“I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior
The following are my personal notes from reading the article, “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting” that was in New York Magazine in the July 12, 2010 issue.
————————————–
“Perhaps the most oft-cited datum comes from a 2004 study by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities.”
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 18
“As a rule, most studies show that mothers are less happy than fathers, that single parents are less happy still, that babies and toddlers are the hardest, and that each successive child produces diminishing returns.”
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 18
The idea that parents are less happy than nonparents has become commonplace in academia.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 18
Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist and host of This Emotional Life on PBS, hypothesizes that what children really do, he suspects, is offer moments of transcendence, not an overall improvement in well-being.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 18
There is the possibility that parents don’t much enjoy parenting because the experience of raising children has fundamentally changed. Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 18
Children of women with bachelor degrees spend almost five hours on “organized activities” per week, as opposed to children of high-school dropouts, who spend two. Annette Lareau, the sociologist who coined the term “concerted cultivation” to describe the aggressive nurturing of economically advantaged children, puts it this way: “Middle-class parents spend much more time talking to children, answering questions with questions, and treating each child’s thought as a special contribution. And this is very tiring work.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 19
All parents spend more time today with their children than they did in 1975, including mothers, in spite of the great rush of women into the American workforce. Today’s married mothers also have less leisure time (5.4 fewer hours per week): 71% say they crave more time for themselves (as do 57% of married fathers). Yet 85% of all parents still — still! — think they don’t spend enough time with their children.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 19
Psychologists W. Keith Campbell and Jean Twenge, in 2003, did a meta-analysis of 97 children and marital satisfaction studies stretching back to the seventies. Not only did they find that couples’ overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids; they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last — our current one most of all. Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. ”And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, in the same,” says Twenge. ”They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” (Or, as a fellow psychologist told Gilbert when he finally got around to having a child: “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.”)
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 20
More generous government policies, a sounder economy, a less pressured culture that values good rather than perfect kids — all of these would certainly make parents happier.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 20
Parenting is an extraordinary activity in both senses of the word extra: beyond ordinary and especially ordinary. While children deepen your emotional life, they shrink your outer world to the size of a teacup, at least for a while.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 20
“In our studies, it’s the men, by a long shot, who have more work-life conflict than women,” says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. ”They don’t want to be stick figures in their children’s lives.”
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 21
In a study by psychologists Lauren Papp and E. Mark Cummings, 100 long-married couples were asked to spend two weeks meticulously documenting their disagreements. Nearly 40% of them were about their kids. One father was very frank about the strain his children put on his marriage, especially after the firstborn. ”I already felt neglected,” he says. ”In my mind, anyway. And once we had the kid, it became so pronounced; it went from zero to negative 50. And I was like, ” I can deal with zero. But not negative 50.”
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 21
Most studies show that marriages improve once children enter latency, or the ages between 6 and 12, though they take another sharp dive during the war zone of adolescence. But one of the most sobering declines documented in Changing Rhythms of American Family Life is the amount of time married parents spend alone together each week: Nine hours today versus twelve in 1975. Thomas Bradbury, a father of two and professor of psychology at UCLA, who was involved in the UCLA study of 32 families, says the husbands and wives spent less than 10% of their home time alone together.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 21
Loving one’s children and loving the act of parenting are not the same thing.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 84
Seven years ago, the sociologists Kei Nomaguchi and Melissa A. Milkie did a study in which they followed couples for five to seven years, some of whom had children and some of whom did not. And what they found was that, yes, those couples who became parents did more housework and felt less in control and quarreled more (actually, only the women thought they quarreled more, but anyway). On the other hand, the married women were less depressed after they’d had kids than their childless peers. And perhaps this is because the study sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of its participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated, and how much despair they were in.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 84
Robin Simon found that the least depressed parents are those whose underage children are in the house, and the most are those whose aren’t… This finding seems significant. Technically, if parenting makes you unhappy, you should feel better if you’re spared the task of doing it. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then noncustodial parents lose. They’re robbed of something that gives purpose and reward.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 84
Daniel Gilbert says, “When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good. The problem is, 95% of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time” — the moment-to-moment happiness — “or the one you experience rarely?”
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 84
About twenty years ago, Tom Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell, made a striking contribution to the field of psychology, showing that people are far more apt to regret things they haven’t done than things they have. Not one told him of regretting having children, but ten told him they regretted not having a family.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 84
“I think this boils down to a philosophical question, rather than a psychological one,” says Gilovich. ”Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. He recalls watching TV with his children at three in the morning when they were sick. ”I wouldn’t have said it was too fun at the time,” he says. ”But now I look back on it and say, ‘Ah, remember the time we used to wake up and watch cartoons?’” The very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification, nostalgia, delight.
It’s a lovely magic trick of the memory, this gilding of hard times. Perhaps it’s just the necessary alchemy we need to keep the species going. But for parents, this sleight of the mind and spell on the heart is the very definition of enchantment.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 84
