All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

When I first meet Vaillant in Boston, he’s dressed in a cheerful blue sweater with holes in it, which seem of a piece with his cheerful, slightly abstracted demeanor. He has dense eyebrows, lively eyes, and an unusually erect bearing for a fellow of seventy-seven. “Your generation can’t imagine a world without attachment,” he tells me as we settle down to chat. “But fancy: before, when behavioral scientists wrote about love, it was all sex.” He’s primarily talking about Freud and Skinner, who couldn’t begin to examine the love between parent and child without seeing eroticism. “They couldn’t conceptualize attachment.” Yet that’s exactly where joy comes from, according to Vaillant: attachment. In his book Spiritual Evolution, he writes, “Joy is connection,” simple as that. Joy is very different from the kind of pleasure one gets from pursuing excitement or satisfying a drive. Those pleasures tend to be intense and ephemeral. “It’s how Freud saw sex,” says Vaillant. “A full prostate, and releasing it is glorious.”