All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (30 page)

Durkheim thought a lot about the benefits of social ties. It wasn’t just the bonds between parents and children that interested him, but the bonds between adults and larger institutions. Without them, people feel rootless, disoriented; he described their condition as “anomie.” Today we think of that word as synonymous with alienation, but that’s not what Durkheim was talking about precisely. What he meant was “normlessness” (from the Greek
anomos,
“without law”). It can be very isolating to live in a normless world. In
The Happiness Hypothesis,
Jonathan Haidt describes it this way: “In an anomic society, people can do as they please; but without any clear standards or respected social institutions to enforce those standards, it is harder for people to find things they want to do.”

Once people become parents, they often discover they have a much clearer set of standards to obey and a renewed respect for the social institutions designed to enforce them. Listening to new mothers and fathers talk about what they loved most about the transition to parenthood, I was surprised by this simple, commonly recurring theme: they were now connected more strongly to institutions that normalize a life. They suddenly had reasons to go to church, to synagogue, to the local mosque. They suddenly knew all about their neighborhood schools and parks and block associations; they wanted to become involved in parent-teacher organizations and local politics. And the shadow, parallel worlds of their neighbors with kids, which had once run indistinctly in the background, now began to pop in three dimensions. (“It’s kind of freeing,” a woman named Jen told her ECFE class. “People will come up to me and just start talking. I love having something to talk about with anybody.”) Becoming parents gave them a means to relate to others. They could be seated on a train, waiting at the checkout counter, standing on a long line at the voting booth—and odds were, if the person nearest them had a kid, they had a common set of concerns. “The love we feel for children,” writes Gopnik in
The Philosophical Baby,
“has a special quality of both particularity and universality.”

The idea that children give us structure, purpose, and stronger bonds to the world around us doesn’t always show up in social science data. But it can, if you use the right set of instruments. Robin Simon, for instance, has found that parents who have custody of their children are
less
depressed than those who don’t. That’s a big departure from most other parenting-and-happiness studies, which suggest that single mothers (who more frequently have custody of their kids) are less happy than single fathers. But there’s a difference between Simon’s study and others: she was measuring
depression,
and depression surveys often ask questions about overall meaning and purpose as well as questions about day-to-day mood. They ask whether participants have had trouble getting going that week, for instance, or whether they have felt like failures, or whether they feel hopeful about the future. And it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that someone
with
children under his or her roof, as opposed to someone whose children were taken away, would answer these questions with more optimism. The former have reasons to get up in the morning, reasons to feel like they have made something of their lives, reasons to be connected to the future.

During one of our conversations, Beth, the divorced schoolteacher from the previous chapter, told me that when her son, Carl, was at his most rejecting (refusing to see her, not responding to her texts), she made an effort to give him space and stopped communicating with him for a while. “And I was more miserable,” she said, “than when I texted him and didn’t hear back.” It felt uncomfortable not to reach out to him. It felt uncomfortable not to give love.

In
Flow,
Csikszentmihalyi reports something similar. He finds that for single, non-churchgoing people, Sunday mornings are the low point of their week, for the simple reason that they have no demands placed on their attention. “For many, the lack of structure of those hours is devastating,” he writes. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, talks about melancholy Sundays too, in his best-known book,
Man’s Search for Meaning.
He calls it “Sunday neurosis” and defines it as “that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over.” His therapeutic recommendation in situations of such distress, always, is to add meaningful activity to a life. That activity doesn’t need to be pleasurable. It can even open up a person to pain. That isn’t the point. The point is to have a reason to keep going. “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch,” he notes, “they
increase
the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.” Therapists handling despairing patients, he therefore counsels, should “not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.”

And that’s what choosing parenthood does: gives strength and structural integrity to one’s life through meaningful tension.

If one takes meaning into consideration, happiness might best be described as “a zest for life in all its complexity,” as Sissela Bok writes in her book. To achieve it means to “attach our lives to something larger than ourselves.” To be happy, one must
do.
It could be something as simple as teaching Sunday school or as grand as leading nonviolent protests. It could be as cerebral as seeking the cure for cancer or as physical as climbing mountains. It could be creating art. And it could be raising a child—my “best piece of poetrie,” as Ben Jonson said in his elegy for his seven-year-old son.

the remembering self

In an evening dads’ class in St. Paul, a fellow named Paul Archambeau has the floor. He’s different from the other fathers in the room. While most are first-time dads—or have, say, a three-year-old and a newborn—Paul has four children. His youngest is three, which makes him eligible for ECFE, but his oldest is eleven. “Now that Ben and Isaac are growing up,” he says, “I long for the days when they would sit at the counter and eat Cheerios with their hands. Norah”—his youngest—“can drive me crazy with some of the things she does. But I just know, a year or two or three from now, I’m going to say, ‘Man, that was fun.’ ”

Another father, Chris, whose son is seventeen months, looks surprised. “Why do you long for that?” he asks. “Because I see being able to play catch . . .”

Says another: “Yeah, I fight the feeling off every day—
I can’t wait until he’s older.”

“I don’t know,” Paul admits. “Maybe the finality to it, knowing I’m never going to get those years back. Or maybe because I’m forgetting how hard it was.”

The group debates this for a while.

“But here’s the thing,” says Paul. “I would bet that if someone did a study and asked, ‘Okay, your kid’s three, rank these aspects of your life in terms of enjoyment,’ and then, five years later, asked, ‘Tell me what your life was like when your kid was three,’ you’d have
totally
different responses.”

WITH THIS SIMPLE OBSERVATION,
Paul has stumbled onto one of the biggest paradoxes in the research on human affect: we enshrine things in memory very differently from how we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the “experiencing self” versus the “remembering self.”

The experiencing self is the self who moves through the world and should therefore, at least in theory, be more likely to control our daily life choices. But that’s not how it works out. Rather, it is the remembering self who plays a far more influential role in our lives, particularly when we make decisions or plan for the future, and this fact is made doubly strange when one considers that the remembering self is far more prone to error: our memories are idiosyncratic, selective, and subject to a rangy host of biases. We tend to believe that how an episode ended was how it felt as a whole (so that, alas, the entire experience of a movie, a vacation, or even a twenty-year marriage can be deformed by a bad ending, forever recalled as an awful experience rather than an enjoyable one until it turned sour). We remember milestones and significant changes more vividly than banal things we do more frequently. And how long an activity lasts seems to have little influence on our recollections at all—two weeks of vacation, Kahneman noted in a 2010 TED lecture, won’t be recalled with much more fondness or intensity than one week, because that extra week probably won’t add much new material to the original memory. (Never mind that the experiencing self might really enjoy that extra week of vacation.)

In that same lecture, Kahneman confessed that the outsize power of the remembering self mystified him. “Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight we put on experiences?” he asked the audience. “This is a bit hard to justify, I think.”

But perhaps the answer is obvious:
children.
The remembering self ensures that we’ll keep having them. More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman’s study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we
think
about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.

This is precisely what Paul tells his fellow dads. “Here’s the best way to describe it,” he says. “I was at the high school hockey tournament this weekend with all the kids. And it was kind of crazy. Especially with a three-year-old. Trying to sit and whatever. And at one point this woman going up the stairs was like, ‘Are
all
those kids yours?’ ” He mimes her incredulity and pretends to point at four imaginary children. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ ” This he says ruefully, with an implied eye roll. “But then, I’m like”—and he pauses to reconsider—“
yeah.
” Marveling this time. “So it just seems to me,” says Paul, “that when I’m in the moment, it can be chaotic. But if I can be shaken out of that moment, even if it’s just for like a split second, it’s like, you know what? This is a cool thing.”

He just has to step away from the moment to see it.

Which isn’t surprising. Lots of parents will tell you that when they aren’t fighting with their teenagers about homework or scraping up raisins their toddlers have expertly ground into the kitchen floor, they’re quite happy, upon reflection. In a 2007 poll taken by Pew, 85 percent of all parents rated their relationships with their minor children as most important to their personal happiness and fulfillment—more than relationships with their spouses, their parents, or their friends, and more than their jobs. When asked to
think
about what makes us happy, the answer is clear: our kids.

Csikszentmihalyi told me something similar when I interviewed him in Philadelphia. It’s true that when he monitors people in real time, they’re less apt to say they’re in flow while with their children. But if you ask mothers to
recall
their greatest flow moments, the ones they’re most likely to report are ones involving their kids. “Especially things like reading books to them,” he said, “and seeing them pay attention, getting interested in things.”

“In our interviews,” says Dan P. McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University, “there’s a section where we focus on high points, low points, and turning points.” McAdams studies how human beings form their identities through the stories they tell about themselves. He’s spoken to hundreds of adult men and women, collecting their narratives, looking for patterns. “And the most common high point for midlife adults,” he tells me, “is the birth of a first child.” That’s true for both men and women.

Storytelling, as Kahneman likes to say, is our natural response to memory. The episodes we recall become part of our identities, the delicate composition of who we are. Our remembering selves are in fact
who
we are, he goes so far as to say in
Thinking, Fast and Slow
, even though our experiencing selves do our actual living for us.

And if that’s the case—if we
are
our remembering selves—then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don’t feel like we’ve amounted to much. “You don’t have a good story until something deviates from the expected,” says McAdams. “And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.”

Our stories may not always be pleasant as they’re being lived. They can in fact be just the opposite, acquiring a warm hue only in retrospect. “I think this boils down to a philosophical question rather than a psychological one,” Tom Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell, tells me. “Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. He recalls watching TV with his children at 3:00
A.M
. when they were sick. “I wouldn’t have said it was too fun at the time,” he says. “But now I look back on it and say, ‘Ah, remember the time we used to wake up and watch cartoons?’ ”

legacies

Kids do not just provide us with stories about ourselves. They give us a shot at redemption. McAdams, who’s spent twenty-five years thinking about life stories, says that the most “generative” adults in his samples—the ones most concerned about bequeathing something meaningful to the next generation—are more inclined to tell stories about renewal and reinvention. Highly generative adults, he writes,