I just devoured the bestseller All Joy and No Fun: The Parado
Yes, devoured is precisely the right word. I couldn't put it down. As a mother with two little ones at home full time who used to work full time, I found myself nodding along with her assessments of what life is like with small children.
The premise: there are LOTS of books out there about how parents can and should impact their children's lives. This is not that. This is a book detailing how children impact their parent's lives and identities. Jennifer Senior explains how having children upsets our sense of "Flow," how their under developed prefrontal cortexes put them into direct conflict with how we, as adults, think and run our lives.
Studies she cited actually show that adults prefer most other activities (including chores!) over child care.
Senior questions why and how, if childcare ranks so low on an adults list of preferred activities, do we cherish childrearing so much?
Some favorite selections:
"I’d like to propose a possible explanation for why these moments of grace are so rare: the early years of family life don’t offer up many activities that lend themselves to what psychologists call “flow.” Simply put, flow is a state of being in which we are so engrossed in the task at hand— so fortified by our own sense of agency, of mastery—that we lose all sense of our surroundings, as though time has stopped…I asked if, in that same data set, he had any numbers about flow in family life. None were in his book. He said he did. “They were low. Family life is organized in a way that flow is very difficult to achieve, because we assume that family life is supposed to relax us and to make us happy. But instead of being happy , people get bored.” Or enervated, as he’d said before , when talking about disciplining his sons. And because children are constantly changing, the “rules” of handling them change too, which can further confound a family’s ability to flow. “And then we get into these spirals of conflict and so forth,” he continued. “That’s why I’m saying it’s easier to get into flow at work. Work is more structured. It’s structured more like a game. It has clear goals, you get feedback, you know what has to be done, there are limits.” He thought about this. “Partly, the lack of structure in family life, which seems to give people freedom, is actually a kind of an impediment.”
"Americans have come to define liberty “negatively, as lack of dependence , the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one’s wealth or time.” If this is how you conceive of liberty— as freedom from obligation— then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all…."
"No matter how perfect our circumstances , most of us, as Adam Phillips observed, “learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.” The hard part is to make peace with that misty zone and to recognize that no life— no life worth living anyway— is free of constraints."
"The researchers took saliva samples from almost all of the participating parents, hoping to measure their levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The researchers found that the more time fathers spent in leisure activities while they were at home, the greater their drop in cortisol at the end of the day , which came as no surprise; what did come as a surprise was that this effect wasn’t nearly as pronounced in mothers. So what, you might ask, did have a pronounced effect in mothers? Simple: Seeing their husbands do work around the house."
"Daniel Kahneman and four of his colleagues compared the moment-to-moment well-being of women in Columbus, Ohio, to that of women in Rennes, a small city in France. Although the researchers found many similarities between their two samples, the French and American women differed in one very significant way: the French enjoyed caring for their children a good deal more, and they spent a good deal less time doing it."
And my personal favorite:
"I’m talking about the [adult] selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies; who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited by how it could work or should; who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love. Unless, that is, they have small children."
So, what do you think?
x of Modern Parenthood.
Yes, devoured is precisely the right word. I couldn't put it down. As a mother with two little ones at home full time who used to work full time, I found myself nodding along with her assessments of what life is like with small children.
The premise: there are LOTS of books out there about how parents can and should impact their children's lives. This is not that. This is a book detailing how children impact their parent's lives and identities. Jennifer Senior explains how having children upsets our sense of "Flow," how their under developed prefrontal cortexes put them into direct conflict with how we, as adults, think and run our lives.
Studies she cited actually show that adults prefer most other activities (including chores!) over child care.
Senior questions why and how, if childcare ranks so low on an adults list of preferred activities, do we cherish childrearing so much?
Some favorite selections:
"I’d like to propose a possible explanation for why these moments of grace are so rare: the early years of family life don’t offer up many activities that lend themselves to what psychologists call “flow.” Simply put, flow is a state of being in which we are so engrossed in the task at hand— so fortified by our own sense of agency, of mastery—that we lose all sense of our surroundings, as though time has stopped…I asked if, in that same data set, he had any numbers about flow in family life. None were in his book. He said he did. “They were low. Family life is organized in a way that flow is very difficult to achieve, because we assume that family life is supposed to relax us and to make us happy. But instead of being happy , people get bored.” Or enervated, as he’d said before , when talking about disciplining his sons. And because children are constantly changing, the “rules” of handling them change too, which can further confound a family’s ability to flow. “And then we get into these spirals of conflict and so forth,” he continued. “That’s why I’m saying it’s easier to get into flow at work. Work is more structured. It’s structured more like a game. It has clear goals, you get feedback, you know what has to be done, there are limits.” He thought about this. “Partly, the lack of structure in family life, which seems to give people freedom, is actually a kind of an impediment.”
"Americans have come to define liberty “negatively, as lack of dependence , the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one’s wealth or time.” If this is how you conceive of liberty— as freedom from obligation— then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all…."
"No matter how perfect our circumstances , most of us, as Adam Phillips observed, “learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.” The hard part is to make peace with that misty zone and to recognize that no life— no life worth living anyway— is free of constraints."
"The researchers took saliva samples from almost all of the participating parents, hoping to measure their levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The researchers found that the more time fathers spent in leisure activities while they were at home, the greater their drop in cortisol at the end of the day , which came as no surprise; what did come as a surprise was that this effect wasn’t nearly as pronounced in mothers. So what, you might ask, did have a pronounced effect in mothers? Simple: Seeing their husbands do work around the house."
"Daniel Kahneman and four of his colleagues compared the moment-to-moment well-being of women in Columbus, Ohio, to that of women in Rennes, a small city in France. Although the researchers found many similarities between their two samples, the French and American women differed in one very significant way: the French enjoyed caring for their children a good deal more, and they spent a good deal less time doing it."
And my personal favorite:
"I’m talking about the [adult] selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies; who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited by how it could work or should; who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love. Unless, that is, they have small children."
So, what do you think?