All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior

[lightreads]

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

3/5. A survey of the effects of children on their parents and caregivers. Includes the somewhat depressing stuff we've probably all heard – how children make marriages less happy. This book reviews the literature, questions some of its methods, profiles parents, and asks some interesting questions about how we really ought to think about this. If it is true that parents rate their happiness lower in moments of parenting, but remember the events more glowingly and are happier in retrospect, is that a bad thing? It's not like the memories are any less real.

Anyway, this is interesting, though the profiles ranged from fascinating to frustrating. Of course the woman trying to start a small business from scratch with three children under five at home with her all day feels a lack of autonomy and time management.* I mean…yes. That is not a kids problem. That is a money problem. I do particularly recommend the chapter on teens. Maybe it's that I've not spent any real time thinking about this, but the insights into why parenting teens is particularly fraught and particularly rewarding in terms of parent identity were interesting.

*Break for crying baby, diaper change, feeding, thoughtful staring at a lamp.

Comments

[cahn]

This reminds me, I never commented on your successful eviction; congratulations! (Also, I hope early babyhood isn't too hard on you; it was really hard on me but YMMV.)

This sounds like a rather interesting book. And I haven't done much if any thinking about teenagers, despite the fact I'm going to have one in less than four years, eek.

Anecdata: I feel like the highs are higher and the lows are lower? Like, sometimes I'm just hanging out with the kids and thinking "wow, I've never been this happy in my life, and definitely not while just hanging out, I wish I could bottle this moment and save it." And sometimes the kids are sick and cranky and there might be fluids coming out of places where fluids ought not to come out of and we're all getting on each other's nerves and I think, "I never had to deal with this crap [sometimes literally] before I had kids." Darned if I know how that averages out, though.

[lightreads]

Thanks. He is about five weeks old and so far we have lucked out with a medium-low difficulty baby. Which is not to say this is easy for me. I have so far confirmed absolutely that I do not want to be a SAHM, which we knew, and I'm the breadwinner anyway. I feel mostly neutral about early babyhood, with a few scattered moments of the sublime, and slightly more scattered moments of real struggle, mostly of the 'omg I need you to not be touching me now I can't for just fifteen minutes please.' Made more difficult by the fact that he is a marathon breastfeeder, god help me.

This book does address that phenomenon, btw, of higher highs and lower lows.

[cahn]

Yeah. Both of mine were medium-to-low difficulty as babies and especially with the first one I was very much "wtf how do people DO this with high-difficulty babies?!" I had a pretty hard time, and by the time my maternity leave was up I was SO ready to go back to work.

I feel kinda negative about early babyhood; I don't really think newborn babies are that cute and they don't really respond to you at all, and they just eat and sleep and poop and I started becoming down about how my worth as a person was at this time was validated only by how much milk I could produce. Hey, wow, I am apparently still bitter about all of this.

Six weeks, when they can smile? Then it started getting substantially better, at least for me (although more with second kid than first, because first still didn't smile at me).