All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (19 page)

She looks at her children. It’s getting to be that hour when kids start flapping blindly about the house like moths. “Sometimes I wish I could put glue on their butts.” She starts laughing. “Managing the two of them is four times the work of managing one.”

“I disagree,” says Steve, who’s discreetly eating takeout and watching the US Open in a corner of the kitchen. “I say two.”

Monique rolls her eyes as if to say:
This guy has no idea.

Steve looks her dead in the eye. “I’m the primary caregiver.”

Monique returns the look. “If you’re the primary caregiver, did you know that Mathis”—their three-year-old—“came in at two-thirty in the morning, wet?”

His eyes widen for a brief second. “No.”

“He’d had an accident. I got up, changed him, and changed the sheets.”

Steve had slept through it. And she didn’t hold it against him. They had a thing going, these two, an arrangement that worked. “Primary caregiver,” she says, smiling at him.

the indoor child

There aren’t a lot of children riding bikes around here. It has taken me a few days in the Houston suburbs to diagnose this strange absence, this latter-day version of the dog that doesn’t bark. Today is a sultry and sunshiny day, the kind that during my own childhood would have been cause for my mother to shoo me into the cul-de-sac for the rest of the afternoon. But here on this lushly landscaped street, just footsteps from Palmer Elementary School in Missouri City, Texas, all is quiet.

I think about this as I approach the door of Carol Reed’s house, a pretty brick structure with a small pool in the backyard. There’s just so very little street life.

Carol greets me at the door. She, like Monique, is on the Palmer PTO, though she lives in a slightly tonier neighborhood, with slightly pricier homes. But unlike most of the women I’ve met in this area, she grew up in Massachusetts (with the accent to prove it) and prefers her hair short and her glasses chunky. And unlike most women I’ve met here—or anywhere—she’s raising children a full generation apart from one another. She had her son at just twenty-one. Six years ago, when she was forty-seven, she and her second husband decided they wanted a child together, and they adopted a baby girl from China. When Emily first arrived, she was malnourished and had just had heart surgery. Today she’s a hale first-grader. Carol stays home with her.

Carol gives a mixed report about the differences between parenting then and now. She has a bigger social network now, which is nice, and more confidence and experience—others don’t try to tell her how to do her job. “But because Emily’s an only child,” says Carol, “she wants me to be her playmate.”

Yet her son, now thirty-one, was also an only child, I point out. Why was it so different? “I don’t know,” she says, after a moment. “But I played with him less. There were more neighborhood kids. More sleepovers.” She thinks about it some more. “Emily likes having people here. But not going over to other people’s houses.”

It’s possible, of course, that Emily is that kind of kid (“Mom! Play with me!”). But as Carol gives me a tour of her home, I develop another theory. Emily doesn’t just have her own beautiful bedroom. She has her own beautiful playroom too, dominated by a yellow dollhouse and a giant easel and a nifty kitchen. Art supplies, stuffed animals, and toys fill every corner. They’re stacked in translucent drawers and brightly colored crates; they’re tucked inside a banquette that runs along the window; they’re piled high on all the play surfaces, including her miniature table and chairs. The place is a child’s wonderland, indistinguishable from many preschool play spaces and pediatricians’ waiting rooms. The strange thing is that this room is not all that different from the playrooms of many other middle-class children. It’s no longer exotic, having all this equipment, all these toys. They’re manufactured abroad and sold here at affordable prices, either through Amazon or at the local Walmart.

“This is like her apartment,” says Carol as she walks me through it. “It’s where she entertains us. She changes it every now and then. Sometimes it’ll be a restaurant and she’ll make you coffee or a smoothie or cakes”—she points to the toy coffeemaker, blender, and mixer—“and sometimes it’s a store.” She points to the toy shopping cart and cash register.

I look at Carol.

She laughs. “I know,” she says, looking at everything. “My son didn’t have any of this.”

THE SENTIMENTALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD
has produced a great many paradoxes. The most curious, however, may be that children have acquired more and more stuff the more useless they have become. Until the late nineteenth century, when kids were still making vital contributions to the family economy, they didn’t have toys as we know them. They played with found and household objects (sticks, pots, brooms). In his book
Children at Play,
the scholar Howard Chudacoff writes, “Some historians even maintain that before the modern era, the most common form of children’s play occurred not with toys but with other children—siblings, cousins, and peers.”

But by 1931, kids had enough gear for the Hoover White House to declare that they deserved a room of their own. Children, said conferees on a panel on child’s health, needed “a place where they may play or work without interference from or conflict with the activities of the adult members of the family.” The idea of the modern playroom was born, by executive decree.

In the years directly following World War II—the time when modern childhood began in earnest—the toy boom began in earnest too. In 1940, toy sales were a modest $84 million; by 1960, they had reached $1.25 billion. Many classic children’s toys were invented during this era, including Silly Putty (1950) and Mr. Potato Head (1952). And the pickings back then were paltry compared to today, when playrooms as well stocked as Emily’s are increasingly common. In
Parenting, Inc.
(2008), Pamela Paul writes that toy industry sales “for babies between birth and age two alone” were over $700 million annually. According to the Toy Industry Association, domestic sales of kids’ toys were $21.2 billion in 2011, a figure that didn’t include video games.

Such oceans of plenty have had unintended consequences. In
Huck’s Raft,
Steven Mintz notes that toys before the twentieth century were primarily social in nature—jump ropes, marbles, kites, balls. “Modern manufactured toys,” on the other hand, “implied a solitariness that was not a part of childhood before the twentieth century.” He’s thinking of Crayons, for instance, introduced in 1903. Or Tinker Toys (1914), Lincoln Logs (1916), or Legos (1932).

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. Lareau noticed it immediately in the families she studied. “Middle-class parents,” she writes, “worry that if their children do not enroll in organized activities, they will have no one to play with after school and/or during spring and summer breaks.”

The result, unfortunately—and entirely inadvertently—can be a self-perpetuating cycle. If 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].” This passivity can be especially hard as kids exit the elementary school years, and the burden of figuring out how to direct their free time becomes their responsibility. As Darling later explained to me: “No kid ever says, ‘Wow, now I’ve got some free time on my hands—I’m going to be a stamp collector!’ Hobbies take time to develop.”

But because middle-class children today occupy privileged positions within the family, and because their parents have overextended themselves on their behalf, kids sense that they have the power to make their boredom their parents’ responsibility. Lareau noticed this immediately too. “Middle-class children,” she writes, “often feel
entitled
to adult attention and intervention in their play.”

PARENTS WOULD DOUBTLESS FEEL
a lot less pressure to keep their children busy or entertained—and more confident about their kids’ ability to make their own fun—if they felt comfortable sending their children outdoors. But increasingly they don’t. Here, again, is another paradoxical consequence of our sentimentality: the more economically useless children have become, the more aggressively we’ve tried to protect them.

One can discern the outlines of this trend by simply studying the history of the modern playground. In 1905, there were fewer than 100 playgrounds nationwide. By 1917, there were nearly 4,000, because reformers had agitated mightily for them. Before then, children played in the streets. But suddenly they needed protection from a brand-new and lethal invention: the automobile. And so, in 1906, reformers established the Playground Association of America.

Today, children lead even more cloistered lives. They grow up in homes with padded coffee tables, plugged-up electrical sockets, and gated stairways. They go to playgrounds that offer protection not only from the streets but from their own equipment, with swings as snug as diapers and spongy surfaces to break falls from the jungle gym.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that by the time children get big enough to venture out on their own—to the grocery store, to a friend’s house down the street—their parents feel strange about letting them go, believing the world to be a dangerous place. The number of children who walk or bike to school dropped from 42 percent in 1969 to 16 percent in 2001, according to a survey by the Department of Transportation, even though crimes against children have been steadily declining for the last couple of decades, making this moment in time perhaps as safe for children as it’s ever been. (To name one example, between 1992 and 2011, reports of child sexual abuse fell by 63 percent.)

It’s also possible that this anxiety about child safety is yet another manifestation of our culture’s ambivalence toward women in the workplace. With so many mothers collecting a wage outside the home, there are fewer eyes on the street, and with fewer eyes on the street, a panic develops about the potential dangers of those streets. Mintz notes that throughout the eighties—the decade when women were marching off to work in their Reeboks and power suits—paranoia ran rampant about sexual abuse in day care centers. “In retrospect,” he writes, “one can see how terrified parents displaced their own anxieties and guilt feelings about leaving their children with strangers onto daycare workers.” There was a near-simultaneous wave of alarm over stranger abductions and madmen inserting razor blades into Halloween candy; the faces of missing children began popping up on milk cartons at around this same time too, when in fact the number of abductions by strangers probably numbered between 500 and 600 per year, or one in roughly 115,000 (while approximately four times as many kids died as passengers in car accidents).

Today, abduction paranoia is stoked not so much by milk cartons as the excesses of cable news and a new transparency in criminal records. Both forces were especially evident in Texas. Nearly every parent I spoke to in Sugar Land and Missouri City mentioned their kidnapping fears to me at some point or another, even though they lived in ravishingly secure middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. I soon learned that Texas has a public, Internet-searchable sex-offender registry. Anyone can go online, type in his or her address, and see where the nearest recently released sex offender lives. Carol Reed speculated that it was one of the reasons her older child needed less attention when he was growing up. “Things weren’t as scary as they are now,” she told me. “Or we weren’t
aware
of how scary it was.”

I’ll confess I found this fear intensely irrational at first, given the robust health of her neighborhood and her home’s proximity to the local school. But then I checked online. An address and profile of a fellow just a half-mile from her house immediately appeared, followed by three others, all under one mile away. The details of their criminal histories were not very specific. Roughly 90 percent of convicted sex offenders have assaulted people they know, rather than the children of strangers. But this is hardly the type of news that reassures most parents. I’m not at all sure I find it reassuring myself.