All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

Durkheim thought a lot about the benefits of social ties. It wasn’t just the bonds between parents and children that interested him, but the bonds between adults and larger institutions. Without them, people feel rootless, disoriented; he described their condition as “anomie.” Today we think of that word as synonymous with alienation, but that’s not what Durkheim was talking about precisely. What he meant was “normlessness” (from the Greek anomos, “without law”). It can be very isolating to live in a normless world. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes it this way: “In an anomic society, people can do as they please; but without any clear standards or respected social institutions to enforce those standards, it is harder for people to find things they want to do.” Once people become parents, they often discover they have a much clearer set of standards to obey and a renewed respect for the social institutions designed to enforce them. Listening to new mothers and fathers talk about what they loved most about the transition to parenthood, I was surprised by this simple, commonly recurring theme: they were now connected more strongly to institutions that normalize a life. They suddenly had reasons to go to church, to synagogue, to the local mosque. They suddenly knew all about their neighborhood schools and parks and block associations; they wanted to become involved in parent-teacher organizations and local politics. And the shadow, parallel worlds of their...