Top Quotes: “All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood” — Jennifer Senior
Introduction
“In 2004, five researchers, including the Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, did a study showing which activities gave 909 working women in Texas the most pleasure. Child care ranked sixteenth out of nineteen behind preparing food, behind watching TV, behind napping, behind shopping, behind housework. In an ongoing study, Mätthew Killingsworth, a researcher at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, has found that children also rank low on the list of people whose company their parents enjoy. As he explained it to me in a phone conversation: “Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse, which is better than interacting with other relatives, which is better than interacting with acquaintances, which is better than interacting with parents, which is better than interacting with children. Who are on par with strangers.”
These findings are undeniably provocative. But the story they tell is incomplete. When researchers attempt to measure parents’ specific emotions, they get rather different — and much more nuanced — answers. Drawing from 1.7 million Gallup surveys collected between 2008 and 2012, researchers Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone found that parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more lows, than those without children. (They’ve just submitted their results for publication.) And when researchers bother to ask questions of a more existential nature, they find that parents report greater feelings of meaning and reward — which to many parents is what the entire shebang is about.
Children strain our everyday lives, in other words, but also deepen them. “All joy and no fun” is how a friend with two young kids described it.
Some people have flippantly concluded that these studies can be boiled down to one grim little sentence: Children make you miserable. But I think it’s more accurate to call parenting, as the social scientist William Doherty does, “high-cost/high-reward activity.” And if the costs are high, one of the reasons may be that parenthood today is very different from what parenthood once was.”
“Because so many of us are now avid volunteers for a project in which we were all once dutiful conscripts, we have heightened expectations of what children will do for us, regarding them as sources of existential fulfillment rather than as ordinary parts of our lives. It’s the scarcity principle at work: we assign greater value to that which is rare and those things for which we have worked harder. (In 2010, over 61,500 kids resulted from assisted reproductive technology.) As the developmental psychologist je-rome Kagan has written, so much meticulous family planning “inevitably endows the infant with a significance considerably greater than prevailed when parents had a half-dozen children, some at inauspicious times.””
“By postponing children, many modern parents are far more aware of the freedoms they’re giving up.”
“It wasn’t until our soldiers returned from World War II that childhood, as we now know it, began. The family economy was no longer built on a system of reciprocity, with parents sheltering and feeding their children, and children, in return, kicking something back into the family till. The relationship became asymmetrical. Children stopped working, and parents worked twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses.”
“Today parents pour more capital — both emotional and literal — into their children than ever before, and they’re spending longer, more concentrated hours with their children than they did when the workday ended at five o’clock and the majority of women still stayed home.”
Early Childhood
“In 1971, for instance, a trio from Harvard observed ninety mother-toddler pairs for five hours and found that on average, mothers gave a command, told their child no, or fielded a request (often “unreasonable” or “in a whining tone”) every three minutes. Their children, in turn, obeyed on average only 60 percent of the time. This is not exactly a formula for perfect mental health.”
“Minnesota’s Early Childhood Family Education program (or ECFE, as I’lI be referring to it from now on) is immensely popular and unique to the state; which is the reason I’ve come here. For a sliding-scale fee — and in some cases, no fee at all — any parent of a child who’s not yet in kindergarten can attend a weekly class. And they do, in great numbers: in 2010, nearly 90,000 moms and dads signed up for one. The themes of the classes vary, but what they all have in common is an opportunity for parents to confide, learn, and let off steam.”
“Until fairly recently, what parents wanted was utterly beside the point. But we now live in an age when the map of our desires has gotten considerably larger, and we’ve been told it’s our right (obligation, in fact) to try to fulfill them.”
“David Dinges, one of the country’s foremost experts on partial sleep deprivation, says that the population seems to divide roughly in thirds when it comes to prolonged sleep loss: those who handle it fairly well, those who sort of fall apart, and those who respond catastrophically. The problem is, most prospective parents have no clue which type they are until their kids come along. (Personally, I was the third type — just two bad nights, and blam, I was halfway down the loonytown freeway to hysterical exhaustion.)
Whatever type you may be and Dinges suspects it’s a fixed trait, evenly distributed between women and men — the emotional consequences of sleep loss are powerful enough to have earned their own analysis by Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues, the ones who looked at those 909 Texas women and found that they ranked time with their children lower than doing laundry. The women who’d had six hours of sleep or less were in a different league of unhappiness, almost, than those who’d had seven hours or more. The gap in their well-being was so extreme that it exceeded the gap between those who earned under $30,000 annually and those who earned over $90,000.”
“In effect, parents and small children have two completely different temporal outlooks. Parents can project into the future; their young children, anchored in the present, have a much harder time of it. This difference can be a formula for heartbreak for a small child. Toddlers cannot appreciate, as an adult can, that when they’re told to put their blocks away, they’ll be able to resume playing with them at some later date. They do not care, when told they can’t have another bag of potato chips, that life is long and teeming with potato chips. They want them now, because now is where they live.
Yet somehow mothers and fathers believe that if only they could convey the logic of their decisions, their young children would understand it. That’s what their adult brains thrived on for all those years before their children came along: rational chitchat, in which motives were elucidated and careful analyses dutifully dispatched. But young children lead intensely emotional lives. Reasoned discussion does not have the same effect on them, and their brains are not yet optimized for it. “I do make the mistake of talking to my daughter sometimes like she’s an adult,” a woman named Kenya confessed to her ECFE group. “I expect her to understand. Like if I break things down enough, she’ll get it.” The class instructor, Todd Kolod, nodded sympathetically. He’d heard it a thousand times before. It’s the “little adult” problem, he explained. We mistakenly believe our children will be persuaded by our ways of reasoning. “But your three-year-old,” he gently told her, “is never going to say, ‘Yes, you’re right. You have a point.””
“I’d like to propose a possible explanation for why these moments of grace are so rare: the early years of family life don’t offer up many activities that lend themselves to what psychologists call “flow.””
“Our nervous systems can become disregulated when we sit in front of a screen. This, at least, is the theory of Linda Stone, formerly a researcher and senior executive at Microsoft Corporation. She notes that we often hold our breath or breathe shallowly when we’re working at our computers. She calls this phenomenon “email apnea” or “screen apnea.” “The result,” writes Stone in an email, “is a stress response. We become more agitated and impulsive than we’d ordinarily be.””
“The phrase “having it all” has little to do with what women want. If anything, it’s a reflection of a widespread and misplaced cultural belief, shared by men and women alike: that we, as middle-class Americans, have been given infinite promise, and it’s our obligation to exploit every ounce of it. “Having it all” is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in Missing Out, is tyrannized by the idea of its own potential.”
“These gains in freedom for both men and women often seem like a triumph of subtraction rather than addition. Over time, writes Coontz, Americans have come to define liberty “negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one’s wealth or time.”
If this is how you conceive of liberty — as freedom from obligation — then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.”
“In 2011, Sarah A. Burgard, a sociologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, analyzed data collected from tens of thousands of parents. In dual-earner couples, she found, women were three times more likely than men to report interrupted sleep if they had a child at home under the age of one, and stay-at-home mothers were six times as likely to get up with their children as stay-at-home dads.”
“In 2000, just 42 percent of married fathers reported multitasking “most of the time”; for married mothers, that number was 67 percent.”
“Perhaps the hardest and most elusive quantity for a time-use survey to measure is the psychic energy that mothers pour into parenting — the internal soundtrack of anxieties that hums in their heads all day long, whether they’re with their children or not.
That’s one of Mattingly and Sayer’s more subtle hypotheses: perhaps mothers feel rushed because the sensitive and logistically intensive parts of raising kids — making child care arrangements, scheduling doctor’s visits, dealing with teachers, organizing family leisure hours, coordinating play dates and summer plans — fall disproportionately to them. Angie certainly says as much. “When I’m at work,” she tells me, “I’m still only 50 percent nurse, probably. You know? Even if I’m dressing a wound or whatever it may be, I’m always thinking, ‘Is Clint going to remember to put sunscreen on ‘em?’”
What happens when she’s out alone with Clint?
“It’s still the kids on my brain,” she says. “Even our date nights, when I’m supposed to be 100 percent wife.”
It’s interesting that Angie attempts to quantify this feeling in a ratio. Some years ago, when Carolyn Cowan was driving home from a meeting with a group of parents, it occurred to her that she ought to ask them to devise a pie chart of their identities. What percentage of themselves did they see as a spouse, as a parent, as a worker, as a person of faith, as a hobbyist? Women, on average, assigned a significantly larger proportion of their self-image to their mother identity than the men did to their father identity. Even women who worked full-time considered themselves more mother than worker by about 50 percent. This finding didn’t surprise Cowan and her husband — nor were they surprised, years later, when they came across a similar study showing that mothers who carry the child in lesbian couples give over more mental real estate to their maternal identity than their partners.
What did surprise the Cowans, however, was what this visualization exercise portended for the hundred or so couples in their sample: the greater the disparity between how a mother and father sliced up the pie when their child was six months old, the more dissatisfied they were in their marriage one year later.”
“It’s worth noting that children would almost certainly be easier on marriages if couples didn’t rely so much on one another for social support. But unfortunately, they do. What this means, all too often, is that parents can feel awfully alone, especially moms.
In 2009, a specialty consulting firm surveyed over 1,300 mothers and found that 80 percent of them believed they didn’t have enough friends and 58 percent of them felt lonely (with mothers of children under five reporting the most loneliness of all). In 1997, the American Sociological Review published a paper showing that women’s social networks — and the frequency of their contact with the people in those networks — shrink in the early years of child-rearing, with the nadir occurring when their youngest child is three. (The expansion thereafter, the authors say, likely has something to do with the new connections mothers make once their children reach school age.) And the most popular form of Meetup in the country, by a substantial margin, is mothers’ groups.”
“Almost all of these efforts to get children to comply are made by mothers, not by fathers, and this asymmetrical dynamic can add a low-frequency hum of resentment to a relationship, because Mom gets the job of family nag. She didn’t seek this job either. It’s a simple matter of numbers: if mothers spend more time with their children than fathers do, they’re bound to issue more commands.”
“In 2012, the sociologist Robin Simon and two of her colleagues measured the difference in happiness levels between parents and nonparents in twenty-two industrialized nations. The country with the greatest gap, by far, was the United States. As a rule, in fact, this difference tended to be larger in countries with less generous welfare benefits and smaller — or inverted entirely — in countries that offer the most support to families.
Arnstein Aassve, a demography professor in Milan, detected a similar pattern in 2013. After examining parental well-being levels across twenty-eight European nations, he and his colleagues concluded that “in general, the happiness that people derive from parenthood is positively associated with availability of childcare.” This was especially true in places where child care is available for children between the ages of one and three (France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia). In those parts of the world, mothers are consistently happier than nonmothers.”
“She lived in Paris during her early child-rearing years:
My elder daughter, from the time she was eighteen months of age, attended excellent part-time preschools where she painted and played with modeling clay and ate cookies and napped for about $150 per month — the top end of the fee scale. She could have started public school at age three, and could have opted to stay until 5 p.m. daily. My friends who were covered by the French social security system (which I did not pay into) had even greater benefits: at least four months of paid maternity leave, the right to stop working for up to three years and have jobs held for them.
Meanwhile, a report from Child Care Aware of America notes that in 2011 it cost more for families to put two children in day care than it did for them to pay their rent — in all fifty states.
It’s worth imagining how different Angie and Clint’s lives might be if they were assured access to the same affordable child care arrangements, and if they both knew they could leave their jobs for a year or three without fear of losing their place in the workforce. At the moment, such luxuries are unthinkable to Americans.
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.”
“This may be the reason Clint believes he does 50 percent of the child care. He counts it as child care if he’s doing one thing and the kids are doing another, so long as they’re safe. Whereas Angie feels obliged to immerse herself completely in their world.
And Angie herself is complicit, to some degree, in this increase in her workload. Before leaving for the hospital, she fretted about the relative state of disorder she’d left for Clint. “He’s going to come home to a crabby baby and a kid who hasn’t napped,” she said, her face bunched in a frown. “I try to get them both to be napping when he comes home so that he can have some free time to go to his office or go onto the computer.”
It isn’t only Clint who is protective of his free time, in other words. Angie protects his free time too.”
“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. The French, she argues, have no qualms about firmly asserting their leisure prerogatives and protecting their adult needs (like peace and quiet, for instance, or uninterrupted conversation with other adults).
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.”
“He told me about the time he took one of his sons to the beach: “He saw some bathers, swimmers, coming out from the water, and he sort of froze, saying, ‘Look, Water People!’ It was so . . .” Csikszentmihalyi didn’t complete the sentence. But the word he was searching for, I think, was “logical,” because he continued: “I thought, Yes, I could see how, if you’ve never seen them, they seem like extraterrestrials.” Of course! Swimmers: Some otherworldly species that makes its home in the sea.”
“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.””
“In the late nineteenth century, children were more likely to earn money for their families than their mothers were, and the wages of teenage boys often exceeded those of their dads.”
“The market today, still hoping to appeal to women’s professional instincts, offers the same differentiation in baby products for mothers that it offered in cleaning products for housewives sixty years ago. Back in the fifties, women were told to master the differences between oven cleaners and floor wax and special sprays for wood; today they’re told to master the differences between toys that hone problem-solving skills and those that encourage imaginative play. This subtle shift in language suggests that playing with one’s child is not really play but a job, just as keeping house once was. Buy Buy Baby is today’s equivalent of the 1950s supermarket product aisle, and those shelves of child-rearing guides at the bookstore are today’s equivalent of Good Housekeeping, offering women the possibility of earning a doctorate in mothering.”
“More generally, writes Mintz, “one defining feature of young people’s lives today is that they spend more time alone than their predecessors.” They grow up in smaller families (22 percent of American children today are only children). They are more likely to have their own rooms than children in generations past, and to live in larger homes, which means the very architecture of their lives conspires against socializing with other family members. They also live in a nation of suburbs and exurbs, where neighbors and friends live farther away.
Isolation results in a lot of extra work for parents. Their children recruit them as playmates, as Emily does Carol. They are prodded for rides hither and yon. And parents oblige, worrying that their children will suffer from loneliness if they don’t. This is yet another reason why mothers and fathers schedule so many after-school activities for their children.”
“Kids lead tightly scheduled lives from the time they’re young (including preschool, which increasingly takes a modular approach to dividing the day), they seldom experience boredom, which means they don’t really know how to tolerate boredom, which means they look to their parents to help them alleviate it. Nancy Darling, an Oberlin psychologist and author of the sterling parenting blog Thinking About Kids, made this point in a 2011 post. When she was a child, she notes,
we were bored all the time. There were no extracurricular activities for kids until junior high except for Scouts once a week or maybe 4H and Sunday School. Few moms worked, so we came home from school at 3:00 and just hung out. They hadn’t invented Sesame Street yet and Bugs Bunny and Rocky & Bullwinkle were more or less all of kids’ television unless it was Saturday morning. … What that meant is that our moms — who were busy cooking, cleaning, watching soap operas, hanging out with their neighbors, and generally running a huge network of non-profit services (Scouts, Church, Red Cross, etc. etc.) would typically respond to our complaints that we had nothing to do by suggesting that our rooms could definitely use cleaning. We learned not to ask and figured something out.
So it’s more than a little maddening when our own children can’t seem to do the same, even if we’ve played a role in diminishing their capacity for resourcefulness. It’s not that these organized activities don’t have their virtues, adds Darling. But because of them, she speculates, “kids have very little experience learning to find things to do FOR THEMSELVES. They have been PASSIVE [capital letters hers, not mine].””
Adolescence
“Her organization did a detailed, comprehensive survey of over 1,023 kids, ages eight to eighteen, and in 1999 she published and analyzed the results in Ask the Children: What America’s Children Really Think About Working Parents. The data were quite clear: 85 percent of Americans may believe that parents don’t spend enough time with their kids, but just 10 percent of the kids in Galinsky’s survey wanted more time with their mothers, and just 16 percent wanted more time with their dads. A full 34 percent, however, wished their mothers would be “less stressed.””
“”It doesn’t seem to me like adolescence is a difficult time for the kids,” he tells me. “Most of them seem to be going through life in a very pleasant haze. It’s when I talk to the parents that I notice something. If you look at the narrative, it’s ‘my teenager who’s driving me crazy.’ “
In the 2014 edition of his best-known textbook, Adolescence, Steinberg debunks the myth of the querulous teen with even more vigor. “The hormonal changes of puberty,” he writes, “have only a modest direct effect on adolescent behavior; rebellion during adolescence is atypical, not normal; and few adolescents experience a tumultuous identity crisis.”
For parents, however, the picture appears to be a good deal more complicated. In 1994, Steinberg published Crossing Paths, one of the few book-length accounts of how parents weather the transition of their firstborns into puberty, based on a longitudinal study he conducted of over two hundred families. Forty percent of his sample suffered a decline in mental health once their first child entered adolescence — nearly one-half of the mothers and one-third of the fathers. Respondents reported that they experienced feelings of rejection and low self-worth; that their sex lives declined; and that they suffered increases in physical symptoms of distress, including headaches, insomnia, and lousy stomachs. It may be tempting to dismiss these findings as by-products of midlife rather than the presence of teenagers in the house. But Steinberg’s results don’t seem to suggest it. “We were much better able to predict what an adult was going through psychologically,” he writes, “by looking at his or her child’s development than by knowing the adult’s age.”
Which is to say that a mother of forty-three and a mother of fifty-three have far more in common, psychologically speaking, if they both have fourteen-year-olds than two moms of the same age with kids who are seven and fourteen.”
“Steinberg noticed a substantial decline in the marital satisfaction of his male subjects when their teenagers began to date. “In fact,” he writes, “the more frequently the teenager dated, the more unhappily married the adolescent’s father became.” If his teenager was a son, Steinberg noticed, the effect was especially bad. He surmises it has to do with a combination of sexual jealousy and nostalgia for a lost era of open-ended possibilities. But he admits he didn’t quite think it was possible to put this question to his subjects directly.”
“Recently, with the advent of magnetic resonance imaging to more closely examine brain topography and function, researchers have discovered that adolescents do not walk around with a defect that prevents them from properly assessing risk. B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, notes that it’s just the opposite: adolescents overestimate risk, at least when it comes to situations involving their own mortality.
The real problem is that they assign a greater value to the reward they will get from taking that risk than adults do. It turns out that dopamine, the hormone that signals pleasure, is never so explosively active in human beings as it is during puberty. Never over the course of our lives will we feel anything quite so intensely, or quite so exultantly, again.
Making matters worse, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs so much of our higher executive function — the ability to plan and to reason, the ability to control impulses and to self-reflect — is still undergoing crucial structural changes during adolescence and continues to do so until human beings are in their mid- or even late twenties.
This is not to say that teenagers lack the tools to reason. Just before puberty, the prefrontal cortex undergoes a huge flurry of activity, enabling kids to better grasp abstractions and understand other points of view. (In Darling’s estimation, these new capabilities are why adolescents seem so fond of arguing — they can actually do it, and not half-badly, for the first time.) But their prefrontal cortexes are still adding myelin, the fatty white substance that speeds up neural transmissions and improves neural connections, which means that adolescents still can’t grasp long-term consequences or think through complicated choices like adults can. Their prefrontal cortexes are also still forming and consolidating connections with the more primitive, emotional parts of the brain known collectively as the limbic system — which means that adolescents don’t yet have the level of self-control that adults do. And they lack wisdom and experience, which means they often spend a lot of time passionately arguing on behalf of ideas that more seasoned adults find inane. “They’re kind of flying by the seat of their pants,” says Casey. ‘If they’ve had only one experience that’s pretty intense, but they haven’t had any other experiences in this domain, it’s going to drive their behavior.””
“Complicating matters, adolescent brains are more susceptible to substance abuse and dependence than adult brains, because they’re making so many new synaptic connections and sloshing around with so much dopamine. Pretty much all quasi-vices to which human beings turn for relief and escape — drinking, drugs, video games, porn — have longer-lasting and more intense effects in teenagers. It makes acting out especially tempting to them, and it makes their habits especially hard to break.”
