All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

Child care ranked sixteenth out of nineteen—behind preparing food, behind watching TV, behind napping, behind shopping, behind housework. In an ongoing study, Matthew Killingsworth, a researcher at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, has found that children also rank low on the list of people whose company their parents enjoy. As he explained it to me in a phone conversation: “Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse, which is better than interacting with other relatives, which is better than interacting with acquaintances, which is better than interacting with parents, which is better than interacting with children. Who are on par with strangers.”

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.

A popular but uncharitable way to interpret this change is to say that modern child-rearing has become a narcissistic undertaking. But there’s a slightly more sympathetic way to think about this change too: by postponing children, many modern parents are far more aware of the freedoms they’re giving up.

percent. That women bring home the bacon, fry it up, serve it for breakfast, and use its greasy remains to make candles for their children’s science projects is hardly news.

And while today’s fathers are more engaged with their children than fathers in any previous generation, they’re charting a blind course, navigating by trial and, just as critically, error. 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.

The way most historians describe this transformation is to say that the child went from “useful” to “protected.” But the sociologist Viviana Zelizer came up with a far more pungent phrase. She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

ONE DAY YOU ARE a paragon of self-determination, coming and going as you please; the next, you are a parent, laden with gear and unhooked from the rhythms of normal adult life.

Until fairly recently, what parents wanted was utterly beside the point. But we now live in an age when the map of our desires has gotten considerably larger, and we’ve been told it’s our right (obligation, in fact) to try to fulfill them.

“The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do.” 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.”

I've thought of something like this in the past, that modern life leaves so many opportunities for second guessing and regret.

These parents now have an exquisite memory of what their lives were like before their children came along. They spent roughly a decade on their own, experimenting with different jobs, romantic partners, and living arrangements. That’s twice as long as many of them spent in college.

But there’s a profound difference between sustained sleep loss and the occasional bad night. David Dinges, one of the country’s foremost experts on partial sleep deprivation, says that the population seems to divide roughly in thirds when it comes to prolonged sleep loss: those who handle it fairly well, those who sort of fall apart, and those who respond catastrophically. The problem is, most prospective parents have no clue which type they are until their kids come along. (Personally, I was the third type—just two bad nights, and blam, I was halfway down the loonytown freeway to hysterical exhaustion.)

Whatever type you may be—and Dinges suspects it’s a fixed trait, evenly distributed between women and men

This is relating to the three groups of humans different reactions to sleep deprivation.

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?

NO GRAPH IN THE world can do full justice to these unexpected moments. They’re sweet little bursts of grace, and they leave sense-memories on the skin (the smell of the child’s shampoo, the smoothness of his arms). That’s why we’re here, leading this life, isn’t it? To know this kind of enchantment? The question is why such moments, at least with small children, often feel so hard-won, so shatterable, and so fleeting, as if located between parentheses. After just a few minutes of this dreamy slow-dance with Abe, William does a face-plant and starts howling. Jessie sambas over and handles it with humor. This is the drill. I’d like to propose a possible explanation for why these moments of grace are so rare: the early years of family life don’t offer up many activities that lend themselves to what psychologists call “flow.” Simply put, flow is a state of being in which we are so engrossed in the task at hand—so fortified by our own sense of agency, of mastery—that we lose all sense of our surroundings, as though time has stopped.

Eventually, Csikszentmihalyi began to notice common patterns in flow experience. Most flow experiences occur, for example, during situations that are “goal-oriented and bounded by rules.” In fact, most activities that lend themselves to flow are designed to maximally engage our attention and expand our competence—like athletics or intense work. “They have rules that require the learning of skills,” he writes in Flow, his 1990 book on the subject. “They set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible.”

Boredom can be an awkward topic for parents. It feels like a betrayal to admit that time spent with one’s children isn’t always stimulating. But even Benjamin Spock, the cuddly pediatrician who dominated the child-rearing advice market for the second half of the twentieth century, talked about it.

After finishing Flow, the reader comes away with the unmistakable impression that most people find themselves in flow when they’re alone. Csikszentmihalyi talks about fishing, cycling, and rock climbing; about solving equations, playing music, and writing poems. As a rule, the experiences he describes do not involve much social interaction, least of all with children.

I was so struck by Flow’s negative implications for parents that I decided I wanted to speak to Csikszentmihalyi, just to make sure I wasn’t misreading him. And eventually I did, at a conference in Philadelphia where he was one of the marquee speakers. As we sat down to chat, the first thing I asked was why he talked so little about family life in Flow. He devotes only ten pages to it. “Let me tell you a couple of things that may be relevant to you,” he said. And then he told a personal story. When Csikszentmihalyi first developed the Experience Sampling Method, one of the first people he tried it out on was himself. “And at the end of the week,” he said, “I looked at my responses, and one thing that suddenly was very strange to me was that every time I was with my two sons, my moods were always very, very negative.” His sons weren’t toddlers at that point either. They were older. “And I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense to me, because I’m very proud of them, and we have a good relationship.’ ” But then he started to look at what, specifically,

he was doing with his sons that made his feelings so negative. “And what was I doing?” he asked. “I was saying, ‘It’s time to get up, or you will be late for school.’ Or, ‘You haven’t put away your cereal dish from breakfast.’ ” He was nagging, in other words, and nagging is not a flow activity. “I realized,” he said, “that being a parent consists, in large part, of correcting the growth...

JUST A FEW GENERATIONS ago, most people didn’t wake up in the morning and fret about whether or not they were living their lives to the fullest. Freedom has always been built into the American experiment, of course, but the freedom to take off and go rock-climbing for the afternoon, or to study engineering, or even to sneak in ten minutes for ourselves in the morning to read the paper—these kinds of freedoms were not, until very recently, built into our private universes of anticipation. It’s important to remember that. If most of us don’t know what to do with our abundant choices and the pressures we feel to make the most of them, it may simply be because they’re so new.

People are often surprised to hear this, assuming that women had no agency at all until the late 1960s, with the blooming of the women’s movement. But in The Way We Never Were, the historian Stephanie Coontz shows that women worked outside the home steadily, and in increasing numbers, throughout the twentieth century. The 1950s, putatively the golden age of the family, were the real anomaly: the median age of women at first marriage fell to twenty (in 1940, it was twenty-three); birth rates increased (the number of women with three or more children doubled over twenty years); and women started dropping out of college at a much faster rate than men.

If this is how you conceive of liberty—as freedom from obligation—then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. 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.

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.

The Institute for American Values points out that one is more likely to be happy raising children as part of a couple than raising them alone, and that’s true. It’s also true that most marriages tend to decline over time, children or not. But pretty much all research suggests that, on average, the marital satisfaction curve bends noticeably the moment a child is born. Some studies say that parenthood merely hastens a decline already in progress, while others say that parenthood exaggerates it. Still others suggest that levels of marital satisfaction are a function of how old the couple’s children are, with the early years being an especially challenging time, followed by a period of some relief during the elementary school years, followed by another plunge during the slings and arrows of adolescence. Yet there’s surprisingly little discussion about any of these theories in mainstream parenting books, other than cloying bromides (schedule date nights!).

E. Mark Cummings, one of the authors, suspects that the reason for such open conflict is fairly straightforward: “When parents are really angry, they don’t have the self-control to go behind closed doors.” And maybe it’s as simple as that. But I have another theory, one that’s born less of quantitative analysis than of personal experience and interviews with strangers: I suspect that parents argue more aggressively in front of their children because children are a mute, ever-present reminder of life’s stakes. A fight about a husband’s lack of professional initiative or a wife’s harsh tone with her daughter is no longer just a fight about work habits or disciplinary styles. It’s a fight about the future—about what kind of role models they are, about what kind of people they aspire to be, about who and what they want their children to become. Do you want your son to see a father who finds the world an intimidating place and doesn’t have the gumption to ask for a raise? If

I’m here because Angie and her husband, Clint, both do shift work, and shift work considerably aggravates the challenges of keeping a marriage intact while raising small children. It makes each parent feel like a single parent, with each tending separately to the kids and then heading off to a job without any help from the other. The arrangement is a formula for exhaustion, and it creates a scarcity economy on days off, pitting spouses against one another over who gets the easier assignments on the to-do list and who gets the spare hour for a bike ride or a nap. Each parent is convinced that he or she has had the more difficult week.

What’s interesting is that many couples with young children say they’re leading separate lives, even if their schedules are synchronized: they each take different children in the mornings and evenings; on weekends, they split carpooling and chores.

In 2000, nearly one-third of all married women reported that their husbands did more than half the housework, versus 22 percent in 1980. Over the same twenty-year span, the number of husbands who did no housework at all dropped by nearly half.

Hochschild could see that repeated—and often touchy, and sometimes failed—attempts to recalibrate the workload had terribly messy emotional consequences.

“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.”

I see this repeated elsewhere over and over, this seems the one key of getting through marriage esp with kids

The deeper problem such women face is that they cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands. Like Nancy Holt, many women carry into their marriage the distasteful and unwieldy burden of resenting their husbands. Like some hazardous waste produced by a harmful system, this powerful resentment is hard to dispose of.

The result was a mother lode of data about families and their habits, and it generated dozens of studies. In one of them, the researchers took saliva samples from almost all of the participating parents, hoping to measure their levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The researchers found that the more time fathers spent in leisure activities while they were at home, the greater their drop in cortisol at the end of the day, which came as no surprise; what did come as a surprise was that this effect wasn’t nearly as pronounced in mothers. So what, you might ask, did have a pronounced effect in mothers? Simple: Seeing their husbands do work around the house.

Funny: I once sat on a panel with Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F**k to Sleep. About halfway through the discussion, he freely conceded that it was his partner who put his child to bed most nights. That said so much, this casual admission: he may have written a best-selling book about the tyranny of toddlers at bedtime, but in his house it was mainly Mom’s problem.

But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a husband and wife do work the same number of hours. That is not, in and of itself, an indicator of fairness. In the context of marriage, fairness is not just about absolute equality. It’s about the perception of equality.

This is tricky, people are naturally tilted towards underestimating work of others and overestimating their own.. but the perception of equality is what leads to contentedness with a partner.

This is another thing that quantitative studies of American time use cannot show you: for the majority of mothers, time is fractured and subdivided, as if streaming through a prism; for the majority of fathers, it moves in an unbent line. When fathers attend to personal matters, they attend to personal matters, and when they do child care, they do child care. But mothers more often attend to personal matters while not only caring for their children but possibly fielding a call from their boss.

Women, on average, assigned a significantly larger proportion of their self-image to their mother identity than the men did to their father identity.

What did surprise the Cowans, however, was what this visualization exercise portended for the hundred or so couples in their sample: the greater the disparity between how a mother and father sliced up the pie when their child was six months old, the more dissatisfied they were in their marriage one year later.

This is something I've ancedotaly observed too.

It’s worth noting that children would almost certainly be easier on marriages if couples didn’t rely so much on one another for social support. But unfortunately, they do. What this means, all too often, is that parents can feel awfully alone, especially moms.

Think this is a big takeaway, our shitty societal setup over the past few decades is leaving us asking our partners for too much.

The net result has been the death of the “pop-in,” to recruit a term of Jerry Seinfeld’s, whereby the Kramers and Elaines of the world show up unexpectedly at your doorstep bearing gossip and harmless, unhurried conversation. In the mid- to late seventies, the average American entertained friends at home fourteen to fifteen times per year, according to Bowling Alone; by the late nineties, that number had split nearly in half, to eight.

Community is really important, and the way american lives (part. suburbs) are laid out as well as social structure make casual conversations harder to come by. Some people notice the lack of this when they go from dorm apartment life to post-college.

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.

Weakened family ties have all sorts of consequences for parents. They affect, for instance, women’s workforce attachment: married women with kids in elementary school or younger are 4 to 10 percent more likely to work if they live near their mothers or mothers-in-law. The social lives of parents are also affected: without the most reliable, most psychologically reassuring, and (above all) most affordable form of babysitting—namely, grandparents—a simple evening out with one’s spouse is a much harder sell.

If you dive into it, you’ll discover that all American parents, even well-adjusted ones, spend a staggering amount of time each day trying to get their toddlers and preschoolers to do the right thing—as often as twenty-four times an hour, according to some studies—and that toddlers and preschoolers, even well-adjusted ones, spend a staggering amount of time resisting these efforts.

It may seem strange to bring up studies about child compliance in a chapter about marriage. But not if you consider one very salient fact: almost all of these efforts to get children to comply are made by mothers, not by fathers, and this asymmetrical dynamic can add a low-frequency hum of resentment to a relationship, because Mom gets the job of family nag. She didn’t seek this job either. It’s a simple matter of numbers: if mothers spend more time with their children than fathers do, they’re bound to issue more commands. (Put your shoes on. Are you going to pick that up, or are you waiting for the house elf to get it? Where on earth did you find that, and whatever it is, please take it out of your mouth.) Even more insidiously, compliance requests tend to be about time-sensitive matters. (Put on your coat, we have to leave. Brush your teeth, it’s getting late.) And mothers feel quite rushed as it is.

Pamela Druckerman, author of the 2012 best-seller Bringing Up Bébé, would argue that American mothers frequently lock horns with their children because they don’t know how to discipline them with the same firmness that the French bring to the task. No doubt there’s some truth to this observation. How children behave is always culturally mediated. But what interests me is that mothers give most of the orders, and this compliance literature makes it clear that giving those orders is taxing and stressful.

“May I just speak up on behalf of dads?” The women smiled. Sure. “I think they need the chance to make mistakes,” he said. “They’ll say that they’ll try to help with laundry, and then, once, they’ll ruin some item they were supposed to hand-wash, and they’re cut off from doing the laundry forever.”

And he did. All relationships benefit from generosity. (Nor do kids stop growing if they’re fed peanut butter and jelly for dinner.) But the women had a point too. What they were responding to, really, was Daniel Gilbert’s observation from chapter 1. “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.” Typically, it’s the mothers who takes the wheel.

Here lies yet another explanation for the happiness gap between mothers and fathers. It’s not necessarily the quantity of time mothers spend with their children that’s the problem. It’s how they spend it.

This is speaking to how mothers are more likely to be multitasking and constant "with" their children while Dads serial-task.

As mercilessly unsentimental as it is to say this, children would have less of an impact on marriage if the institution itself weren’t so heavily burdened by romantic expectations—which, as we saw in chapter 1, are relatively new. Before the late eighteenth century, marriage was a public institution, inseparable from raising families and binding individuals to the broader community. But sometime around the late eighteenth century, as Jane Austen was completing her first draft of Pride and Prejudice, a different idea began to take shape: marriage was for love. Today, 94 percent of singles in their twenties believe that spouses should be soul mates “first and foremost,” according to a 2001 Gallup poll, while just 16 percent believe that children are the primary objective of marriage.

This is speaking to the modern romantic ideal of a marriage is diametrically opposed to what children bring.