All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (2 page)

TO MY MIND, THOUGH,
there is a third development that has altered our parenting experience above all others, and that is the wholesale transformation of the child’s role, both in the home and in society. Since the end of World War II, childhood has been completely redefined.

Today, we work hard to shield children from life’s hardships. But throughout most of our country’s history, we did not. Rather, kids worked. In the earliest days of our nation, they cared for their siblings or spent time in the fields; as the country industrialized, they worked in mines and textile mills, in factories and canneries, in street trades. Over time, reformers managed to outlaw child labor practices. Yet change was slow. 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.

The way most historians describe this transformation is to say that the child went from “useful” to “protected.” But the sociologist Viviana Zelizer came up with a far more pungent phrase. She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

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. Yet parents don’t know what it is they’re supposed to
do
, precisely, in their new jobs. “Parenting” may have become its own activity (its own profession, so to speak), but its goals are far from clear. Children are no longer economic assets, so the only way to balance the books is to assume they are
future
assets, which requires an awful lot of investment, not to mention faith. Because children are now deemed emotionally precious, today’s parents are also charged with the
psychological
well-being of their sons and daughters, which on the face of it may seem like a laudable goal. But it’s a murky one, and not necessarily realistic: building confidence in children is not the same as teaching them to read or to change a tire on your car.

THIS BOOK ATTEMPTS TO
look at the experience of parenthood systematically, piece by piece, stage by stage, in order to articulate—and in some cases quantify—what today’s parents find so challenging about their lives. To give but one example: that exasperating back-and-forth between Angie and Eli? Researchers have been examining that kind of exchange for more than forty years. 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.

There’s a lot more research out there that helps to explain why modern parents feel as they do. What I’ve tried to do here is knit it all together, recruiting from a wide variety of sources. I’ve looked at surveys about sex and charts measuring sleep; books about attention and essays about distraction; histories of marriage and chronicles of childhood; and a wide range of inspired studies that document phenomena as varied as when teenagers fight most intensely with their parents (between eighth and tenth grade) and who feels the most work-life conflict (dads). I’ve then tried to show how all this material appears in the lives of real families, in their kitchens and bedrooms, during carpools and over homework hour, as they go about their daily business.

A FEW CAUTIONARY WORDS:

While it is my sincere hope that parents will read this book to better understand themselves—and, by extension, be easier on themselves—I make few promises about being able to provide any usable child-rearing advice. Tilt your head and stare long enough, and it’s possible you’ll make some out. But that is not my primary objective. This is not a book about children. It’s a book about parents.
What
to Expect When You’re Expecting
may describe the changes that accompany pregnancy. But what changes should you expect when your children are three, or nine, or fifteen? What should you expect once your children are redirecting the course of your marriage, your job, your friendships, your aspirations, your internal sense of self?

One other crucial caveat: this book is about the middle class. Some of the families here may be struggling more than others, but all have to wrestle with difficult economic realities, whether they’re social workers or shift workers, doctors or installers of security systems. I spend little time in the precincts of the elite, because their concerns aren’t especially relatable (practically every child in this book goes to public school). But I also do not focus on the poor, because the concerns of poor parents
as parents
are impossible to view on their own. They are inextricable from the daily pressure to feed and house themselves and their children. As many have noted—perhaps most recently Judith Warner in
Perfect Madness
—poor parents deserve a different kind of book, and far more than one.

BECAUSE THE INDIVIDUAL STAGES
of parenting don’t much look like one another (the pandemonium of the toddler years feels very different from the frustrations and anxieties generated by adolescents), I’ve organized this book in a chronological fashion. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the two things that undergo the most radical transformations once a child is born: our sense of autonomy, which gets entirely upended, and our marriages, whose rites and bylaws are suddenly undone. Chapter 3, on the other hand, concentrates on the unique pleasures that very young children can bring. Chapter 4 is about the middle parenting years—elementary school mostly—when parents feel immense pressure to prepare their children for an increasingly competitive world, thereby turning afternoons and weekends into a long procession of extracurricular activities. And chapter 5 concentrates on the adolescent years, whose effects on parents are wildly underdiscussed. We now shelter and care for our children for so long that they live with us through their own biological metamorphosis into adulthood. Yet precious little has been written about this awkward arrangement, a gap in the literature that’s made doubly weird when one considers that parents, at this same moment, are going through significant life changes of their own, such as menopause and midcareer evaluations.

But my goal isn’t just to analyze the difficulties of parenthood. The “high rewards,” as William Doherty calls them, are worth analyzing too—they’re just incredibly hard to measure. Meaning and joy have a way of slipping through the sieve of social science. The vocabulary for aggravation is large. The vocabulary for transcendence is more elusive. So in chapter 6, my last, I look at what raising children means in the larger context of a life—what it is to feel joy, what it is to surrender ourselves to a larger set of obligations, and what it is, simply, to tell our stories, to remember, to form whole visions of ourselves. We’re all the sum of our experiences, and raising children plays an enormous part in making us who we are. For some of us, perhaps the largest part.

chapter one

autonomy

I held the baby up to the light, squinted at the physician out of one bloodshot eye, and spoke starkly: “Tell me, Doctor. You’ve been in this business a long time.” I glanced meaningfully at the baby. “She’s ruining my life. She’s ruining my sleep, she’s ruining my health, she’s ruining my work, she’s ruining my relationship with my wife, and . . . and she’s ugly.” . . . Swallowing hard, I managed to compose myself for my one simple question: “Why do I like her?”

—Melvin Konner,
The Tangled Wing
(1982)

WHEN I FIRST I
met Jessie Thompson, it was mid-March, a trying time for Minnesota parents. Everywhere else in the country, spring had sprung; here, it would be at least another month before the kids could be humanely disgorged into the yard. All week long, I attended Early Childhood Family Education classes in and around Minneapolis and St. Paul, listening to roughly 125 parents talk about their lives. And all week long, at some point or another, almost all would give the same report: their nerves were shot and so were their kids’ toys—the Play-Doh reduced to dry chips, the Legos scattered in a housewide diaspora. Everyone had the look of a passenger who’d been trapped far too long in coach and could not wait, for the love of everything that was holy, to deplane.

Minnesota’s Early Childhood Family Education program (or ECFE, as I’ll 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.

The first half of each class is straightforward, with parents and children interacting in a group facilitated by ECFE’s staff of early childhood education professionals. But the second half—
that’s
when things get interesting. The parents leave their kids in the hands of those same professionals and retreat to a room of their own, where for sixty blissful minutes they become grown-ups again. Coffee is consumed; hair is let down; notes are compared. A parent educator always guides the discussion.

I met Jessie in one of the smaller ECFE classes in South Minneapolis and instantly liked her. She was one of those curious women who seemed not to realize she was pretty, carrying herself in a slightly distracted way. Her contributions to the discussion, while often wry (“I blame Oprah”), also suggested that she wasn’t afraid of her darker, spikier feelings, and that she could even take a dispassionate view of them, as a lab researcher might of her rats. About midway through the class, for instance, she mentioned that she’d managed to get out of the house the previous evening to meet a girlfriend—a triumph, considering she had three kids under the age of six—“and I had this moment,” she said, “where I realized,
This is how it feels when moms run away from their kids.
I could see why moms get in their cars and just . . . keep driving.” She luxuriated for a few minutes in the high of being alone—just her on the open road, no children strapped into the car seats. “And then I had this actual
fantasy
for a few minutes,” she said. “
What if I just keep driving?
”

She was not seriously entertaining this idea. Jessie was clearly a secure mother, which was why she was comfortable enough to confess this fleeting vision aloud. It was also clear, though, that she was dead-tired and not a little overwhelmed. She was trying to expand her new portrait photography business, based in the den of her home; she was living paycheck to paycheck; her youngest was just eight months old. She didn’t have the resources to put her children in ballet classes and soccer, much less something as luxurious as preschool. She couldn’t afford a babysitter for so much as one morning a week. Every trip to the grocery store involved loading all three kids in the car. “I just have these selfish bouts sometimes,” she said. “Like:
I don’t want to change another diaper. I don’t want my kids hanging all over me 24/7. I want to have a phone conversation without being interrupted.
”

She was simply craving a few perks of her old life. But they were hard to come by with three small children in the house. Perhaps Erma Bombeck put it best more than thirty years ago when one of her characters declared: “I have not been alone in the bathroom since October.”

ONE DAY YOU ARE
a paragon of self-determination, coming and going as you please; the next, you are a parent, laden with gear and unhooked from the rhythms of normal adult life. It’s not an accident that the early years of parenting often register in studies as the least happy ones. They’re the bunker years, short in the scheme of things but often endless-seeming in real time. The autonomy that parents once took for granted has curtly deserted them, a fact that came up again and again among ECFE parents.

One father who’d opted to stay home with his two kids told his group—all stay-at-home dads—about running into a former colleague who was heading to Cuba for work. “And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s great,’ ” he said, gnashing his teeth, making it clear that he in fact thought it was the least great thing he’d heard in a while. He added:

I see people who seem a lot more free, and they’re doing things I wish that I could do, but for the fact that I have my family. Of course, did I want a family? Yes, I did. And do I get a lot of joy out of my children? Yes, I do. But in the day-to-day, it’s sometimes hard to see. You rarely get a chance to do what you want, when you want.

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. In an end-of-the-millennium essay, the historian J. M. Roberts wrote: “The 20th century has spread as never before the idea that human happiness is realizable on Earth.” That’s a wonderful thing, of course, but not always a realistic goal, and when reality falls short of expectations, we often blame ourselves. “Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken,” writes the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his 2012 collection of essays,
Missing Out.
“The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do.” Even if our dreams were never realizable, even if they were false from the start, we regret not pursuing them. “We can’t imagine our lives,” writes Phillips, “without the unlived lives they contain.” And so we ask:
What if I just keep driving?

Today’s adults have an added reason to be spooked by those unlived lives: they have more time to exploit their potential before their children come along. Using National Vital Statistics birth data from 2010, a report by the National Marriage Project recently calculated that the average age of a college-educated woman at first birth is now 30.3 years old. The report added that college-educated women “typically have their first child more than two years after marrying.” The consequence of this deferment is a heightened sense of contrast—before versus after. These parents now have an exquisite memory of what their lives were like before their children came along. They spent roughly a decade on their own, experimenting with different jobs, romantic partners, and living arrangements. That’s twice as long as many of them spent in college.

During my week attending ECFE classes, few people talked about this before-and-after with more honesty or descriptive power than Jessie. In her early twenties she had taught English in Germany, worked at a pub in England, and done a brief stint as a flight attendant for Delta; now she was spending her days in a 1,700-square-foot bungalow with one bathroom (a lovely bungalow, but still). In her late twenties she had decided she wanted a career in advertising, and she was well en route to one by the time her first child was born; now she was presiding over a new, family-friendlier business (so she assumed), her peaceful downtown office replaced by a boisterous niche across from the TV room. “I really, really struggle with this still,” she told her group. “It was just me and my husband until I was thirty-two.”

Having children enlarges our lives in loads of unimaginable ways. But it also disrupts our autonomy in ways we couldn’t have imagined, whether it’s in our work, our leisure, or the banal routines of our day-to-day lives. So that’s where this book begins: with a dissection of those reconfigured lives and an attempt to explain why they look and feel the way they do.

purloined sleep

One of the advantages to arriving at a household at 8:00
A.M
.—assuming you can get past the inherent weirdness of everyone still half-clad in pajamas and walking around with uncombed hair—is that you can read in the parents’ faces the story of both that morning and the evening before. When I visit Jessie in her South Minneapolis home a few months after our first meeting at ECFE, her husband, a civil engineer, is already long gone for work. But she’s here and she’s tired: it’s clear that she either woke up early or went to bed late. It turns out the answer is both.

“Before you got here, I was so depressed,” she confesses, shutting the door behind me. She’s wearing a striped purple-and-maroon tank top, her long hair wet and bunched in a ponytail. Bella, five, and Abe, four, are both padding about, merry and oblivious to their mother’s exhaustion, while the baby, William, is asleep upstairs. “The baby got up early,” she explains. “And the others were up early too, and then the baby threw up on one of his stuffed animals.” At roughly the same moment, Abe wet the bed, which meant the sheets had to be changed and he had to be bathed. Then William started spitting up juice in spectacular projectile fashion at breakfast. “This was at 7:37,” she says. “I know, because I was thinking
, It’s way too early for everything to be falling apart.
”

Which explains why she was up early. Why she was up late the night before is another story. Nighttime is Jessie’s one opportunity for uninterrupted work, and she has an afternoon deadline today. Plus, she was fretting: she and her family will soon be decamping to the suburbs, in order to cut costs. The move should theoretically reduce her stress (“Half the taxes and half the price,” she tells me), but she doesn’t know a soul in her new community. Between her worries and her work, she didn’t climb into bed until 3:00
A.M
.

On some mornings, Jessie admits, she’s so exhausted that the most she can do is set bowls of Cheerios and a cup of milk on the kitchen counter and then return to bed. “I do know a couple of moms who get enough sleep,” she says. “I always wonder how they do it. Because I sure don’t.”

OF ALL THE TORMENTS
of new parents, sleeplessness is the most infamous. But most parents-to-be, no matter how much they’ve been warned, don’t fully grasp this idea until their first child comes along. Perhaps that’s because they think they know what sleep deprivation feels like. But there’s a profound difference between sustained sleep loss and the occasional bad night. 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 newspapers and magazines, this finding is sometimes re-reported as “an hour extra of sleep is worth a $60,000 raise,” which isn’t exactly right, but close enough.)

A 2004 poll by the National Sleep Foundation found that parents of children two months old and younger slept, on average, just 6.2 hours during the night, and the numbers weren’t much better for parents of children ten years old and younger, with their reports averaging only 6.8 hours of sleep per night. Other studies aren’t quite so bleak: Hawley Montgomery-Downs, a neuroscientist who has done lots of work on this topic, recently found that parents of newborns average the same amount of sleep per night as nonparents—7.2 hours per night—with the crucial difference being that it’s noncontinuous.

No matter which study they’re consulting, though, most researchers agree that the sleep patterns of new parents are fragmented, unpredictable, and just plain rotten, failing to do the one thing we love most about sleep, which is to restore the body and mind. As I noted in the introduction, just a brief period of sleep deprivation compromises a person’s performance as much as consuming excess alcohol. “So you can imagine the effects of sleeping for four hours every night for three months,” says Michael H. Bonnet, a sleep researcher and clinical director of Kettering Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio. “We tend to think of it as a list of bad side effects: ‘Well, this happens and this happens and this happens.’ But it’s the comparison with the alcohol studies that
really
makes the point, because we have agreed, as a society, that driving while drunk is punishable.”