All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (4 page)

The paradoxical thing about flow is that it is often marked by an
absence
of feeling, experienced nonetheless as a form of undiluted bliss. That’s what makes flow one of the most beguiling and equal-opportunity parts of our emotional lives: no matter what kind of temperament we’ve been handed, even if it’s melancholic, almost all of us have the ability to lose ourselves in something we love and do well.

In order to experience this kind of magical engagement, though, circumstances need to align. This is where the work of the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a revelation. For decades, Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced as “cheeks sent me high”) has been thinking about flow, analyzing the conditions that make it possible, and looking in broad cultural terms at what gives us our deepest satisfactions. He has dissected the flow experiences of thousands of people. In 1983, he even codeveloped an innovative technique to measure it, by contacting study participants at random intervals and asking them to record not just
what
they were doing at that moment but how they
felt
about it. (Bored? Engaged? In control? Scared? Stressed? Exhilarated?) He called this tool the Experience Sampling Method, or ESM. It was an inspired contribution to his field. Researchers for the first time were making the distinction between how study participants felt
in the moment
and how they felt retrospectively.

Eventually, Csikszentmihalyi began to notice common patterns in flow experience. Most flow experiences occur, for example, during situations that are “goal-oriented and bounded by rules.” In fact, most activities that lend themselves to flow are designed to maximally engage our attention and expand our competence—like athletics or intense work. “They have rules that require the learning of skills,” he writes in
Flow,
his 1990 book on the subject. “They set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible.”

In theory, young children like rules. But they’re pretty spotty observers of them. Every parent has a story about a perfectly planned day—a trip to the zoo, a jaunt to the local ice cream joint—that devolved into something close to anarchy. Most of life with young children does not have a script, and if a parent attempts to write one, children may not be inclined to follow it. That’s what it means to look after people with immature prefrontal cortexes. Their neurocircuitry conspires against focus. Gopnik says it outright, midway through
The Philosophical Baby:
“This expansive lantern consciousness is almost the opposite of the distinctive adult happiness that comes with what psychologists call ‘flow.’ ” To be in flow, one must pay close and focused attention. Yet very young children are wired for discovery, for sweeping in lots of stimuli. And if they can’t be in flow, chances are you’ll have a hard time slipping into flow yourself—in the same way that athletes have a much harder time finding their groove if their teammates are distracted.

This subject came up repeatedly in ECFE classes. At one point, Annette Gagliardi, a veteran instructor, started to ask the parents in one of her seminars whether having a focused plan for the day made them happier. One mother cut her off. “Only if the plan goes
well.
If there are meltdowns, it’s
What was I thinking?
”

“Which is why I have very low expectations,” said another. “You shoot for the bare minimum and are excited by anything else.”

A clear plan isn’t the only requirement for flow. Csikszentmihalyi also noticed that we enjoy ourselves most when we’re positioned “at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with [our] capacity to act.” Yet parents of young children often describe the sensation of lurching back and forth
between
those two poles—boredom and anxiety—rather than being able to comfortably settle somewhere in the middle. “To the extent that we are not maximally happy when we’re with our young children,” says Daniel Gilbert, the social psychologist, “it could be that they’re demanding things of us we find difficult to give. But it could also be that they’re not demanding
that much.
”

Consider what happens at the end of Jessie’s impromptu dance party. Once William begins to wail, she has a hard time figuring out how, precisely, to console him. She tries rocking him, she tries giving him Cheerios; at one point, she even tries picking him up, while Abe is still on her shoulder. But the only thing that seems to work, in the end, is the simplest repeated act: tossing a pair of pants from the laundry basket over his head and yanking them off. “Where’s William?” she asks.
Whoosh.
“There he is!” Another toss. “Where’s William?”
Whoosh.
“There he is!” It’s boring, sure, and there’s certainly no flow. But it works.

Boredom can be an awkward topic for parents. It feels like a betrayal to admit that time spent with one’s children isn’t always stimulating. But even Benjamin Spock, the cuddly pediatrician who dominated the child-rearing advice market for the second half of the twentieth century, talked about it. “The fact is,” he once wrote, “setting aside a chunk of time to be devoted exclusively to companionship with children is a somewhat boring prospect to a lot of good parents.” Boredom also came up in the ECFE classes I attended, including Jessie’s, with the instructor herself confessing that she found it dull to play “My Little Pony” when her daughter was small. “That was the most negative emotion I experienced as a father,” recalls Gilbert. “Boredom. Throwing the ball back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The endless repetition, the can-you-do-it-again, the can-you-read-the-same-story-one-more-time. There were times I just thought,
Give me a gun.
”

In
Flow,
Csikszentmihalyi explains that most flow experiences happen
apart
from everyday life rather than in the midst of it. But raising children
is
everyday life. In Csikszentmihalyi’s view, people have more control in specialized settings, even dangerous ones; hang-gliders, deep-sea divers, or race car drivers, writes Csikszentmihalyi, still “report flow experiences in which a heightened sense of control plays an important part,” because they feel the
possibility
of success. Above all, people report experiences of flow while they’re working. It sounds counterintuitive, but not if one considers how propitious work conditions are to flow: work provides rules, clear-cut goals, and immediate feedback.

After finishing
Flow,
the reader comes away with the unmistakable impression that most people find themselves in flow when they’re alone. Csikszentmihalyi talks about fishing, cycling, and rock climbing; about solving equations, playing music, and writing poems. As a rule, the experiences he describes do not involve much social interaction, least of all with children.

I was so struck by
Flow
’s negative implications for parents that I decided I wanted to speak to Csikszentmihalyi, just to make sure I wasn’t misreading him. And eventually I did, at a conference in Philadelphia where he was one of the marquee speakers. As we sat down to chat, the first thing I asked was why he talked so little about family life in
Flow
. He devotes only ten pages to it. “Let me tell you a couple of things that may be relevant to you,” he said. And then he told a personal story. When Csikszentmihalyi first developed the Experience Sampling Method, one of the first people he tried it out on was himself. “And at the end of the week,” he said, “I looked at my responses, and one thing that suddenly was very strange to me was that every time I was with my two sons, my moods were always very, very negative.” His sons weren’t toddlers at that point either. They were older. “And I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense to me, because I’m very proud of them, and we have a good relationship.’ ” But then he started to look at what, specifically, he was doing with his sons that made his feelings so negative. “And what was I doing?” he asked. “I was saying, ‘It’s time to get up, or you will be late for school.’ Or, ‘You haven’t put away your cereal dish from breakfast.’ ” He was nagging, in other words, and nagging is not a flow activity. “I realized,” he said, “that being a parent consists, in large part, of correcting the growth pattern of a person who is not necessarily ready to live in a civilized society.”

I asked if, in that same data set, he had any numbers about flow in family life. None were in his book. He said he did. “They were low. Family life is organized in a way that flow is very difficult to achieve, because we assume that family life is supposed to relax us and to make us happy. But instead of being happy, people get bored.” Or enervated, as he’d said before, when talking about disciplining his sons. And because children are constantly changing, the “rules” of handling them change too, which can further confound a family’s ability to flow. “And then we get into these spirals of conflict and so forth,” he continued. “That’s why I’m saying it’s easier to get into flow at work. Work is more structured. It’s structured more like a game. It has clear goals, you get feedback, you know what has to be done, there are limits.” He thought about this. “Partly, the lack of structure in family life, which seems to give people freedom, is actually a kind of an impediment.”

divided attention

It’s early afternoon, William is down for his second nap, and Jessie is sitting in front of her computer, staring at an image from her most recent photo shoot. It’s pretty wonderful—a woman pulling two kids in a red wagon—but Jessie’s not pleased with it, and this client is scheduled to come by tomorrow evening. Jessie is determined to get her portfolio right.

Bella walks in. “Mom, I need help.”

Jessie is still staring at the screen. “What’s going on?”

“I want to do Roku.”

“You can’t do Roku right now. Watch a movie.”

“I need
you.
”

She sighs, gets up from her desk, and walks into the TV room, just opposite her office. “Bella, you need to change the channel. Here.” She punches a button.

Flow is hard enough to achieve if your sole task is trying to care for your kids. But it’s even harder if you’re trying to care for your children
and
work at the same time. Today, that’s what many of us are doing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly one-quarter of employed men and women work from home at least some of the time. Even those who work exclusively outside the home now find that the border between their living room and their workplace has dissolved. Once upon a time, only doctors had to live with after-hours disruptions. Now, many professionals walk around with the impression that everything they do is urgent. Emergencies are regular occurrences; late-night texts in all caps go with the territory. The portability and accessibility of our work has created the impression that we should always be available. It’s as if we’re all leading lives of
anti
-flow, of chronic interruptions and ceaseless multitasking.

This subject, too, surfaced and resurfaced in ECFE classes. Responding to the beckoning smart phone and the siren call of email—these turned out to be huge and surprisingly shameful refrains among parents, as if
their children
were the disruptions, rather than the other way around. One father summed up his feelings in two sentences: “There are days I’m able to put work behind me and just
be
with my son, and it feels awesome. But then there are days when all I’m thinking is,
If I can get this kid taken care of, I can get back on the computer,
and it feels terrible.”

Parents attempting to work out of their homes brought up this topic the most. Jessie talked at length about her divided attention—how difficult she found it, both emotionally and intellectually, to toggle between her portrait business and her children’s needs. She knew she wanted to stay at home. Her own mother had died just two years before Bella came along, and the black abruptness of it crystallized, in her mind, the importance of being around as a parent. But she also came from a long line of female breadwinners, “women with master’s degrees and women who ran companies.” Anyway, she liked her work. It gave her a sense of independence and pride. But she couldn’t figure out how to manage the rhythms and demands of both her family and her work at the same time, especially after William, her third, was born. “I think back to yesterday,” she told her class, “and I knew what the good parent should do. I knew I should
stop.
” She’d been editing a photo shoot, just as she is doing today, and William had started to cry. “I knew that if I gave him the bottle and I held him and I kissed him, it would be all right,” she continued. “But I had this deadline over my head, and for some reason I couldn’t let it go. So I’m emailing the parent, and I’m trying to work . . . all while feeling bad about myself and this choice. I’m not even sure why I made it. No one benefited in the end.” You could see the confusion in her face.

Neurologically speaking, though, there are reasons we develop a confused sense of priorities when we’re in front of our computer screens. For one thing, email comes at unpredictable intervals, which, as B. F. Skinner famously showed with rats seeking pellets, is the most seductive and habit-forming reward pattern to the mammalian brain. (Think about it: would slot machines be half as thrilling if you knew when, and how often, you were going to get three cherries?) Jessie would later say as much to me when I asked her why she was “obsessed”—her word—with her email: “It’s like fishing. You just never know what you’re going to get.”

More to the point, our nervous systems can become dysregulated when we sit in front of a screen. This, at least, is the theory of Linda Stone, formerly a researcher and senior executive at Microsoft Corporation. She notes that we often hold our breath or breathe shallowly when we’re working at our computers. She calls this phenomenon “email apnea” or “screen apnea.” “The result,” writes Stone in an email, “is a stress response. We become more agitated and impulsive than we’d ordinarily be.”