All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (3 page)

Bonnet adds that the sleep-deprived score higher on measures of irritability and lower on measures of inhibition too, which isn’t an especially useful combination for parents, who are trying to keep their cool. Psychologists in fact have a term for the slow, incremental erosion of our self-restraint: they call it “ego depletion.” In 2011 the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and
New York
Times
columnist John Tierney wrote a book on the subject called
Willpower,
whose central argument is that self-control, unfortunately, is not a bottomless resource. One of the most intriguing studies cited by the authors concluded, after following more than two hundred subjects throughout the day, that “the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along.”

For me, this finding raises a question: assuming that parents spend a great deal of time fighting off the urge to sleep—and the urge to sleep is one of the two most common urges that adults try to fight (the other being the urge to eat)—then what urges do parents later succumb to instead? The most obvious answer I can think of is the urge to yell, an upsetting thought—nothing makes a mother or father feel quite so awful as hollering at the most vulnerable people in their lives. Yet that’s what we do. Jessie confesses it’s what she does, in spite of her enviably mellow disposition. “I’ll yell,” she says, “and then I’ll feel bad that I yelled, and then I’ll feel mad at myself:
Why didn’t I get enough sleep?
”

pashas of excess

Five-year-old Bella wanders into the kitchen, where her mother and I have parked ourselves. Jessie cups her daughter’s face in her hands. “What’s up?”

“I’m hungry.”

“So what do you say?”

“May I have something to eat, please?”

“Yes.” Jessie flings open the fridge. Bella stares into it. Abe wanders over. The baby, William, is still down for his morning nap. “Abe, you want some yogurt?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes please, Mama,” Jessie corrects. “
You’re the best, Mama.
” She smiles and rolls her eyes. Too much to ask for, obviously, but a woman can dream. “Are you guys going to make apple pie?” Jessie’s not talking about apple pie in the traditional sense, but something the kids invented: yogurt topped with applesauce and Cheerios and cinnamon. They have “pie-eating” contests sometimes, to see who got the ratios just right.

“Yes!”

The kids head out to the dining room while we remain in the kitchen. All is quiet for a little while. But a few minutes later, as we walk through the dining room to Jessie’s office, we see Abe place a Play-Doh set onto a blob of yogurt. “Abe, no!” Jessie says, lunging quickly to avert a gloppy mess. Too late. “Everything
off
the table until I wipe it up, okay?” It’s the first time I’ve heard tension creep into her voice all morning. She’s so calm one almost forgets that life with small children is a long-running experiment in contained bedlam. She wipes the yogurt silhouette away, then stops for a brief second, staring at a constellation of Cheerios and crackers behind William’s high chair, which he’d obviously been tossing behind him earlier that morning. Should she even bother cleaning it up? The kids are about to embark on another grubby project anyway, rolling Play-Doh hot dogs all over the dining room table. “Later,” she decides, and continues into her office.

IN HIS 2005 COLLECTION
of essays
Going Sane,
Adam Phillips makes a keen observation. “Babies may be sweet, babies may be beautiful, babies may be adored,” he writes, “but they have all the characteristics that are identified as mad when they are found too brazenly in adults.” He lists those characteristics: Babies are incontinent. They don’t speak our language. They require constant monitoring to prevent self-harm. “They seem to live the excessively wishful lives,” he notes, “of those who assume that they are the only person in the world.” The same is true, Phillips goes on to argue, of young children, who want so much and possess so little self-control. “The modern child,” he observes. “Too much desire; too little organization.” Children are pashas of excess.

If you’ve spent most of your adult life in the company of other adults—especially in the workplace, where social niceties are observed and rational discourse is generally the coin of the realm—it requires some adjusting to spend so much time in the company of people who feel more than think. (When I first read Phillips’s observations about the parallels between children and madmen, it so happened that my son, three at the time, was screaming from his room, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Wear. PANTS.”)

Yet children do not see themselves as excessive. “Children would be very surprised,” Phillips writes, “to discover just how mad we think they are.” The real danger, in his view, is that children can drive
their parents
crazy. The extravagance of children’s wishes, behaviors, and energies all become a threat to their parents’ well-ordered lives. “All the modern prescriptive childrearing literature,” he concludes, “is about how not to drive someone (the child) mad and how not to be driven mad (by the child).”

This insight helps clarify why parents so often feel powerless around their young children, even though they’re putatively in charge. To a preschooler, all rumpus room calisthenics—whether it’s bouncing from couch cushion to couch cushion, banging on tables, or heaving bowls of spaghetti onto the floor—feel normal. But to adults, the child looks as though he or she has suddenly slipped into one of Maurice Sendak’s wolf suits. The grown-up response is to put a stop to the child’s mischief, because that’s the adult’s job, and that’s what civilized living is all about. Yet parents intuit, on some level, that children are
meant
to make messes, to be noisy, to test boundaries. “All parents at some time feel overwhelmed by their children; feel that their children ask more of them than they can provide,” writes Phillips in another essay. “One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child.”

THERE ARE BIOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS
that help explain why young children drive us crazy. Adults have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that sits just behind the forehead, while the prefrontal cortexes of young children are barely developed at all. The prefrontal cortex controls executive function, which allows us to organize our thoughts and (as a result) our actions. Without this ability, we cannot focus our attention. And this, in some ways, is one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with little kids: their attention is unfocused (or suffers from what Phillips might call “too little organization”).

But again: children themselves do not perceive their attention as unfocused. In
The Philosophical Baby,
the psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik makes a distinction between a lantern and a spotlight: the spotlight illuminates just one thing while the lantern throws off a 360-degree glow. Adults have a spotlight consciousness. The consciousness of small children, on the other hand, is more like a lantern. By design, infants and preschoolers are highly distractible, like bugs with eyes all over their heads. And because the prefrontal cortex controls inhibitions as well as executive function, young children lack compunction about investigating every tangential object that captures their fancy. “Anyone who tries to persuade a three-year-old to get dressed for preschool will develop an appreciation of inhibition,” she writes. “It would be so much easier if they didn’t stop to explore every speck of dust on the floor.”

You don’t have to be especially clever to infer from this difference that adults might therefore find children a bit difficult to synchronize with their own agendas. A parent wants to put on a child’s shoes and go to preschool; the child might agree, but then again, she might not, deciding it is vastly more important at that moment to play with her socks. Perhaps the parent has time to indulge this fascination, perhaps the parent doesn’t. Either way, the parent must adapt, and that is hard: part of the reason we consider the world a comfortable place is because we can more or less predict the behavior of those in our lives. Small children send predictability out the window.

In addition to reason and focus and inhibition, the prefrontal cortex controls our ability to plan, to forecast, to ponder the future. But young children, whose prefrontal cortexes have barely begun to ripen, can’t conceive of a future, which means they spend their lives in the permanent present, a forever feeling of
right now.
At times, this is a desirable state of consciousness; indeed, for meditators, it’s the ultimate aspiration. But living in the permanent present is not a practical parenting strategy.

“Everybody would like to be in the present,” says Daniel Gilbert, a social psychologist at Harvard and author of the 2006 best-seller
Stumbling on Happiness.
“Certainly it’s true that there is an important role for being present in our lives. All the data say that. My own research says that.” The difference is that children, by definition,
only
live in the present, which means that you, as a parent, don’t get much of a chance. “Everyone is moving at the same speed toward the future,” he says. “But your children are moving at that same speed with their eyes closed. So you’re the ones who’ve got to steer.” He thinks about this for a moment. “You know, back in the early seventies, I hung out with a lot of people who wanted to live in the present. And it meant that no one paid the rent.”

In effect, parents and small children have two completely different temporal outlooks. Parents can project into the future; their young children, anchored in the present, have a much harder time of it. This difference can be a formula for heartbreak for a small child. Toddlers cannot appreciate, as an adult can, that when they’re told to put their blocks away, they’ll be able to resume playing with them at some later date. They do not care, when told they can’t have another bag of potato chips, that life is long and teeming with potato chips. They want them
now,
because now is where they live.

Yet somehow mothers and fathers believe that if only they could convey the
logic
of their decisions, their young children would understand it. That’s what their adult brains thrived on for all those years before their children came along: rational chitchat, in which motives were elucidated and careful analyses dutifully dispatched. But young children lead intensely emotional lives. Reasoned discussion does not have the same effect on them, and their brains are not yet optimized for it. “I do make the mistake of talking to my daughter sometimes like she’s an adult,” a woman named Kenya confessed to her ECFE group. “I expect her to understand. Like if I break things down enough, she’ll get it.”

The class instructor, Todd Kolod, nodded sympathetically. He’d heard it a thousand times before. It’s the “little adult” problem, he explained. We mistakenly believe our children will be persuaded by our ways of reasoning. “But your three-year-old,” he gently told her, “is never going to say, ‘Yes, you’re right. You have a point.’ ”

flow

“You want a dance party?” Jessie asks. “A pillow fight? A sword fight?” William has awakened from his morning nap, so she’s taking a break from her work. One of the loveliest things about Jessie as a mother is that she seriously embraces play. She loves rocking out to music, loves art projects, loves clue games. (As in: “Something you pick.” Answer: “Booger.”) “Get off my boat!” she tells Abe, whose obsession of the moment is pirates. “Get on your
own
boat!” She picks up a light saber and jousts with one hand while cranking up the music on an iPod dock with the other. Then she picks up William, spins, and gives Abe a wicked look. “I’m stealing your boat! I’m going to take all your treasure!”

Abe bangs his light saber on the ground.

She looks mildly cross for a second. “Don’t do that. You’ll break it.” Then, back in character: “Less talk, more action!” She leans in with her light saber to attack Abe, then gives it to William to do the same. She puts William down and begins to tickle Abe, who likes it at first, but objects when she moves in to devour his belly.

“Don’t do that,” he tells her. Their rhythm, again, is disrupted.

“Don’t do that?” she says. “You know why I do that? Because I love you.” She turns him upside down.

“No!” he repeats.

She looks at him assessingly. “You were up too early, huh? Okay. No swinging.” She decides to change both songs and tactics, turning her son right side up and holding him in a koala hug as she finds a beautiful Spanish ballad. They start to slow-dance. It clicks. The music forms a cocoon around them, as if I’m not even there. Abe melts into his mother’s shoulder. She breathes him in.

NO GRAPH IN THE
world can do full justice to these unexpected moments. They’re sweet little bursts of grace, and they leave sense-memories on the skin (the smell of the child’s shampoo, the smoothness of his arms). That’s why we’re here, leading this life, isn’t it? To know this kind of enchantment?

The question is why such moments, at least with small children, often feel so hard-won, so
shatterable,
and so fleeting, as if located between parentheses. After just a few minutes of this dreamy slow-dance with Abe, William does a face-plant and starts howling. Jessie sambas over and handles it with humor. This is the drill.

I’d like to propose a possible explanation for why these moments of grace are so rare: the early years of family life don’t offer up many activities that lend themselves to what psychologists call “flow.” Simply put, flow is a state of being in which we are so engrossed in the task at hand—so fortified by our own sense of agency, of
mastery
—that we lose all sense of our surroundings, as though time has stopped. Athletes commonly experience this feeling when they’re sinking every shot or completing every pass (“being in the zone,” they call it); artists commonly experience it too, when music or paint pours out of them as if they were mere spigots.