All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (8 page)

“If you eat like Zay,” says Angie, “that’d be great. Zay’s
eating.
”

Eli has an idea. “Watch this, Mama!” He tips his plate toward his mouth and some spaghetti slides in.

“Eli, use your fork.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I just did it this way.”

Angie stands up, shrugs, and moves on to other things. “As long as you get food into you.”

ALL PARENTS FIND THEMSELVES
in absurdist loops of non-argument with their children. At their most benign, these disputes are merely annoying; at their worst, they’re outright maddening. It’s not surprising that the parenting section of bookshops is filled with guides to coaxing obedience from children. What is surprising, though, is how little of them cite the behavioral research on this subject. If you dive into it, you’ll discover that
all
American parents, even well-adjusted ones, spend a staggering amount of time each day trying to get their toddlers and preschoolers to do the right thing—as often as twenty-four times an hour, according to some studies—and that toddlers and preschoolers, even well-adjusted ones, spend a staggering amount of time resisting these efforts.

It may seem strange to bring up studies about child compliance in a chapter about marriage. But not if you consider one very salient fact: almost all of these efforts to get children to comply are made by mothers, not by fathers, and this asymmetrical dynamic can add a low-frequency hum of resentment to a relationship, because Mom gets the job of family nag. She didn’t seek this job either. It’s a simple matter of numbers: if mothers spend more time with their children than fathers do, they’re bound to issue more commands. (
Put your shoes on. Are you going to pick that up, or are you waiting for the house elf to get it? Where on earth did you find that, and whatever it is, please take it out of your mouth
.) Even more insidiously, compliance requests tend to be about time-sensitive matters. (
Put on your coat, we have to leave. Brush your teeth, it’s getting late
.) And mothers feel quite rushed as it is.

The first time I came across data about compliance requests from mothers and noncompliance in children was in a 1980 paper titled “Mothers: The Unacknowledged Victims.” The name pretty much says it all. The author’s first conclusion was that, during the preschool phase, “rearing normal children provides the mother with high rates of aversive events,” which happened as frequently as once every three minutes, according to his review of the literature.

But this study was hardly the only one. There was the 1971 study from Harvard that I mentioned in the introduction, which found mothers correcting or redirecting their toddlers every three minutes, and their toddlers listening only 60 percent of the time. Three years later, researchers from Emory and the University of Georgia found that psychologically healthy kindergartners from higher-income homes listened to their mothers only 55 percent of the time, and children from lower-income homes, 68 percent. (The mothers of lower-income children consistently issued more orders.) And these studies are dotted throughout the social science archives, all the way to the present day. In one of the more recent papers I peeked at—from 2009, this was—mothers and toddlers were averaging a conflict every two and a half minutes.

There are limits to how seriously one should take these kinds of studies, of course. In the words of Urie Bronfenbrenner, who helped found Head Start: “Much of contemporary developmental psychology is the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.” But they were a delight to discover nonetheless. Who knew that my son’s dissident behaviors—and my responses—were so commonplace?

Pamela Druckerman, author of the 2012 best-seller
Bringing Up Bébé,
would argue that American mothers frequently lock horns with their children because they don’t know how to discipline them with the same firmness that the French bring to the task. No doubt there’s some truth to this observation. How children behave is always culturally mediated. But what interests me is that
mothers
give most of the orders, and this compliance literature makes it clear that giving those orders is taxing and stressful. In the all-mom ECFE groups, the subject came up all the time. In a class just before Angie’s, two women had this exchange:

KATY:
I have night classes, so I have a list for my husband before I leave—be sure you give our son a bath, be sure you put him in his jammies. And I’ll come home four hours later, and they’ve both fallen asleep on the floor, all clothed, and there’s a movie playing and a bag of chips.

COURTNEY:
Same here. I think my husband thinks of parenting as play, and I see it as work.

KATY:
Or watching the two of them grocery shopping—that’s awful. Whatever my son wants, my husband gets it for him.

The next day, in a different class:

CHRISSY:
My husband will give the kids peanut butter and jelly and yogurt and be like, “Woohoo! Dinner!” And I’m racing to put out the vegetables, saying, “Uh, guys, you have to eat these too.”

KENYA:
I know! I don’t know why my husband winds up being the fun guy. I come home, and my daughter tells me, “Daddy lets me have pop.”

At that point, the instructor, Todd Kolod, felt compelled to intervene.

“May I just speak up on behalf of dads?”

The women smiled.
Sure.

“I think they need the chance to make mistakes,” he said. “They’ll say that they’ll try to help with laundry, and then,
once,
they’ll ruin some item they were supposed to hand-wash, and they’re cut off from doing the laundry forever.”

The women agreed he might have a point.

And he did. All relationships benefit from generosity. (Nor do kids stop growing if they’re fed peanut butter and jelly for dinner.) But the women had a point too. What they were responding to, really, was Daniel Gilbert’s observation from chapter 1. “Everyone is moving at the same speed toward the future. But your children are moving at that same speed with their eyes closed. So you’re the ones who’ve got to steer.” Typically, it’s the mothers who takes the wheel.

It’s exhausting to be the family compass and conscience. It means the stuff of everyday life becomes a source of tension; it means you’re the designated family prig.
I don’t know why he’s the fun guy
. When Kenya said this, she didn’t sound angry. She sounded sad.

Here lies yet another explanation for the happiness gap between mothers and fathers. It’s not necessarily the quantity of time mothers spend with their children that’s the problem. It’s how they spend it.

who’s having sex?

As mercilessly unsentimental as it is to say this, children would have less of an impact on marriage if the institution itself weren’t so heavily burdened by romantic expectations—which, as we saw in chapter 1, are relatively new. Before the late eighteenth century, marriage was a public institution, inseparable from raising families and binding individuals to the broader community. But sometime around the late eighteenth century, as Jane Austen was completing her first draft of
Pride and Prejudice,
a different idea began to take shape: marriage was for love. Today, 94 percent of singles in their twenties believe that spouses should be soul mates “first and foremost,” according to a 2001 Gallup poll, while just 16 percent believe that children are the primary objective of marriage.

This redefined notion of marriage—as a sheltered loop of mutual fulfillment rather than a public institution for the commonweal—generated an inspired term from the sociologists David Popenoe and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. They called it a “SuperRelationship,” which they defined as “an intensely private spiritualized union, combining sexual fidelity, romantic love, emotional intimacy and togetherness.”

If most of us begin our marriages with these expectations, is it any wonder that we experience children as a disruption?

Lots of couples genuinely enjoy their coupledom. Unlike the literature about raising children, many studies about marriage suggest that the institution makes people happier and more optimistic (though it’s possible that happier people get married in the first place). Studies also suggest that married people are healthier.

So what, precisely, gets compromised when a child enters the picture?

Well, time alone together, famously (hence those endless exhortations to schedule date nights). Estimates vary as to how much a couple’s time together declines, but the most commonly cited study says it drops by two-thirds once a child is born. The nature of this time together changes dramatically too. Social scientist and St. Paul couples therapist William Doherty, who is also an adviser to ECFE, likes to tell the story of a beautiful couple, marvelous country-Western dancers both, who came to his office for counseling one day. They’d met as young adults at a dance in Oklahoma; when they were dating, they’d go out dancing all the time, and other couples would inevitably form a circle around them, just to watch them spin. At some point Doherty casually asked them when they’d last gone out dancing. Their answer? Their wedding reception, twelve years earlier.

Almost everyone seems to agree that a couple’s sex life also changes after children come along, though it’s surprisingly difficult to find strong data supporting this hypothesis. A few studies do manage, however, to confirm the suspicion that this is true, either indirectly or by design. A paper from 1981, for instance, looked at 119 first-time mothers and found that 20 percent were having sex less than once a week at their child’s first birthday, while only 6 percent were having sex that infrequently in the three months prior to conception. (Then again, they may have been actively trying to get pregnant during those three months—and hence, having more sex.) Another small study, conducted slightly later, found that a child, along with “jobs, commuting, housework . . . conspires to
reduce
the degree of sexual interaction” in the early years of marriage, “while almost nothing leads to increasing it.”

In 1995, a much larger study concluded that the presence of young children—specifically four years of age or less—has an even more substantial impact on a couple’s sexual frequency than pregnancy itself (and only slightly less significant an impact than poor health). Having five- to eighteen-year-olds at home, on the other hand, slightly
increases
sexual frequency. (Though here’s a question: if the authors had analyzed
just
the parents of adolescents, would they have come to the same conclusion? Because teenagers can pose a true circadian dilemma, springing alive in the wee hours like so many vampire bats. It makes the prospect of nighttime congress particularly dicey.) And here is my favorite detail from that study: “Respondents with low and high educational attainment levels reported less frequent marital sex. This curvilinear relationship is taken into account in all analyses.” Make of that what you will.

But it’s very hard—almost impossible—to find concrete numbers about the frequency of marital sex once babies enter the picture. In an evening ECFE class of working fathers, the instructor, Todd Kolod, surprised everyone by asking the question outright: how much sex is it realistic for a dad with young children to expect? Everyone paused for a moment, trying to gauge whether they should answer this question seriously or punt with a joke.

FATHER #1:
Whenever you can talk her into it.

FATHER #2:
Can we put it this way? What’s realistic about going out to the movies? It’s like once . . . a year.

TODD:
We don’t really know what’s realistic, do we? That’s part of the problem. But really, seriously: what do you think?

FATHER #3:
Some of our friends, they started out crazy. One friend, for years, I called him “nine times.” And now, I’ll talk to the same guy, and he’ll be like . . . nothing.

FATHER #2:
Okay, let’s make it more uncomfortable: how many times do we masturbate a day?

FATHER #4:
Ha-hey, speak for yourself. . . .

But numbers may be beside the point. If you really speak to men and women about this, both alone and in groups, they’ll tell you that sure, they miss their old erotic selves, those people who once could only be coaxed from bed in order to pee or eat. But in many cases, those selves were fading away even before the baby came along. (There’s evidence that the most precipitous drop in sexual frequency occurs just after the “honeymoon” year of marriage—a sobering thought.) What most couples really seem to miss is that sense of closeness and aliveness that sex brings. “I don’t think I had ridiculous expectations about intimacy,” a father told me. “And maybe it’s easier for guys, in a way, because we can look at a woman and say, ‘She doesn’t
look
exhausted and wiped out. She
looks
like she’s back to her old self.’ ” Whereas his wife’s attitude was
I am exhausted. Can’t you let me sleep without making me feel guilt for denying you something?
It took him a while to realize this. “Honestly, sex itself wasn’t even what was driving it for me,” he said. “It was our lack of connection. And the less connected I felt, the more I felt like I was going to snap.”

“I think it’s about mastering the art of the quickie,” Angie tells me. “It’s like, ‘Okay! The kids are sleeping! And I’ve got to go to work!’ ” She makes a chop-chop with her hands, then smiles. “We try for at least once a week, if not more. If it gets any longer than that, we just don’t feel . . .” (and then that word again) “ . . .
connected.
”

Yet that connection comes at a price, just as ignoring it comes at a price. “In our erotic lives we abandon our children,” writes Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst, in
Side Effects,
“and in our familial lives we abandon our desire.” When faced with this unsavory dilemma, observes Phillips, “most people feel far worse about betraying their children than about betraying their partner.”