All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

They called it a “SuperRelationship,” which they defined as “an intensely private spiritualized union, combining sexual fidelity, romantic love, emotional intimacy and togetherness.” If most of us begin our marriages with these expectations, is it any wonder that we experience children as a disruption?

(There’s evidence that the most precipitous drop in sexual frequency occurs just after the “honeymoon” year of marriage—a sobering thought.)

When faced with this unsavory dilemma, observes Phillips, “most people feel far worse about betraying their children than about betraying their partner.”

Rather, the authors found, what played the most powerful role in determining the quality of a couple’s sex life was a deceptively simple idea: the importance of the marriage to each partner’s identity. The more central each one found it, the more satisfied he or she was. Believing in marriage, at least if you’re in one, turns out to be the most powerful aphrodisiac of all.

WATCHING CLINT GO ABOUT his afternoon and evening routine, it is hard not to notice the stylistic differences between him and his wife—and the different responses the children have to each of them. Zay, for one, could hardly tolerate being put on the ground by Angie that morning. The second she tried it, he bawled. She could have taken a stand, sure, and left him there to tough it out; Clint would say, albeit gently, that Angie has had a hand in creating this predicament, because she allows herself to be manipulated by Zay’s distress. (“Zay’s not expecting me to pick him up the moment he whimpers,” Clint notes.) But to leave Zay to cry would only compound Angie’s terrible sense that she’s not doing all she can do for him, and she feels bad enough going off to work three or four nights a week—the second the kids catch sight of her in her scrubs, they start to cling. So while she’s at home, she doesn’t put Zay on the ground or in the Bumbo. Instead, she works one-armed and lopsided, straining her back and making the awkward progress of a contestant in an egg toss.

Whereas Clint, both by habit and temperament, is quite clearly the kind of fellow who optimizes his time and probably was doing so even before the kids were born. Parenthood has simply completed his transformation into an efficiency-seeking Scud missile.

I hear this a lot from parents. One—usually the mother—is more alive to the emotional undercurrents of the household. (In A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham writes: “She knows something is up. Her nerves run through the house.”) The result is that the more-intuitive parent—in this case Angie—sometimes feels like the other parent is not doing his or her fair share, while the other parent—in this case Clint—feels like the intuitive parent is excessively emotional. When really, what may be going on is that the couple is experiencing time differently, because each person is paying attention to different things. When Angie hears the baby monitor or sees that Zay’s diaper needs a change, she jumps. Those are time-sensitive tasks, and she’s the first responder in the house. Which makes her feel, to use her word, “overwhelmed.”

Yet he’s also very attuned to the strain that comes from the moment-to-moment handling of the kids. “That real-time sense that she’s doing more? I probably fail to validate that as much as I should,” he

BEFORE PROCEEDING ANY FURTHER, I should pause here to note that this conversation Clint and Angie are having about who does what—this conversation that all couples have about who does what—happens at the expense of a more important conversation: does the state have an obligation or moral imperative to help out mothers and fathers? In America we wind up having these arguments privately because our politics allows little room for us to have them publicly. One hates to invoke Sweden at this moment—it really is the most predictable cliché—but some of the happiest parents on the globe are, in fact, in Scandinavia and the other northern European countries with large social safety nets.

Sort of a theme here. We're expecting our partners to be everything, and that we can solve parenting/work/etc ourselves, but we in the USA should direct our on going anger to the state for doing nothing or worse than nothing to support families.

Yet they appear to confer true psychological benefits. In a 2010 study, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and four of his colleagues compared the moment-to-moment well-being of women in Columbus, Ohio, to that of women in Rennes, a small city in France. Although the researchers found many similarities between their two samples, the French and American women differed in one very significant way: the French enjoyed caring for their children a good deal more, and they spent a good deal less time doing it. In his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman speculates that this may be the case because French women have greater access to child care and “spend less of the afternoon driving children to various activities.”

The more parents try to be omnipresent and everything to their children the less they actually enjoy the time. It takes a village...

ME TIME. SUCH A simple phrase, and yet it reveals a universe of difference between Angie and Clint, and possibly between most mothers and fathers. The majority of parents feel like they don’t have enough time for themselves, but mothers are especially

burdened by this feeling. One can easily see this pattern with Angie and Clint. Clint gets home after a long day, and his goal, quite reasonably, is to get the kids situated and to map out the rest of the evening, in the hope of creating a modest stretch of leisure later on. If that means doing mundane housework while the kids are still awake, rather than in bed, so be it. “Whenever the kids are doing something where I don’t have to interact with them,” he says, “I use the time to do daily chores.” Something where I don’t have to interact with them is another telltale phrase. It’s not the sort of phrase that would spring to mind for most middle-class mothers, particularly if they’re in the workforce. Painfully aware of the time they’re not spending with their kids, working mothers are more likely to say that they should always be interacting with their children once their heels are off. If they’re not working . . . well, why are they at home, if not to interact with their children? Yet Clint is perfectly comfortable leaving his children to their own devices every now and then, and no rational jury of his peers would declare him unloving on account of it. They would simply say he’s protective of his time.

It was easier, in other words, for Clint to leave Angie with the impression that he was a bum than to confess he was covertly sleep-training their child.

This feeling is common. To me, it suggests that Hochschild’s observation—that power struggles over who does what in a relationship aren’t just about fairness but about the “giving and receiving of gratitude”—has an added layer today: guilt. Like many women, Angie feels resentment because her husband is not doing enough. But she also believes that she is not doing enough, and can never do enough, and that she should be doing everything all the time. “If I were to say, ‘Okay, I’ll give you a break and take care of the kids 100 percent, but it’s going to be my way,’ ” Clint confesses to her at one point, “I’m afraid you’ll be calling the shots from the couch.”

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.”

Pamela Druckerman’s solution to these excesses is to emulate the French. In Bringing Up Bébé, she marvels at how French parents, mothers especially, resist what William Doherty calls (in his own book about marriage) “consumer parenting,” that insidious style of American child-rearing that makes it possible for a kid to lay claim to a mother’s or father’s attention twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

That’s a constructive message. But since few American women have French mothers sitting around their homes, ready to show them the way, they may do better to take their cues from a model that’s more readily available: the good fathers they know. Who may in fact be their own husbands. Because odds are, these men have something valuable to teach. Here’s why: unencumbered by outsized cultural expectations about what does or doesn’t constitute good parenting, and free from cultural judgments over their participation in the workforce, good fathers tend to judge themselves less harshly, bring less anguished perfectionism to parenting their children (“Sit in this Bumbo while I unload the dishwasher, would ya?”), and—at least while their kids are young—more aggressively protect their free time. None of this means they love their children any less than their wives do. None of this means they care any less about their children’s fates. Mothers may not, of course, be fully able to follow their husbands’ examples. If women make more forceful claims on their husbands’ free time, their husbands could well push back. This is also, admittedly, a private solution to something that in a civilized world would be a public problem, as Judith Warner argues so fiercely in Perfect Madness. It would be far better if the government kicked in the support that parents needed. But considering that the last Republican presidential primary was briefly derailed by a debate over the legitimacy of birth co...

I thought this was very interesting having seen these patterns. Because fathers don't have an impossible standard to live up to we are happier with ourselves and our work. It also seems to lead to different boundary setting with children by different parents.

There are a lot of hardships that this pioneering generation of involved fathers has to endure. But comparing themselves to an unattainable ideal—whether it’s Donna Reed in Hilldale or the “Tiger Mom” of a best-selling book—is not one of them. I am the standard. “Personally,” says Clint, “I think having my parents separate when I was seven was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Clint saw little of his father after that. “I didn’t have anyone saying to me, ‘This is how good you need to be.’ ” Angie, meanwhile, says she never knows if she’s doing things the way they ought to be done. When asked if she’s a good mother, her answer is one word: “Sometimes.” She’s wrong. Angie’s a great mother. If she could just say, “I am the standard,” maybe she would breathe.

This is a big one to me

YOUNG CHILDREN MAY BE grueling, young children may be vexing, and young children may bust and redraw the contours of their parents’ professional and marital lives. But they bring joy too. Everyone knows this (hence: “bundles of joy”). But it’s worth considering some of the reasons why. It’s not just because they’re soft and sweet and smell like perfection. They also create wormholes in time, transporting their mothers and fathers back to feelings and sensations they haven’t had since they themselves were young. The dirty secret about adulthood is the sameness of it, its tireless adherence to routines and customs and norms. Small children may intensify this sense of repetition and rigidity by virtue of the new routines they establish. But they liberate their parents from their ruts too.

All of us crave liberation from those ruts. More to the point, all of us crave liberation from our adult selves, at least from time to time. I’m not just talking about the selves with public roles to play and daily obligations to meet. (We can find relief from those people simply by going on vacation, or for that matter, by pouring ourselves a stiff drink.) I’m talking about the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies; who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited by how it could work or should; who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love. Unless, that is, they have small children.

SMALL CHILDREN COME WITH a built-in paradox. The same developmental phenomena that make them so frustrating—namely, their immature prefrontal cortexes, which insist on living in the here and now—are what can also make them so freeing to be around. Most of us live by a schedule, with places to be and chores to do. But looking at Sharon, who doesn’t have a day job or a husband or other small children to attend to, you begin to see how it would look if we all unshackled ourselves from the clock. Sharon doesn’t bother taking her cell phone to the park when she’s out with Cam (though she adores email and texting); at home she doesn’t have a television. “I don’t let the world intrude on me,” she says. “It can only come in when I want it to.” When she’s with Cam, she fully surrenders to kid-time, letting the day unfold.

Sharon is a grandparent raising a small child FYI

It’s amazing how many parents at ECFE talked about the joys of shedding their grown-up inhibitions, if only for a few minutes each day. For women, it tended to come out around singing and dancing: Kenya talked about watching her kid bounce and howl to Katy Perry’s “Firework” in the backseat of their car; another woman talked about going to outdoor concerts. (“No one looks at you if you dance like crazy with your kid.”) And then there was Jessie, who so loved her dance parties. The second time I visited her home—an evening this time, with her husband, Luke, and all three kids romping around—she showed us a new dance move Abe had done in his underpants earlier that day. Her impersonation was dead-on, wild, ridiculous, communicated in a private shorthand that her husband seemed better than anyone in the room to understand; the two oldest kids spontaneously joined in, forming a conga line as Estelle’s “American Boy” boomed in the background. When a sudden hissing sound issued from the kitchen, Luke assured Abe, who seemed concerned, that it was just the potatoes on the stove coming to a boil.

Sometimes the transcendent joys of toddler-dom aren’t about transcendence at all, but about how far we can descend. These joys give us a reprieve from etiquette, let us shelve our inhibitions, make it possible for our self-conscious, rule-observing selves to be tucked away. For a few blessed moments, we’re streaming, uncorked ids. It’s hard to know what kind of psychic price we pay for keeping those ids bottled and sealed. Adam Phillips has always had a keen interest in this question. In one of his essays, he notes that “writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens,” have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. “Without this first madness,” he writes, “without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods—to our most passionate selves—our lives can begin to feel futile.”

This topic was a minor theme at ECFE. “I didn’t find my career particularly fulfilling,” Kevin, a stay-at-home dad, told his all-male class one day. “It was just something I did. I liked it fine, but I didn’t come home and say, ‘Wow, I’m really glad I helped this big corporation process their data more efficiently!’ ” Young children, on the other hand, offer adults the chance to engage in life’s more tactile pleasures and tangible, real-world pursuits. They provide an opportunity for agency, for being able to do something and actually see its effect.

Overall, children make people more inclined to cook:

Children remind us just how much of our implicit knowledge, which hums inaudibly in the background all day long, is stuff we once had to learn. They climb into the bathtub partially clothed, put half-eaten bananas in the refrigerator, use toys in ways the manufacturer never intended. (So you want to mix those paints rather than make pictures with them? Lay stickers on top of one another rather than lay them out side by side? Use dominos as blocks, cars as flying machines, tutus as bridal veils? Knock yourself out!) No one has yet told them otherwise. To children, the whole universe is a controlled experiment.

MOST ADULTS CONSIDER PHILOSOPHY a luxury. But philosophy, it turns out, is what children do naturally, and when they do, they take us back to that remote and almost unimaginably luxurious time when we ourselves still asked loads of questions that had no point. In fact, according to Gareth B. Matthews, author of The Philosophy of Childhood, asking pointless questions is the true specialty of children, especially between the ages of three and seven, because the instinct hasn’t yet been drummed out of them: “Once children become well settled into school,” he ruefully observes, “they learn that only ‘useful’ questioning is expected of them.” (Which recalls Edmund Burke’s alleged observation about studying law: “It sharpens the mind by narrowing it.”)

“In important part,” writes Matthews, “philosophy is an adult attempt to deal with the genuinely baffling questions of childhood.” Many adults enjoy pondering philosophical questions if given the chance. But they have little excuse to do so in their everyday lives, until they have children. Then

ON PAGE 1 OF The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis makes a distinction between what he calls Gift-love and Need-love. “The typical example of Gift-love,” he writes, “would be that love which moves a man to work and plan and save for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing or seeing; of the second, that which sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother’s arms.” In my conversations with parents of young children, it’s Need-love that often most bedazzles, and with good reason: there’s nothing like it. To be adored unconditionally, to be hoisted on a plinth and held above reproach, is rare for most adults, no matter how much they’re loved by their spouses or cherished by friends. “Maybe it’s egocentric to say this,” said a woman in Angie’s ECFE class, “but you’re their whole world, at this age. I love that. . . .” “ . . . and maybe that’s why,” finished the woman next to her, “you don’t want them to grow up.”

Yet it’s Gift-love, and not Need-love, that parents spoke about with more passion. Need-love comes from children. Gift-love is something parents give away. It’s a far less cozy arrangement. Gift-love can be difficult to muster too, contrary to what so many cheerful books about new parenthood contend. It does not come instantaneously to all parents the moment they’re handed their new baby in the nursery. Rather, it blooms with time. Alison Gopnik makes this distinction with a perfect aphorism in The Philosophical Baby: “It’s not so much that we care for children because we love them,” she wrote, “as that we love them because we care for them.”

the overscheduled parent It was William Doherty, the professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota and adviser to ECFE, who, in 1999, first coined the phrase “overscheduled kids,” thus contributing the perfect term to describe the sudden proliferation of play dates and extracurricular activities on children’s agendas, as if they’d all suddenly acquired chiefs of staff. Overscheduling has earned more than its share of critics, who fear it makes kids anxious and robs them of the glories of imaginative idling and unstructured play. But few critics think to ask what kind of harm such overzealous planning might be doing to children’s parents. Yes, those parents are usually the ones responsible for the family schedules and are therefore complicit in the problem. But it’s worth considering what particular forces could be driving mothers and fathers to such extravagant lengths.

The sociologist Annette Lareau was one of the first to take an in-depth look at this controlled pandemonium, capturing it in energetic detail in Unequal Childhoods, which became a classic the instant it was published in 2003. Looking at a dozen families—four of them middle-class, four of them working-class, and four of them poor—she couldn’t help but notice some crucial differences in parenting styles. Poor and working-class parents did not try to direct every aspect of their kids’ lives. She called their approach the “accomplishment of natural growth.” The style of middle-class parents, on the other hand, was something altogether different—so different she coined a term for it: “concerted cultivation.” “Concerted cultivation,” Lareau writes, “places intense labor demands on busy parents, exhausts children, and emphasizes the development of individualism, at times at the expense of the development of the notion of the family group.” Throughout the book she looks at middle-class parents with a sense of both empathy and mild, bewildered awe, but what seems to surprise her most is the psychologically insidious nature of middle-class parents’ engagement with their children’s lives. She uses a family called the Marshalls to make this point most vividly. “Unlike in

working-class and poor families, where children are granted autonomy to make their own way in organizations,” she writes, “in the Marshall family, most aspects of the children’s lives are subject to their mother’s ongoing scrutiny [emphasis hers].” Like which gymnastics program her daughter should attend, for instance. “The decision regarding gymnastics,” she writes, “seemed to weigh more on Ms. Marshall than on any other member of the family.” It was as if her daughter’s future depended on where she learned her back flips and cartwheels.

After-school baseball isn’t just Little League here. It’s the right Little League team and a private batting tutor; advanced kids do club-level tournament baseball, for which “there aren’t even tryouts,” says Laura Anne. “You have to be asked.” Bela Karolyi, the former coach to Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton and Kerri Strug, runs a gymnastics camp sixty miles outside of Houston. Some kids start football before they can read. “Stephen went to football camp over the summer,” says Monique Brown, another mother I met, “and those parents were like, ‘We gotta get these kids protein shakes and muscle milk!’ As if their kids were going to go pro. At seven.”

Hard pass

Yet adults did not always take this indulgent view of children. Before the nineteenth century, they were distinctly unsentimental about them, regarding childhood “as a time of deficiency and incompleteness,” according to historian Steven Mintz. Rarely, he writes, did parents “refer to their children with nostalgia or fondness.” It was not uncommon for the New England colonists to call their newborns “it” or “the little stranger,” and no extra measures were taken to protect these little intruders from harm. “Children suffered burns from candles or open hearths, fell into rivers and wells, ingested poisons, broke bones, swallowed pins, and stuffed nutshells up their noses,” writes Mintz. Nor did grown-ups try to shield children from the more brutal emotional realities of life: “As early as possible, ministers admonished children to reflect on death, and their sermons contained graphic descriptions of hell and the horrors of eternal damnation.”

Childhood as we think of it today—long and sheltered, devoted almost entirely to education and emotional growth—became standard for American children. Only adults worked full-time. Children did not; they could not. In fact, parents began giving them money: that strange custom we all know as “the allowance” officially began. The primary job of a child became his or her schooling. “The useful labor of the nineteenth century child,” writes Viviana Zelizer in Pricing the Priceless Child, “was replaced by educational work for the useless child.” Homework replaced actual work. Which had value, certainly. But not to the family. “While child labor had served the household economy,” notes Zelizer, “child work would benefit primarily the child [emphasis mine].” Children, in a funny way, became the first true members of the information economy. Schoolwork, which corresponded little to the life skills needed to run the house, became their area of greatest expertise. Academics and sports. Modern childhood had begun. As I noted in my introduction, Zelizer found a memorable, five-word phrase to describe this historic transformation. Children had become “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

Children sense their solicitousness. The kind of lip discouraged and punished by parents in other eras is something middle-class parents now reward. While all children were once told, more or less, to know their place, only the less affluent—who lack power to begin with—are told to think this way today. Middle-class children, on the other hand, are told that they are fully empowered. In the long run, this attitude may or may not serve them well, because they then enter the world with the sense that no power structure is too formidable to defy or outmaneuver. But one thing is immediately clear: this attitude is not very good for parents. “The very same skills parents encourage in their children,” writes Lareau, “can and do lead children to challenge, and even reject, parental authority.”

HAD THE CHILD’S ROLE been the only role to change within the family, that alone would have been a significant historical development. But industrialization and modernization inevitably changed the role of parents too. As time went on, mothers and fathers also lost their traditional function in the family economy. Before the Industrial Revolution, parents provided educational, vocational, and religious instruction to their children; they also tended to them if they got sick, helped make their clothes, and supplied the food on the table. But with industrialization, these jobs were gradually, one by one, outsourced to non-family members or entire institutions, to the point that the idea of the “family economy” practically ceased to exist. The sole job of parents became the financial and physical security of their children. Ever since, every debate we have had about the role of parents—whether they should be laissez-faire or interventionist “Tiger Moms,” attachment-oriented or partial to the rigors of tough love—can be traced back to the paring down of mothers’ and fathers’ traditional roles. Today, we are far less clear about what “parenting” entails. We know what it doesn’t entail: teaching kids mathematics and geography and literature (schools do that); providing them with medical treatment (pediatricians); sewing them dresses and trousers (factories abroad, whose wares are then distributed by Old Navy); growing them food (factory farms, whose goods are then distributed by ...

Meaning, joy, and purpose come from a great variety of sources, not just children. But what’s important here is Marilyn’s more basic observation: a single word, “happiness,” often cannot fully capture these feelings—or countless other emotions that make us feel transcendently human. The awed, otherworldly feeling you get when your infant looks directly into your eyes for the first time is different from the sense of pride you experience when that same kid, years later, lands a perfect double axel, which in turn is different from the sensation of warmth and belonging that consumes you when your widely dispersed family gathers for Thanksgiving. You can try to quantify each of these feelings with a number, certainly, and I don’t underestimate the value of such attempts, for the sake of figuring out ways to get more of them. But in the end, a number is just that—a digit, plotted on a graph. It may reflect the degree to which we feel something, but it entirely lacks dimensionality. These feelings do not strike me as the same in kind. Some, like joy, can hurt almost as much as they elate; others, like duty, run silently in the background, perhaps making our day-to-day lives more difficult, but making our overall lives more worthwhile and more consonant with our values.

Indeed, one could argue that the whole experience of being a parent exposes the superficiality of our preoccupation with happiness, which usually takes the form of pursuing pleasure or finding our bliss. Raising children makes us reassess this obsession and perhaps redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness is. The very things Americans are told almost daily to aspire to may in fact be misguided. (There’s that line in Raiders of the Lost Ark that Sallah and Indiana Jones utter in unison: “They’re digging in the wrong place.”) As we muddle our way through the parenting years—trying to make sense of our new role in the age of the priceless child, trying to execute that role in a culture that provides so little support for working and nonworking parents alike—it is very worth asking: what are we digging for, and what have we found?

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.”

” You can’t have joy without the prospect of mourning, and to some people this makes joy a difficult feeling to bear. Especially in parenthood, where loss is inevitable, built into the very paradox of raising children; we pour love into them so that they’ll one day grow strong enough to leave us. Even when our children are still young and defenseless, we feel intimations of their departure. We find ourselves staring at them with nostalgia, wistful for the person they’re about to no longer be.

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...

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...

The idea that children give us structure, purpose, and stronger bonds to the world around us doesn’t always show up in social science data. But it can, if you use the right set of instruments. Robin Simon, for instance, has found that parents who have custody of their children are less depressed than those who don’t. That’s a big departure from most other parenting-and-happiness studies, which suggest that single mothers (who more frequently have custody of their kids) are less happy than single fathers. But there’s a difference between Simon’s study and others: she was measuring depression, and depression surveys often ask questions about overall meaning and purpose as well as questions about day-to-day mood. They ask whether participants have had trouble getting going that week, for instance, or whether they have felt like failures, or whether they feel hopeful about the future. And it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that someone with children under his or her roof, as opposed to someone whose children were taken away, would answer these questions with more optimism. The former have reasons to get up in the morning, reasons to feel like they have made something of their lives, reasons to be connected to the future.

And if that’s the case—if we are our remembering selves—then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don’t feel like we’ve amounted to much. “You don’t have a good story until something deviates from the expected,” says McAdams. “And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.” Our stories may not always be pleasant as they’re being lived. They can in fact be just the opposite, acquiring a warm hue only in retrospect. “I think this boils down to a philosophical question rather than a psychological one,” Tom Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell, tells me. “Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. He recalls watching TV with his children at 3:00 A.M. when they were sick. “I wouldn’t have said it was too fun at the time,” he says. “But now I look back on it and say, ‘Ah, remember the time we used to wake up and watch cartoons?’ ”

This pride need not come from kids’ accomplishments either. It can stem—and often does—from their simple transformation into moral, compassionate creatures. All children start their lives as tiny narcissists. Yet somewhere along the line, almost without your noticing, they begin to appreciate suffering and want very much to assuage it. They bring you soup when you get sick. They tell you about keeping their mouths shut at lunch, because their friends were discussing a birthday party and not everyone present was invited. And you realize that all the love you showed along the way, all the lectures you gave about compassion and grace and respect—it has somehow all managed to stick.