Have you ever wondered why there is an army of mommy and daddy bloggers talking about how hard being a parent is? Is it because they have access to communication channels we’ve never had before? Because they have the freedom to talk about the hard stuff and brush off the sugar coating? Or is it because modern parenting is really harder for us than it was for our parents?
Recently I had the opportunity to see award-winning journalist and author Jennifer Senior speak about her book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.
I read the book about six months ago, and it was one of the first parenting books that I’ve read in entirety. Maybe because it’s not a book about everything parents are doing to screw up their kids. It’s about the impact that kids have on their parents– a combination of research and personal perspectives set in the historical context of parenting as we know it.
All Joy and No Fun does not serve up a set of ideas or solutions to make your life as a parent easier or more fulfilling. But if you’re looking for answers regarding why modern parenting is so damn hard, Senior paints a compelling portrait of parenthood today for middle-class Americans.
The bottom line: kids give parents meaning and purpose in their lives but they don’t necessarily make them happy. The research is fascinating and often contradictory, but Senior is able to illustrate a cohesive story laying out three factors that she sees contributing to this:
1. The Buffet is All You Can Eat, Twenty-Four Hours
We have a lot of choices and an unprecedented amount of freedom. And this freedom means adults today have fewer children later in life. Because we wait longer and have fewer, there’s more significance placed on our precious offspring. We also have a stronger sense of the before and the after, which is why we can feel so conflicted and not always on cloud nine about being a parent. We remember what adult life was like without them.
2. We’re Always Chasing More Time
41% of working mothers are the primary breadwinners for their families, and fathers struggle with balancing work and home demands more than ever. The real kicker is that everyone is working more and harder while spending more time per week with their kids than previous generations. Fathers alone spend three times as much time with their kids as their father’s did. And mothers are clocking in significantly more mommy hours too.
So what do you think the most common marital arguments are about? Money? Sex? Netflix? Nope. Chores and childcare. Division of family labor causes the most stress within families. Because even if a mom is home full-time with her kids – she’s no longer a homemaker who cooks and cleans and focuses on having an immaculate house. Now, she’s a Stay At Home Mom. Her children are her priority. Bottom line: we work more than ever and we spend more time with our kids than ever. And it never feels like it’s enough, because there are always dirty dishes in the sink.
3. You’ve Been Demoted
Historically children were economic assets. Now they are investments costing a family time, money, and resources. It’s not enough to provide them with shelter and access to education. The evolution of children from labor to precious treasures, leaves parents uncertain about the future of their investment. We’re living in a “culture wide pressure to produce happy, well-adjusted children.” The stakes seem higher than ever.
To ensure our children are not falling behind and have a clear pathway to success, we’ve created the over-scheduled, over-homeworked child. Children in a few generations went from being family employees to running the show, and parents are still reeling. Once the boss, we now work for our kids.
But what the research shows, and Senior explains, is that despite all of this, our children still bring us our greatest sense of joy in life. And through these moments of joy, we are open to connection. And connection and bonding, well, that’s really what life is all about.
Is parenting still hard? Sure. But knowing that what we are experiencing is a sign of our times and not simply a series of personal failures makes it an easier pill to swallow.
These are the times we live in, but there does seem to be some shifting. A subtle backlash brewing. Free range parents are planting the seed that constant supervision is going too far. Minimalists are talking about owning less and experiencing more. Schools are choosing to opt out of homework. Hopefully parents are starting to see that it’s unrealistic to think we can fulfill all of our children’s emotional needs and guarantee their success.
I’ll leave you with this. My favorite little nugget from All Joy No Fun:
The research shows that kids don’t want more time with their parents. They want their parents to be less stressed.
I think that’s worth repeating:
Kids want their parents to be less stressed.
Not more time, not more things, not more access, not more of anything.
Less stress.
Maybe the first step to making parenting easier is to remove the things from our lives that cause us stress. It might be just that easy.
#tenyearsaparent is a weekly blog series about what I’ve learned in my first ten years as a parent. Whether you’re a parent nodding in agreement or shaking your head with disgust or a non-parent using these posts as birth control (the surgeon general wants me to tell you that reading blog posts about parenting is not an effective form of birth control), I’ll be spilling the beans on what parenting is really all about.
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Great post! I’ve been super intrigued by the free range parenting movement of late. Hopefully, the pendulum is swinging back to the middle somewhere and we, as parents, can regain some sort of sanity.
I was out with a group of parents recently and we decided to start our own parenting movement: Parenting with Reason. I hope the middle ground appears sooner than later!
I’m interested in reading this book now since I agree with this entire post. If only now I could just find the easiest way to remove all the stress! …I like the theory though. Seems pretty simple, that simplicity would be the key 🙂
It’s definitely an interesting read – I was able to see Jennifer Senior on her book tour and it was her talk that really drove it home for me. If she comes near you, she’s a very good speaker and can spout statistics and study results like no one I’ve ever seen! I don’t have the answers for removing stress either. But I think that it starts with taking a little bit of pressure off and trusting our guts.
“We work for our kids”… wow, is that ever true. I’m going to just have to sit with that thought for a while because it really is so poignant and spot on. It was never like that before. And from the sounds of this book, our kids don’t want us to work for them. But rather, they want us to just BE.
Yeah, it’s big. Even though I had read the book, I left Senior’s talk reeling a bit. But after everything sunk, I felt better. I am a sucker for context. I like to know why things are the way they are. I feel like having this info as a base is a good touchstone, because I don’t think as our kids get older things are necessarily going to be any less complicated.
This is really interesting. I have thought about this before…how parenting is different now than it used to be. I may have to check out this book. It does seem like our generation is constantly questioning our parenting skills, thanks to all the information we are bombarded with. And that’s hard. I wonder how our parents’ and grandparents’ generation would feel about the comment that we spend more time with our kids then they did with theirs. I think dad definitely are more hands on, but I would be lots of older mothers would protest. Maybe it is more that we are spending time with our children in DIFFERENT ways? We are specifically devoting time to more child-oriented activities, classes, etc, while our parents and grandparents spent more time at home with kids?
Kelly – yes the constant questioning! It seems it could be a result of the stakes being so high. As far as the time spent, Senior doesn’t differentiate the research between time at home and time out and about. Maybe it’s something like this scenario: a homemaker would kick her kids outside while she cooked and cleaned while a stay-at-home mom would be outside with them playing catch, drawing with chalk, supervising and then having to rush frantically to get dinner on the table.
I definitely agree that we put more pressure on ourselves as parents, than our parents did. We are way to concerned with making our kids childhoods perfect.
Hi Julia – there is definitely pressure. I think it is interesting to know that yes, we put it on ourselves but it is also a result of an environment that has changed. We’re not all just really high strung!
As if I didn’t have enough to stress about, now I need to figure out how to be less stressed. I’ll add that to my to-do list.
Seriously though, this sounds like a great read. I’m kinda wishing someone had written this when my kids were smaller.
I know, right? It’s easy, just be less stressed! Like I mentioned in the post, this book really isn’t about solutions but I think that every family probably has areas that trigger stress. And maybe just being more aware of what those are can bring some clarity on how to improve things.