The reputation of parenthood has not fared well in the modern era. Social science has concluded that parents are either no happier than people without children, or decidedly unhappier. Parents themselves have grown competitively garrulous on the subject of their dissatisfactions. Confessions of child-rearing misery are by now so unremarkable that the parent who doesn’t merrily cop to the odd infanticidal urge is considered a rather suspect figure. And yet, the American journalist Jennifer Senior argues in her earnest book about modern parenthood, it would be wrong to conclude that children only spoil their parents’ fun. Most parents, she writes, reject the findings of social science as a violation of their ‘deepest intuitions’. In fact, most parents – even the dedicated whingers – will say that the benefits of raising children ultimately outweigh the hardships.
Senior’s characterisation of parenthood as a wondrous ‘paradox’ – a nightmare slog that in spite of everything delivers transcendent joy – has gone down very well in America, where parents seem reassured to find a cheerful, pro-kids message being snatched from the jaws of sleep deprivation and despondency. The book spent six weeks on the bestseller list and has earned Senior the ultimate imprimatur of a lecturing gig at the TED conference. ‘All Joy and No Fun inspired me to think differently about my own experience as a parent,’ Andrew Solomon observed in his New York Times review. ‘Over and over again, I find myself bored by what I’m doing with my children: how many times can we read Angelina Ballerina or watch a Bob the Builder video? And yet I remind myself that such intimate shared moments, snuggling close, provide the ultimate meaning of life.’
It is possible, of course, that some parents are lying, or at least sentimentalising the truth, when they offer up this sort of rosy ‘end-of-the-day’ verdict on parenthood. (There are strong social and emotional incentives for not publicly expressing remorse about one’s reproductive choices.) But Senior rejects this surmise as unduly bleak. Having children, she contends, has always been a ‘high cost/high reward’ activity. If today’s parents appear to be having a horrible time, it is not because they aren’t getting the rewards, but because various aspects of modern life have conspired to make them feel the costs more acutely.
By ‘today’s parents’ Senior means American, middle-class, heterosexual, married parents. These are the people she interviews and about whom she generalises throughout her book. She has deliberately excluded the poor because the problems they encounter as parents are hard to separate from their more general money problems. She has also left out the rich because they can afford to outsource the arduous or tedious parts of child-rearing. Why she has chosen to glance only fleetingly – and pityingly – at the case of single parents is less clear. Given that the marriage rate in the US is the lowest it’s been in more than a century and that in 2013 nearly half of the first-time births in the US were to unmarried women, her focus on the nuclear family seems a bit quaint.
Senior identifies three main reasons why modern parents (according to her limited definition) feel more burdened by parenthood than their forebears. One is that they tend to have greater expectations of the existential satisfaction that children – and life in general – will bring them. With their unprecedented array of ‘lifestyle options’, their tendency to regard happiness and self-actualisation as entitlements and their habit of constantly taking their own emotional temperature, contemporary adults are poorly prepared, she argues, for the self-sacrificing work that child-rearing demands. They also suffer, she believes, from a general confusion about how childcare duties should be divided. Most mothers now work, but guidelines for how they should share domestic labour with their partners have yet to be established, leaving couples with the stressful task of improvising (and fighting about) their own labour-sharing arrangements.
Lastly – and in Senior’s estimation, most significantly – modern parents have to cope with the drastically elevated status of modern children. The useful little trainee adults who, just a century ago, were toiling in fields and factories and contributing to the family purse have been transformed into family pets – ‘economically useless but emotionally priceless’ in the words of the sociologist Viviana Zelizer. (Senior doesn’t mention it, but it’s worth noting that for some years the default phrase used by Americans to congratulate their offspring on any sort of achievement has been, ‘Good job!’ – a wishful idiom, it seems, designed to confer on a child’s economically useless exploits the illusion of the dignity of labour.) Rearing the priceless modern child is now a high performance, perfectible project, requiring an unprecedented outlay of money and time. In 1965, Senior observes, when women had yet to become a sizeable presence in the workforce, mothers spent 3.7 fewer hours per week on childcare than in 2008, even though women in 2008 were working almost three times as many paid hours. Fathers spent more than three times as many hours with their children in 2008 as in 1965.
What were these parents doing with all their extra parenting hours? Specifically, they were reading to their children, playing with them, helping them build replicas of the Giza pyramids, ferrying them to ballet class, taekwondo class, soccer practice, chess lessons, Scouts. Generally, they were attempting to maximise their children’s potential, to optimise their CVs, to ensure their psychological well-being – to make them happy.
Senior’s characterisation of parenthood as a wondrous ‘paradox’ – a nightmare slog that in spite of everything delivers transcendent joy – has gone down very well in America, where parents seem reassured to find a cheerful, pro-kids message being snatched from the jaws of sleep deprivation and despondency. The book spent six weeks on the bestseller list and has earned Senior the ultimate imprimatur of a lecturing gig at the TED conference. ‘All Joy and No Fun inspired me to think differently about my own experience as a parent,’ Andrew Solomon observed in his New York Times review. ‘Over and over again, I find myself bored by what I’m doing with my children: how many times can we read Angelina Ballerina or watch a Bob the Builder video? And yet I remind myself that such intimate shared moments, snuggling close, provide the ultimate meaning of life.’
It is possible, of course, that some parents are lying, or at least sentimentalising the truth, when they offer up this sort of rosy ‘end-of-the-day’ verdict on parenthood. (There are strong social and emotional incentives for not publicly expressing remorse about one’s reproductive choices.) But Senior rejects this surmise as unduly bleak. Having children, she contends, has always been a ‘high cost/high reward’ activity. If today’s parents appear to be having a horrible time, it is not because they aren’t getting the rewards, but because various aspects of modern life have conspired to make them feel the costs more acutely.By ‘today’s parents’ Senior means American, middle-class, heterosexual, married parents. These are the people she interviews and about whom she generalises throughout her book. She has deliberately excluded the poor because the problems they encounter as parents are hard to separate from their more general money problems. She has also left out the rich because they can afford to outsource the arduous or tedious parts of child-rearing. Why she has chosen to glance only fleetingly – and pityingly – at the case of single parents is less clear. Given that the marriage rate in the US is the lowest it’s been in more than a century and that in 2013 nearly half of the first-time births in the US were to unmarried women, her focus on the nuclear family seems a bit quaint.
Senior identifies three main reasons why modern parents (according to her limited definition) feel more burdened by parenthood than their forebears. One is that they tend to have greater expectations of the existential satisfaction that children – and life in general – will bring them. With their unprecedented array of ‘lifestyle options’, their tendency to regard happiness and self-actualisation as entitlements and their habit of constantly taking their own emotional temperature, contemporary adults are poorly prepared, she argues, for the self-sacrificing work that child-rearing demands. They also suffer, she believes, from a general confusion about how childcare duties should be divided. Most mothers now work, but guidelines for how they should share domestic labour with their partners have yet to be established, leaving couples with the stressful task of improvising (and fighting about) their own labour-sharing arrangements.
Lastly – and in Senior’s estimation, most significantly – modern parents have to cope with the drastically elevated status of modern children. The useful little trainee adults who, just a century ago, were toiling in fields and factories and contributing to the family purse have been transformed into family pets – ‘economically useless but emotionally priceless’ in the words of the sociologist Viviana Zelizer. (Senior doesn’t mention it, but it’s worth noting that for some years the default phrase used by Americans to congratulate their offspring on any sort of achievement has been, ‘Good job!’ – a wishful idiom, it seems, designed to confer on a child’s economically useless exploits the illusion of the dignity of labour.) Rearing the priceless modern child is now a high performance, perfectible project, requiring an unprecedented outlay of money and time. In 1965, Senior observes, when women had yet to become a sizeable presence in the workforce, mothers spent 3.7 fewer hours per week on childcare than in 2008, even though women in 2008 were working almost three times as many paid hours. Fathers spent more than three times as many hours with their children in 2008 as in 1965.
What were these parents doing with all their extra parenting hours? Specifically, they were reading to their children, playing with them, helping them build replicas of the Giza pyramids, ferrying them to ballet class, taekwondo class, soccer practice, chess lessons, Scouts. Generally, they were attempting to maximise their children’s potential, to optimise their CVs, to ensure their psychological well-being – to make them happy.
by Zoe Heller, LRB | Read more:
Image: Ecco. All Joy and No Fun
