All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (13 page)

Sharon didn’t start noticing behavioral problems until Michelle was nine years old. Michelle had an IQ of only 75, which may have contributed to her defiance; the frustration of coping with so many cognitive difficulties can easily spill into social difficulties, as parents of severely learning-impaired children can attest. Or perhaps Michelle’s behavior was the result of those five first crucial months of neglect, which for all Sharon knew involved unspeakable abuse; perhaps it was scribbled into a few obscure strands of her DNA. Michelle also began acting out around the same time her brother, Mike, died, which Sharon assumes was no coincidence. Everyone in the family was suffering terribly back then. Mike’s suicide had a wretched effect on everyone.

But whatever the origins of Michelle’s unruliness, Sharon suddenly had a wildly oppositional child on her hands, a girl who never finished high school and would frequently run off to live with various boyfriends. The psychiatrists called it “attachment failure.” In practical terms, it meant something much more basic to Sharon.

“It took a long, long time for Michelle to believe I loved her,” she says, as we settle into her living room for the afternoon and Cam naps upstairs. “A lot of the opposition and the testing was from the
utter disbelief
that someone could love her.” Throughout Michelle’s late teens and twenties, she would leave home and come back, leave and come back, and each time she disappeared it’d be for months at a clip, with Sharon never knowing whether Michelle was dead or alive.

People close to Sharon were amazed at her forbearance. “They would always ask me, ‘Why do you do this to yourself, taking her back in? She’s just going to break your heart again,’ ” says Sharon. “And I would say, ‘Well, because I’m her mother.’ ”

At this point, I confess to Sharon that I too am amazed that she found the strength to cope. Wasn’t it hard to funnel so much love into someone who
resisted
love and attachment?

She shrugs. “It’s the whole bonding thing, I guess.”

Right. But she’s describing a child who
didn’t
bond.

“But I bonded to
her,
” she says. “She might not have bonded back. But I bonded to Michelle.” That was enough. “I can’t tell you why I loved her,” she says. “But I loved her. I always did.”

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.”

Many adults need the people they love too. But in young children, love is almost
indistinguishable
from need, which makes their adoration especially powerful. Because they live in the present, forgiveness comes easily to them; they haven’t yet formed the mental machinery to hold grudges. (“When I apologize, she’s instantly okay,” another woman told her class. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, Mom, that’s fine.’ ”) Toddlers and preschoolers do not smolder, do not hoard a satchel of grievances, do not love conditionally. They love. That’s that.

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.”

That’s the kind of love that Sharon had for Michelle. Through nurturing her as a child, day in and day out, Sharon came to love her, to bond with her, and to wish stubbornly to protect her, no matter how hard Michelle pushed back as a teen or an adult.

This is not to suggest that parents have cornered the market on Gift-love, or that they’re better at it than nonparents. There are plenty of times when parents feel themselves loving conditionally, qualifiedly; there are moments when they discover, to their horror, that they have trouble loving their children at all. Sharon is acutely aware of her past shortcomings as a young mother, decades before Cam came into her life. She and her husband divorced early, which left her broke, sometimes incapable of providing her kids with so much as bologna sandwiches for lunch. She remembers missing crucial milestones—first steps, first words—because she was beating the pavement, trying to find teaching work. After Mike died, she struggled with a terrible depression, which she knows had consequences, rendering her absent while still home, and making her daughters suffer a double loss, not just of their brother but of their mother too.

“I don’t want to say I was a
bad
parent back then,” says Sharon. “But I was such a needy person, trying to raise these kids and not giving them what they needed.” She has compassion for her younger self. She also knows her life would have been easier if, as she puts it, “there’d been more societal helps.” But the struggles of those years defined her inner life and her subsequent choices. “Knowing that I had not been able to make my kids feel like their world was safe, and that help was available when they needed it, drives a lot of what I do for other people now,” says Sharon. “And it’s driving
everything
that I do with Cam.”

What Cam has given her, many years later, is another chance to be her best self. That’s what children can do in the end: give us that shot, even if we so frequently and disastrously fall short of the mark. It takes effort to love generously. “There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved,” writes Lewis toward the end of
The Four Loves.
“Every child is sometimes infuriating; most children are not infrequently odious.” But on the days we’re at our best, our very finest, we’re able to overlook these imperfections and love our children with only their best interests in mind. “There are many ways to approach that ideal and to care for others—ways that don’t involve children,” Gopnik notes. “Still, caring for children is an awfully fast and efficient way to experience at least a little saintliness.”

ABOUT NINETY MINUTES HAVE
passed. Cam suddenly appears at the top of the stairs. “Cameron!” shouts Sharon. “You’re awake! Come here, you!” He races down the steps, runs over to his grandmother, and gives her a giant embrace. She pat-pat-pats his bottom. “Did you have a good nap?”

He nods. It’s hard not to be struck by how much happier Sharon looks now than she did this morning. I ask if she was aware that she couldn’t wipe the grin off her face when we were at the splash pad earlier.

She smiles. “No. But I love water. That might be part of it.” She gives it a bit more thought. “I love kids, I love water—they all came together there. And I knew Cameron was having fun. It made me happy to see you laughing in the water, didn’t it?” she says, turning to Cam. “You were laaaaaughing. You were drinking the water!” She stares right into his face. “It made me happy.”

So Sharon strives, in her own way, for a little bit of saintliness. In fact, she’s a religious person, intensely active in her Catholic church. She’s not really sure about God—“I’m more of a Jesus freak than a God freak,” she likes to say—but she believes in the Gospels and social justice, framing her philosophy in very simple terms: “You should take care of people who don’t have what they need.”

That’s what her life with Michelle was about: trying to give her what she needed. “And I was getting
something
back,” Sharon says, after thinking it over. “She was receptive to my love.” Sharon considered that a gift. Michelle was the kind of child who found it hard to trust anyone, much less accept affection. It meant something to Sharon that Michelle learned to accept hers. “It felt good to love her,” she says. “Also, it was
my promise
to love her. I’m very strong on promise. I can’t be
who I am
if I take on an obligation and I don’t carry through with it.” She recalls the day she stood before the judge, finalizing the adoption. “He looked at me and said, ‘You understand, you cannot bring her back.’ ” She laughs, pretending to reply. “
Yes, I get it. It’s for life.
” And that was the point. “At the time I made my choice, I had other options,” she says. “But once I made my choice, I stripped myself of those options. That was it, right there.”

And now she’s made the same commitment to Cam. At thirty-two, Michelle came back to Sharon after another months-long disappearance, telling her she was pregnant. What Michelle didn’t know was that she also had advanced-stage cervical cancer, because she’d never gone for any internal exams during her pregnancy and the cancer didn’t show up on any of her sonograms. Cam was born at just twenty-eight weeks, a frail little thing whose prospects for survival were hardly better than his mother’s. Michelle held on for nine more months. She was in a lot of pain toward the end, incapable of being touched, incapable of holding her son. The one wish she made clear was that Sharon should care for him. And so Sharon does, every day, imperfectly but fiercely, with Cam now occupying the same room in which his mother spent her final months.

“I’m in it for life now,” says Sharon. “And sometimes I do think to myself
, Would he be better off with two parents, with some young people in his life?”
She can do the math. She’s sixty-seven; he’s three. “And then I’m like,
Possibly.
But where would I find them, and how would I know for sure?
And if I can’t know for sure, and I can’t find them, he’s got me.”

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that there are two ways to lead a life: one in which we act as if nothing is a miracle, and the other in which we act as if everything is. Sharon directs her gaze across the living room. Cam has discreetly settled into an armchair, Richard Scarry’s
A Day at the Airport
sprawled across his lap. “When Cam was born,” she says, “he weighed three pounds and was fourteen inches long. And now, a mere three years later, he sits with his legs crossed, reading a book. How can you not be incredulous and amazed?” She stares at him for a while. We both do. “How does this happen?” she asks. “We start as
nothing.
And today, just look at him. Is he in charge of his earth or what?”

chapter four

concerted cultivation

Profound must be the depths of the affection that will induce a man to save money for others to spend.

—Edward Sandford Martin,
The Luxury of Children and Some Other Luxuries
(1904)

IT WAS LAURA ANNE
Day’s idea that I come to Cub Scouts sign-ups with her. It wasn’t the plan when I originally phoned. I had no plans. I knew only the barest details about her life: she was thirty-five, divorced, and a mother of two boys; she worked full-time as a scheduler for a lawyer; and she lived in West University Place, an affluent, autonomous city within the city of Houston, a place where striver parents typically lead busy, ambitious lives.

Then she told me she was a Scout mom. Cub Scouts are a huge deal in Houston. Laura Anne can tell you sixteen different reasons why they’re a big deal, but none of them has anything to do with why she suggested I tag along with her this evening. Rather, Laura Anne believed that Cub Scout sign-ups were the best place in the neighborhood to witness the real-time theatrics of parents trying to set their children’s fall schedules. As she’s driving us there in her Toyota Highlander, her sunglasses crowning her blond bob and her khaki Scout shirt tucked neatly into her jeans, she warns me that the air will be filled with arias of conflict and overcommitment from the moment we walk through the door. “You’ll see,” she says, locking the car door.

She’s right. The very second parents arrive at the West University United Methodist Church, they start to shower the Scout leaders with questions: How many times per week do I need to attend these meetings? Is there any flexibility when it comes to my kids’ participation? Because . . .

“Because my son has at least an hour of homework per night,” says a mother, looking at her son, “and piano and soccer, and my younger one has T-ball . . .”

“Because he has Skype lessons for Indian classical music once a week,” says another woman, “and voice lessons twice a week, and piano and soccer and language lessons on the weekend—Sanskrit on Saturday and Hindi on Sunday . . .”

“Because,” says a father just a few moments after that, neatly summing things up, “like everyone here, we are seriously overscheduled.”

Randy, a podiatrist by day and the Cubmaster to whom these questions are metronomically directed this evening, nods understandingly each time. “Right. The answer is, there are two meetings per month, one with the den and one with the pack. . . .”

As he elaborates, the father grimaces. “Okay. I’ll have to consult.” He looks at his son. “Because, naturally, he’s got football Tuesday nights.”
Naturally,
because this is Texas, and everyone plays football in Texas. And
naturally
in the ironic sense too, because the Cub Scouts’ once-monthly pack meetings are also on Tuesday nights. “And I’m his younger brother’s soccer coach on Tuesday nights too,” says the dad. Meaning he’s doubly unavailable to take his kid to Scouts. “Okay. . . .” Yet here he is, trying valiantly to figure out a way to make it all work. “Maybe he just won’t go to football practice once a month,” he says, letting out a long, resigned
pfffffff.
“Or maybe . . .” He trails off. “Maybe we’ll just clone ourselves.”

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.

Because they
are
extravagant. Behind every overscheduled child is a mother or father filling out forms, hustling from T-ball to ice-skating to chess lessons, and, in many instances, going through the same paces the child is, from learning the violin Suzuki-style to co-building miniature replicas of Reliant Stadium for school. As one mother put it to me: “I planned a career that would allow me to work part-time because I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. And I am never at home.”

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.

This is one of the reasons I’ve come to Houston and its surrounding suburbs. The area is one of the country’s unofficial capitals of concerted cultivation, though it may not be associated with it in quite the same way as New York or Cambridge or Beverly Hills. The place has all the ingredients. It’s got a thriving middle class. It’s obsessed with sports. It has a large population of adults who do research for a living—at the Texas Medical Center, at Baylor and Rice and the University of Houston, at a host of energy companies. And it’s exploding with families with children under the age of eighteen, according to the 2010 census.

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.
”

Summers can be even worse, because there are full days to fill. When I first started phoning parents in Texas, it was June, and I spoke to the mother of two boys, ages eleven and thirteen, both gifted in math and science. Most parents know that summer camp today isn’t the summer camp of yore, filled with tetherball and relay races and inedible Jell-O snacks. Camp has become a week-to-week series of immersion courses, each designed to nurture strengths and open minds. But even in light of these new, talent-optimizing developments, the recitation this woman gave of her sons’ summer options was truly Homeric, amounting to a nerd’s paradise for the kids but a carpool Hades for her and her husband. There was one computer camp to learn Java, another to learn C++, and another to learn Visual Basic; still another camp taught “Game modding,” teaching aspiring hackers off-menu ways to supercharge their video games. Among the offerings at the Natural Museum of Science were Chemistry Camp, Space Camp, Dinosaur Camp, and Physics Camp (which included the Star Warriors Academy and Council); the American Robotics Academy offered camps on “crazy action contraptions” and “Leonardo da Vinci machines.” The brainiest seventh-graders could participate in a three-week program allowing them to take college-level courses, from architecture to neuroscience. More eccentric kids could do “duct tape creations,” which, just as it sounds, was devoted to making improbable objects out of the sticky stuff, including cell-phone cases and flip-flops.

But the simplest way to tell this story of mushrooming children’s activities and escalating parental involvement in them is through numbers. Back in 1965, when women had not yet become a regular presence in the workplace, mothers
still
spent 3.7 fewer hours per week on child care than they did in 2008, according to the American Time Use Survey, even though women in 2008 were working almost three times as many paid hours. Fathers, meanwhile, spent over three times as many hours with their children in 2008 as they did in 1965.

So how to account for this steady trend toward a more exhaustive—and exhausting—style of parenting?

One explanation is straightforward: we are having fewer children, which means we have more time for each child. But other explanations are more subtle. We live in a nation of sprawl, which means our children’s friends are farther apart, making it tempting to enroll our children in organized activities just to give them a chance to socialize. (This, I should add, is especially true of the Houston area, looped with ribbons of twelve-lane highways that rattle with SUVs the size of ice-cream trucks.) We also live in the midst of an electronic-media explosion, whose lures parents fear ought to be counterprogrammed with more constructive agendas. Today’s parents harbor extra—and not always rational—concerns about children’s safety, which makes them more inclined to control their time. And we live in a nation of women who work, a fact that still generates discomfort and ambivalence, resulting in stricter imperatives for parents, mothers especially, to spend more of their nonworking hours with their children to compensate for all that time away.

Perhaps most fundamentally, though, hyperparenting reflects a new sense of confusion and anxiety about the future. Today it is the unimpeachable conviction of the middle class that children ought to be perfected and refined in order to ready them for the world ahead. But our higgledy-piggledy efforts to do so, often contradictory and even promiscuous in nature, suggest we’re a bit flummoxed about what that entails and what our exact role
is
in this important matter. What, precisely, are we preparing our children
for?
How, as mothers and fathers, are we supposed to prepare them for it? Have parents always operated this blindly? Or were the roles of parents and children more clearly—and simply—defined in the past?

The answers to these questions may seem obvious. But they’re more complicated than one might think, and they lie at the heart of some of the most obdurate challenges of the middle parenting years. It is during these years that the strengths and weaknesses of children start to reveal themselves in all their contours, as do their preferences and tastes. The things that once were quirks, modestly irritating habits, or joyful tendencies start to harden into full-blown characterological traits. The whole person starts to show. Middle-class parents perceive these years as a crucial stretch of time, one in which they can either do something or nothing to coax out their children’s best selves. But they’re uncertain how to do it, and they’re uncertain whether their goals for their children are even possible. “When the kids were younger,” says Leslie Schulze, a mom in the Houston suburbs you’ll be meeting shortly, “the question was, ‘Am I starting cereal at the right time?’ Now, it’s ‘Am I making the right decision for my child?’ ”

Indeed, how would she even know if she were?

WE ARE ACCUSTOMED TO
thinking about concerted cultivation as the neurotic product of coastal overprivilege or Lone Star State–size ambition. But as I was reading Annette Lareau, the first two people I thought of were a pair of women I’d met through ECFE in St. Paul. Both were members of a group of moms who referred to themselves as “The Committee,” because they all knew one another from committees associated with their children’s activities. “All the women in The Committee,” wrote one of them to me in an email, “are intelligent, caring, fun, and dynamic women who are very close to being completely burnt out.”

The next day I met with the author of the email, Marta Shore, in a café. Marta is a statistics professor and mother of two. She told me she was so fried that she decided this year to limit her parental involvement to just one activity per child.

Why? I asked.

She looked confused for a moment. “Because if I didn’t impose the limit of one per child,” she finally said, “it’d be eighteen.”

But that wasn’t my question. I was asking why she felt the need to do anything
at all.
She was already driving her nine-year-old daughter to swim lessons and Hebrew school and piano (or, at the very least, coordinating the carpools that got her there), and she was already a leader of her daughter’s Girl Scout troop. She was investigating judo for her too, as well as art lessons—not that she could afford these activities, not that there was time—but she thought she ought to at least consider these options because her daughter had expressed an interest in them. She was also doing advocacy work on behalf of ECFE, because she and her three-year-old were still attending classes.