees her adolescent son showing similar qualities of not taking initiative. She might be angry at the dad for not being a better role model for him, and fears he may be turning into a slacker too. But if you take Dad’s point of view, he sees Mom being critical of the son the way she’s critical of him, and he’s protective of the son. That tends to be one of the worst-case scenarios of parenting conflict we see clinically [emphasis mine].

But looking at Mae, one also sees fairly clearly what Adam Phillips means in On Balance when he says that 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.”

raising happy children is an elusive aim compared to the more concrete aims of parenting in the past: creating competent children in certain kinds of work; and creating morally responsible citizens who will fulfill a prescribed set of community obligations.

The fact is, those bygone goals are probably more constructive—and achievable. Not all children will grow up to be happy, in spite of their parents’ most valiant efforts, and all children are unhappy somewhere along the way, no matter how warmly they’re nurtured or how stoutly they’re protected.

Joy is about being warm, not hot.

“Excitement, sexual ecstasy, and happiness all speed up the heart; joy and cuddling slow the heart.”

not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.” And that’s what choosing parenthood does: gives strength and structural integrity to one’s life through meaningful tension.

we enshrine things in memory very differently from how we experience them in real time.