All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (7 page)

What happens when she’s out alone with Clint?

“It’s still the kids on my brain,” she says. “Even our date nights, when I’m supposed to be 100 percent wife.”

It’s interesting that Angie attempts to quantify this feeling in a ratio. Some years ago, when Carolyn Cowan was driving home from a meeting with a group of parents, it occurred to her that she ought to ask them to devise a pie chart of their identities. What percentage of themselves did they see as a spouse, as a parent, as a worker, as a person of faith, as a hobbyist?

Women, on average, assigned a significantly larger proportion of their self-image to their mother identity than the men did to their father identity. Even women who worked full-time considered themselves more mother than worker by about 50 percent. This finding didn’t surprise Cowan and her husband—nor were they surprised, years later, when they came across a similiar study showing that mothers who carry the child in lesbian couples give over more mental real estate to their maternal identity than their partners.

What
did
surprise the Cowans, however, was what this visualization exercise portended for the hundred or so couples in their sample: the greater the disparity between how a mother and father sliced up the pie when their child was six months old, the more dissatisfied they were in their marriage one year later.

This finding suggests an even larger context to all these fights about the distribution of family labor. How much does each member of the couple psychologically inhabit his or her parenting role? If each parent prioritizes this role differently, their arguments take on a whole new dimension:
How could you not care about this as much as I do? What kind of parent are you anyway? Doesn’t family and family time matter to you? Does this not mean the same to you as it does to me?

social isolation

It’s worth noting that children would almost certainly be easier on marriages if couples didn’t rely so much on one another for social support. But unfortunately, they do. What this means, all too often, is that parents can feel awfully alone, especially moms.

In 2009, a specialty consulting firm surveyed over 1,300 mothers and found that 80 percent of them believed they didn’t have enough friends and 58 percent of them felt lonely (with mothers of children under five reporting the most loneliness of all). In 1997, the
American Sociological Review
published a paper showing that women’s social networks—and the frequency of their contact with the people in those networks—shrink in the early years of child-rearing, with the nadir occurring when their youngest child is three. (The expansion thereafter, the authors say, likely has something to do with the new connections mothers make once their children reach school age.) And the most popular form of Meetup in the country, by a substantial margin, is mothers’ groups. “That really surprised me,” Kathryn Fink, the company’s community development specialist, told me in a phone conversation. “Before I worked at Meetup, I assumed that if you chose to be a stay-at-home mom, you could rely on your preexisting social network.”

Fink isn’t the only one who finds it surprising that new mothers pine for connection. So do many new mothers themselves. The conventional wisdom about children is that they bring together not just couples but extended families, social networks, entire
communities.
There’s some evidence suggesting that this is true—eventually. Sociologists who have examined the complex circuitry of American social life have noticed that people with children know their neighbors better than those without children do; they also participate in more civic organizations and form new ties through their children’s activities and friends. But these are not necessarily their most intimate or emotionally sustaining ties. In his landmark book
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam explains this distinction by noting the difference between “machers” and “schmoozers”: machers are community muckity-mucks, people who make things happen through formal involvements in civic organizations; schmoozers are social butterflies and informal hanger-outers, people with active social lives whose “engagement is less organized and purposeful.” If you’re young and unmarried and renting, odds are that you’re a schmoozer. Once you marry and buy a home, you may continue some elements of your schmoozing life, but you’re also more likely to reapportion some of those energies to macherdom.

And children seal the deal. Once women and men become mothers and fathers, their purposeful socializing—through churches or synagogues or mosques, through PTAs, through neighborhood watch groups—goes up, up, up. But informal socializing with friends goes down, according to Putnam. So does socializing associated with leisure interests. “Holding other demographic features constant,” he writes, “marriage and children are
negatively
correlated with membership in sports, political, and cultural groups [emphasis his].”

In the early days of infancy, motherhood can be especially isolating, with mother and child forming a closed loop. Modern social scientists aren’t the only ones who have noticed. Dr. Benjamin Spock talked about it over half a century ago. “Women who have worked for a number of years and loved not only the job but the companionship,” he wrote in
Problems of Parents
,
“often find children quite limited company.” He added: “The woman who chafes at the monotony of child rearing (and I’m assuming that most mothers do at times) is really beset from two directions: the separation from adult companions, and being bottled up with the continual demands of the children. I don’t think Nature ever intended the association to be quite so exclusive.”

The subject of isolation came up a lot in ECFE classes, especially from mothers of newborns and toddlers who had dropped out of the workforce. The women in Angie’s class discussed it at length:

SARA:
I didn’t think I’d feel as
alone
as I have at times. I feel like it’s just me and the boys.

KRISTIN:
Me neither. My mom probably gets annoyed, because I call her more than I should. I feel like that’s my connection.

ANGELA:
Yeah, and I sort of thought,
Well, I’m not around people most of the day anyway, I’m stuck in a cube. How can it be that different?
But it is different, because when I was at work, I could stand up and talk to
adults.

The real surprise to me, however, was the testimony of stay-at-home fathers. Almost to a man, the stay-at-home dads I met in Minnesota described how challenging it was to find a network of compatriots in their brave new role. “The first year, I was incredibly isolated,” a father told his group in a fairly representative moment. “I felt weird about hanging out with other moms. I didn’t feel like I could approach them in the same way. I mean, if my wife were staying at home, she could have. But me . . .”

So what did he do?

“I was really, reaaaaaally nice to other dads I met at the park.”

THERE’S A LARGER BACKDROP
to this loneliness. Today’s parents are starting families at a time when their social networks in the real world appear to be shrinking and their community ties, stretching thin. Yes, mothers and fathers may have many friends on Facebook, and Facebook is an invaluable resource for them in all sorts of ways, whether it’s crowd-sourcing questions about relieving colic or simply posting a comment that helps unspool a thread of sympathy (like Angie’s post of October 2011: “I should be sleeping”).

But our non-virtual ties are another matter. In 2006, a survey in the
American Sociological Review
famously reported that the average number of people with whom Americans could “discuss important matters” dropped from three to two between 1985 and 2004, and that the number of Americans who felt they had no confidants at all had more than doubled, from 10 to 24.6 percent. The far better-known chronicle of American solitude, though, is
Bowling Alone,
in which Putnam manages to document the decline of almost every measurable form of civic participation in the waning decades of the last century. When the book came out in 2000, critics complained that Putnam had focused too much on obsolescent activities (card-playing, Elks club meetings) and given short shrift to new forms of social capital, like Internet groups. (Facebook hadn’t even been invented back then.) It didn’t matter. The book still resonated with politicians and laypeople alike, and if my conversations with parents are any indication, Putnam’s findings and themes still resonate deeply with families today, in spite of their vast virtual networks.

Take our dwindling neighborhood ties: during the last quarter of the twentieth century, according to Putnam, the number of times married Americans spent a social evening with their neighbors fell from roughly thirty times per year to twenty, and subsequent studies have shown that this number continued to drop through 2008. “When I first moved to our block,” Annette Gagliardi, the veteran ECFE instructor, told one of her classes, “I didn’t know anyone, and my mom was several towns away. So the older women on the block pulled me in. They were the ones I called in the middle of the night and said, ‘My child has a fever.’ ” There’s no substitute, she said, for that kind of embodied contact with fellow parents. “Yes, I can text someone,” Gagliardi said. “Or yes, I can look online at a parenting website. But that’s not the same as someone racing over to my house and teaching me how to put a butterfly bandage on my daughter’s wound.”

Our relative estrangement from our neighbors is partially an outgrowth of a positive development: more women are in the workforce. With more women heading off to the office in the morning, more houses inevitably sit empty during the afternoon. But our diminishing neighborhood ties cannot be explained by social progress alone. It can be explained by sprawl, which pushes our houses farther and farther apart. It can be explained by anxieties about crime—kidnappings in particular—which have all but obliterated the once-standard practice of sending children out into the yard or the street. Putnam, like his colleagues studying time use, also describes a sensation of “pervasive busyness” among Americans today, a sense that we are chronically and forever feeling rushed.

The net result has been the death of the “pop-in,” to recruit a term of Jerry Seinfeld’s, whereby the Kramers and Elaines of the world show up unexpectedly at your doorstep bearing gossip and harmless, unhurried conversation. In the mid- to late seventies, the average American entertained friends at home fourteen to fifteen times per year, according to
Bowling Alone;
by the late nineties, that number had split nearly in half, to eight.

ANGELA:
When I was growing up, my mother was surrounded by people home alone with their kids. Every afternoon someone was going to call or we were going to visit someone. My mom would load us all into the car. I mean, maybe my mom was just a social person, but—

SARA:
No, it was the same in my house: every Sunday we’d load in the station wagon and just go visit someone. And now you feel like you’re intruding, because everyone’s so busy.

Without the pop-in, without the vibrant presence of neighbors, without life in the cul-de-sacs and the streets, the pressure reverts back to the nuclear family—and more specifically, to the
marriage
or partnership—to provide what friends, neighbors, and other families once did: games, diversions, imaginative play. And parents have lost some of the fellowship provided by other adults.

Of course, raising children would be easier on marriages if we still lived in extended-family groupings. But as Stephanie Coontz notes in
The Way We Never Were
, “extended families have never been the norm in America.” (The highest percentage of people living in extended families on record was just 20 percent, and that was between 1850 and 1885.) What is true, though, is that college-educated Americans tend to live farther away from their parents than those who have only completed high school. In marriages where both partners finished college, the odds are just 18 percent that they live within thirty miles of both their mothers. (Among the high school–educated, the odds increase to 50 percent.) Education clearly results in mobility, which almost by definition weakens family ties.

Weakened family ties have all sorts of consequences for parents. They affect, for instance, women’s workforce attachment: married women with kids in elementary school or younger are 4 to 10 percent more likely to work if they live near their mothers or mothers-in-law. The social lives of parents are also affected: without the most reliable, most psychologically reassuring, and (above all) most affordable form of babysitting—namely, grandparents—a simple evening out with one’s spouse is a much harder sell.

“I do have an aunt who lives just fifteen minutes away,” Angie tells me, when I ask whether she has a network of caretakers to rely on. But that’s it. Everyone else is far away or in poor health. Angie and Clint are part of the so-called sandwich generation, the generation inconveniently squeezed between aging parents and young children, meaning they face caretaking stresses no matter which direction they crane their necks. As Americans live longer and women defer childbearing into their thirties, this generation is only expected to grow.

disobeying orders

It’s lunchtime, and Eli is sitting in front of a plate of Angie’s chicken parmesan. He is not, however, eating it. He is instead contemplating his polar bear mug.

“What do polar bears eat?” he asks.

“Fish,” Angie replies.

“What else?”

“I don’t know. Would you eat, please?”

He doesn’t. Angie looks at him. “You’re not eating again until dinner. If you don’t eat, you won’t have a snack.”

Eli tries picking off a small piece with his fingers.

“Please use your fork. Is that a polar bear bite?”

“I’m eating like Zay,” he answers. Zay gets to eat with his fingers.