All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (20 page)

THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE THAT
keeps children indoors, luring them onto couches the world over with the force of a super-magnet: today’s wide variety of electronic entertainments.

“Half the time,” a Sugar Land mom told me, “if my son”—he’s ten—“goes outside, he’ll come back just a few minutes later with the neighbor boy to play video games.”

The technological developments of the last fifteen years are obviously huge, and I’ll be exploring them in more depth in the next chapter. I should also declare from the start that I’m not an alarmist when it comes to the new modalities of the information age. But if one simply considers the raw data about video games (a 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study says that eight- to ten-year-olds play them for roughly an hour each day) and then adds the data about television for the same age group (3 hours and 41 minutes, up 38 minutes since 2004) and non-school-related computer use (46 minutes), one can see why parents would start to wonder about the cumulative impact of these entertainments—especially for a generation that has a hard time tolerating boredom. (Sixty percent of all “heavy” media users in the Kaiser study described themselves as “often bored,” compared to 48 percent of “light” users.) Screen time consumes a lot of time. Some of it is social, but more of it is solitary. A recent study found that 63 percent of seventh- and eighth-grade boys “often” or “always” play video games alone.

Fears about this new and intense form of time-use provide yet another explanation for why parents sign up their children for more familiar organized activities. And it again explains, I think, the huge appeal of scouting in many of the communities I visited.

The Boy Scouts of America were founded in 1910, a time of rapid urbanization, which prompted fears that young men were degenerating into dandies, opting for the easy pleasures of city life over the rough work of the farm. It was also at just this moment that child labor was being criminalized, and children were, as Viviana Zelizer ruthlessly puts it, becoming useless.

The result was an almost hysterical fear of male softness. And this fear still exists today, often expressed when parents talk about their kids’ excessive Xbox-playing or Hulu-watching. The Boy Scouts seem the perfect antidote to those sedentary hours spent in front of a screen. “I
love
Scouts,” said Laura Anne, the Scout mom from the beginning of this chapter. “We did Scout camp last week. Andrew and Robert got to do the things boys don’t do anymore. Leatherwork, archery, firing BB guns—old-timey fun.”

It doesn’t matter that gaming and online adventures may turn out to be
useful
for the next generation, preparing them for a future written in HTML code. On some primitive level, rightly or wrongly, we still associate practical skills with things you can
physically
do.
It’s nostalgia for these more tactile, “manual” enterprises that surely explains the phenomenal popularity of
The
Dangerous Book for Boys,
published in 2006. It gave instructions for how to
do
things: How to tie five essential knots. How to hunt and cook a rabbit. How to make a go-cart, a battery, a treehouse. To adults, it’s much harder to see the value of video games.

But a child can. From a child’s point of view, video games provide great opportunities for flow. They provide structure and rules. They offer feedback, telling players how well they’ve done. Video games supply a chance to excel at something, to gain a sense of mastery. “There’s now this weird structural tension,” says Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California at Irvine who studies technology use. “We’ve seen a heightened arms race to good educational pathways and good jobs. So kids look to these online spaces for the autonomy they’ve lost”—going to all these structured activities, she means, in order to win that arms race—“while parents are more focused on efficiency and look at these spaces as completely time-wasting.”

And she wonders too if kids would be less inclined to sink hours into these indoor entertainments if they were given more freedom outside the home.

the burden of happiness

Angelique Bartholomew, forty-one, lives just a few houses down from Carol Reed, in a similar brick structure, also just a couple of blocks from Palmer Elementary School, where she too serves on the PTO board. The challenges inside her home, however, are different. Carol struggles with the intense dynamic of keeping one child entertained; Angelique has four children under her roof, plus a stepdaughter who frequently stays over, which means her role is often indistinguishable from that of an air traffic controller. This afternoon, it’s fairly quiet. Her thirteen-year-old, Myles, is at football practice. Her nine-year-old, Brazil, is at a piano lesson. Her youngest, Niguel, is napping. So Angelique, a stunning African American woman in giant hoop earrings and bare feet, is taking advantage of this atypical hour of calm to prepare dinner. On a more ambitious night, it takes two chickens, seven yams, and a crate of strawberries to feed her crew, but this evening she’s keeping it simple with tacos. As she stirs a pan of ground turkey, her four-year-old daughter, Rhyan, wanders downstairs and starts vigorously jumping up and down on the living room couch. Angelique looks up at her.

“Should we get you a book or crayons, and you can do some coloring?”

“My book’s up there.” She points.

“
Please.
Manners.
Please.
” Angelique fetches the book. “We’re having an adult conversation. Don’t butt in.”

I ask Angelique what she finds hardest about having a large family. I expect her to say managing everyone’s schedule, or making her marriage work, or surviving her mortgage payments, or getting enough sleep, or carving out enough time for herself, or keeping her career alive. (She works part-time for a medical forensics lab, but her true love is inspirational speaking.) None of these is the answer I get.

“Balance between the kids,” she instantly replies. “Making sure they all feel like they’re important. Because I know which one of them doesn’t feel like they’re as important.”

She’s speaking candidly while still treading cautiously, daring to say something many parents won’t, but carefully concealing the identity of the child by using the plural pronoun “they.” “All my kids are self-sufficient,” she continues. “But this one wants me to slow down and take a minute and acknowledge them. And I’m in continual motion. . . .”

Even now, in this hour of quiet, a pile of paperwork for a big meeting she has tomorrow needs attention, as does a pile of PE forms for her oldest. Her husband, who sells medical equipment to hospitals, is in San Antonio, which means he can’t help out, and her sister—Angelique is one of ten kids—on whom she heavily relies, is asleep upstairs because she works nights.

Yet Angelique and her husband have managed to make it work. They’ve got a large, airy home with a beautiful pool out back with a twisty slide. They can afford nursery school. She finds time to do her work during the day; she volunteers for the PTO and a local organization that supplies clothes to schools. And she keeps her sanity by waking each morning at six o’clock to meditate and pray.

It sounds tiring—
physically
tiring. But what’s most exhausting to her, she says, are the emotional demands of raising children. “It’s funny how the same parents can make totally different characters,” she says. “No matter how much you put into some of your kids, some will need more than others. And this one”—the one who’s on her mind at the moment, the one to whom she obliquely referred before—“will always require more.” She starts chopping strawberries for dessert and shifts the discussion to the more general theme. “I want them
all
to know that they’re really important to me,” she says. “I feel the same love and care and nurturing for each of my kids. It’s just that the relationship with each is different.”

What does she do to make each of them feel important? “I’ll ask one to come to the store with me,” she says. “Or I’ll act like I can’t do something, and ask one to help me. Or I’ll lay in the bed with one. That’s a big deal. Saying prayers before going to sleep.” She throws open the fridge, inspects it, frowns. Not enough cheese. “And then when
I
go to sleep,” she continues, “I’ll think of something I said to one, or my response to another, or my reaction to another . . . and I’ll try to get up the next day and go to that kid first, if I don’t like what it was.”

I don’t know why I ask her this next question, exactly, but it feels natural. What, in her view, makes a good mother?

She stops what she’s doing to consider this riddle. “Looking at my kids,” she says after a while, “and saying, ‘Are you hungry? Are you sad?’ Identifying the emotion.” She resumes her work, pulling out a box of eighteen taco shells and thunking it down on the counter. “Identifying the emotion,” she repeats for emphasis. “The mother who can detect before it’s spoken. See the place the kid’s in before the kid says it. That’s a good mom to me.”

IN MANY WAYS, ONE
expects a modern and conscientious mother to be like Angelique. She should not play favorites. She should be mindful of her children’s sensitivities. And above all, she should make her children feel important, building their self-esteem shingle by shingle, block by block.

But “modern” is the key word here. Before the “sacralization” of childhood (another apt description from Viviana Zelizer), parents’ hearts weren’t expected to double as emotional seismographs. It was enough that they mended their kids’ clothes, fed them, taught them to do good, and prepared them for the rigors of the world.

It was only after parents’ primary obligations to their kids had been completely outsourced—to public schools, to pediatricians, to supermarkets, to the Gap—that the emotional needs of their children came sharply into focus. In
Raising America,
Ann Hulbert cites the 1930s sociologist Ernest Groves, who observed: “Relieved of having to carry out all the details of child-care in all their ramifications, the family today can concentrate on the more important responsibilities which no other institution can perform—direction, stimulation, and loving friendship.”

But what, exactly, does it mean to provide “direction, stimulation, and loving friendship”? These are, to say the least, abstract objectives. Yet practically every child-rearing expert has insisted on them since World War II. “Stimulation and loving friendship” was the central lesson of
Mary Poppins
almost half a century ago—the character of George Banks metamorphoses from a distant Edwardian paterfamilias to an emotionally engaged maker of kites (a lesson almost every movie dad has learned since)—and it is the central tenet of almost all parenting blogs today. (For years the capsule description of the
New York Times
parenting blog Motherlode started like this: “The goal of parenting is simple—to raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids.”) In
The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood,
the sociologist Sharon Hays sums up her close reading of the works of Benjamin Spock, T. Berry Brazelton, and Penelope Leach, three of the most popular child-rearing experts in history: “Individual happiness becomes that elusive good upon which we can all agree.”

I should here point out that individual happiness is precisely the goal I have for my own son too. But in one of his essays, Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst, makes an observation I’ve never quite been able to shake:

It is unrealistic, I think—and by “unrealistic” I mean it is a demand that cannot be met—to assume that if all goes well in a child’s life, he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn’t make you happy; but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children, I think, suffer—in a way that adults don’t always realize—under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy, which is the pressure not to make their parents unhappy, or more unhappy than they already are.

Parents probably wouldn’t be so frantic about making children happy if their children had more concrete roles within the family. Writing in 1977, Jerome Kagan remarked that the modern, useless child cannot “point to a plowed field or a full woodpile as a sign of his utility.” Hence, he predicted (with uncanny prescience), children were at risk of becoming overly dependent on praise and repeated declarations of love to build their confidence.

Nor would parents be so anxious about shoring up their children’s self-esteem if, to use Margaret Mead’s phrase, “the sureness of folkways” guided their efforts and they knew what, precisely, they were preparing their children
for.
Dr. Spock, the first child-rearing expert to write in the era of the protected child, discusses this predicament in
Problems of Parents
(1962), and it’s probably no accident: he was the pediatrician for Mead’s daughter. “We are uncertain about how we want our children to behave,” he writes, “because we are vague about our ultimate aims for them.” Unless we’ve had “unusually purposeful” upbringings, he says, American middle-class parents

fall back on such general aims as happiness or good adjustment or success. These sound all right as far as they go, but they are quite intangible. There’s little in them that suggests how they are to be accomplished. The trouble with happiness is that it can’t be sought directly. It is only a precious by-product of other worthwhile activities.

This, I think, explains why Amy Chua’s
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
was such a titanic success. It preached exactly this same idea. Forget all this airy-fairy talk about happiness. Aim for excellence instead. Happiness from a job well done is the best kind of happiness anyway. It leads to lasting esteem.

The irony is that even Chua has questions about this approach. “If I could push a magic button and choose happiness or success for my children,” she writes on her website, “I’d choose happiness in a second.”

homework is the new dinner

“That’s a good shovel—where’d you find that?” asks Laura Anne. Cub Scout sign-ups are over, the kids have eaten dinner, and now we’re all sitting at the kitchen table: it’s homework time. Robert, Laura Anne’s seven-year-old, is working quietly on more modest assignments. But Andrew, her nine-year-old, has to transform a big cardboard doll into some kind of scientist. He’s opted for an archaeologist. He nimbly tweezes the shovel between his fingers and affixes it to the doll. “From my Lego set,” he answers.