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May 6 - May 6, 2025
Transition to Parenthood.” 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,
“All joy and no fun” is how a friend with two young kids described it.
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.
Children stopped working, and parents worked twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses.
She was simply craving a few perks of her old life. But they were hard to come by with three small children in the house.
They’re the bunker years, short in the scheme of things but often endless-seeming in real time.
just two bad nights, and blam, I was halfway down the loonytown freeway to hysterical exhaustion.)
the emotional consequences of sleep loss are powerful enough to have earned their own analysis
No matter which study they’re consulting, though, most researchers agree that the sleep patterns of new parents are fragmented, unpredictable, and just plain rotten, failing to do the one thing we love most about sleep, which is to restore the body and mind. As I noted in the introduction, just
a brief period of sleep deprivation compromises a person’s performance as much as consuming excess alcohol.
“Me and my husband, the relationship is just horrible now. He doesn’t understand I’m at my breaking point.
“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.
division of labor being a key source of contention between spouses.” (Mothers of children ages zero to four, they add, report the most acute feelings of unfairness.)
In the early days of infancy, motherhood can be especially isolating, with mother and child forming a closed loop. Modern
Summers can be even worse, because there are full days to fill.
Most parents know that summer camp today isn’t the summer camp of yore, filled with tetherball and relay races and inedible Jell-O snacks. Camp has become a week-to-week series of immersion courses, each designed to nurture strengths and open minds.
So how to account for this steady trend toward a more exhaustive—and exhausting—style of parenting? One explanation is straightforward: we are having fewer children, which means we have more time for each child.
We live in a nation of sprawl, which means our children’s friends are farther apart, making it tempting to enroll our children in organized activities just to give them a chance to socialize.
