All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

Though he may be unaware of it, Clint is exploiting Angie’s guilt, or at the very least recognizes he benefits from it. On their mutual days off, he admits, “I’m more quick to say, ‘I want to do something.’ Whereas she’s less quick to do that.” But if he knows he’s more aggressive about claiming his leisure time, and he knows that Angie is perpetually exhausted, why doesn’t he yield some of his leisure time to his wife? This is a strange moment for fatherdom. There’s increasing pressure for men to be actively involved in the affairs of the home, but there’s no precise standard for how much involvement is enough. In his parenting memoir Home Game, Michael Lewis shrewdly notes that all it takes for a couple to start fighting, really, is for them to go out to dinner with another couple whose domestic division of labor is slightly different from their own. “In these putatively private matters, people constantly reference public standards,” he writes. “They don’t care if they’re getting a raw deal so long as everyone is getting the same deal.” The problem with modern parenting, he says, is that “there are no standards and it’s possible that there never again will be.”