All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

But there’s a difference between viewing our children as a continuation of our own DNA and burdening them with our hopes, which may or may not be met. Those who let go of having too many personal expectations may in fact have a healthier attitude toward child-rearing. In his memoir Family Romance, the English novelist and critic John Lanchester makes a beautiful plea. Specifically, he calls for a revival of the concept of duty. “ ‘Duty,’ ” he writes, “is one of those words that has more or less vanished from our culture. It—the word, and perhaps the thing as well—exists only in specific ghettos like the armed services.” And then he turns, almost instinctively, to the topic of caring for others: We often prefer to use “care” or “carer” for people who would once have thought that what they were doing, in, say, looking after incapacitated relatives, was a duty. To call the act of changing someone’s soiled underclothing a work of caring can make you feel as if you should be doing it because you want to do it, whereas the idea that you’re doing it because it’s your duty makes it more impersonal and therefore—to my mind, anyway—a lighter burden. It leaves you free to dislike what you are doing while still feeling that you are doing the right thing in doing it. Children are not the same as incapacitated relatives. And Lanchester is not saying, at any rate, that caring for others can’t be pleasurable, or that it can’t be something one very much wants to do. But by removing ple...