I made all sorts of notes while I was reading Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood last month. I didn’t think I’d get all of my thoughts into my discussion of the book and planned a follow-up post, although I didn’t plan for it to go up quite so long after the review. But since it felt like many of us were on some form of blogging break during August, I really don’t mind revisiting this now…and you might have missed it the first time, anyway.
Gayle at Everyday I Write the Book also read All Joy and No Fun this summer, and appreciated many of Senior’s insights:
“To research All Joy and No Fun, Senior interviewed couples, single moms, grandparents raising grandchildren, working moms, SAHMs, and SAHDs to get at the heart of why parenting can be both such a slog and the most rewarding thing we’ve ever done in our lives. She also explores the effect children have on marriage, on friendship, on work, and on self-esteem. I read this book with interest and felt reinforced by many of Senior’s conclusions. One of my friends on FB posted about this book a few months ago, calling it required reading for parents and suggesting that we have our parents read it too, so that they can understand why we’re all going crazy.”
I agree with Gayle’s friend, but not necessarily for the same reason. One thing that All Joy and No Fun really brought home for me was just how different our parents’ experience of parenthood was–and how my own experience of it, begun thirty years ago and continuing with my teenage stepkids, has elements of both the traditional and the modern.
My sister and I have had numerous conversations about how much time she spends with her kids’ homework, and she once asked me “Was Mom involved with us and our homework like this?”
Not to my recollection, Mom wasn’t. She might have answered questions or read over something for us, but she didn’t get involved unless she was specifically asked. Our homework was our homework, and I never sensed that she had all that much of a stake in it other than asking what we had to do and checking in on how we were doing with it.
My parents were children during the Great Depression and in school throughout Word War II, and both grew up in homes that held extended family, but only one parent. Between that particular combination of personal and cultural circumstances, they were raised under very different conditions and philosophies than those in effect by the time they had children of their own. Senior notes that “modern” concepts of childhood–and thus, of parenthood–didn’t begin taking shape until the mid–20th century; many of us “modern” parents were raised by “pre-modern” ones ourselves.
Even so, in some ways, our mother had more in common with my sister’s cohort of mothers than with her own. Like many of them–and like my sister herself–she spent more than a decade in the workforce before she married, and she didn’t have children until her mid-thirties. In the 1960s, that was nowhere near as common as it is now, and it put her several years behind most women her age. And while it was rare for mothers to work in those days–especially if they had husbands, lived in middle-class neighborhoods, and their children were young–they didn’t identify as “stay-at-home moms;” they were “housewives” or “homemakers.”
Granted, by the 1960s, homemaking was taking up less of a woman’s day than it had ten to fifteen years earlier–thanks to advances in appliances, transportation, and food production and preparation methods–but mothers were just beginning to shift their newly available time and attention from their chores to their children…and/or jobs, volunteer activities, and sometimes maybe even personal development and self-nurturing. The second wave was cresting. And while we were the first generation of kids to grow up with color TV, which got a lot of our time and attention, we also may have been the last granted hours of lightly supervised free-play time.
I think my parents sought a balance between encouragement and protectiveness of their children–often leaning more heavily to one side than the other, and maybe not always leaning to the correct side–and I know they weren’t afraid to leave us to our own devices sometimes. They weren’t about to leave us hanging, but they wanted us to have the chance to learn from our mistakes and develop our own resources.
I was barely an adult when I became a mother myself–a full-time student during the first three years of my son’s life, a full-time worker (as was his father) ever since, and a full-time parent until he graduated high school. My non-parenting full-time pursuits played a part in my desire for him to learn to develop his own resources, I’m sure; we didn’t have the time to go over every bit of homework together, and he didn’t get deeply involved in extracurriculars until the more independently-mobile high-school years. However, I always considered my primary job as a mother to be the production of a functioning (and functional) adult, and the development of one’s own resources is a fairly critical component of that.
Even in this era of “intentional parenting” and “concerted cultivation” of our children, parents remain aware that we’re ultimately working ourselves out of a job…and that’s actually okay, both for us and for our kids. As Kristen Howerton of Rage Against the
Minivan notes, “Sometimes I ignore my children, and that’s okay”:
“I don’t want my kids to rely on me for their own good time. I want them to learn how to be creative, and to handle boredom. I want them to use their own resources to discover imaginative play…I’m available – always. But I’m going to preoccupy myself in the moments that I’m not needed, or when they are preoccupied. The idea of standing-in-waiting for my children is ludicrous.”
A quote from the original New York magazine article that grew into All Joy and No Fun sums up the book’s thesis:
““A few generations ago, people weren’t stopping to contemplate whether having a child would make them happy. Having children was simply what you did. And we are lucky, today, to have choices about these matters. But the abundance of choices—whether to have kids, when, how many—may be one of the reasons parents are less happy…When people wait to have children, they’re also bringing different sensibilities to the enterprise. They’ve spent their adult lives as professionals, believing there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things; now they’re applying the same logic to the family-expansion business, and they’re surrounded by a marketplace that only affirms and reinforces this idea.”
Parenthood is like blogging. Although there are plenty of ways to get it wrong, there’s really no one way to do it right.
