To become a parent is to enter the realm of paradox. You’re exhausted and exhilarated. You’re depleted and replete. You wouldn’t sell your baby for a million bucks, but you feel like getting in a car and driving away forever, without even accepting any money at all. You’re slave and master. You want to warn your friends about the perils of reproduction, and you feel sorry for the ones who will never be parents. It’s the best of times, it’s the — ARRRRGHHH! WHAT THE HELL — Pardon me, there’s a 2-year-old stomping on my nads.
I’m back. Let the wife worry about the kid. Hey, the little succubus came out of her body, after all, right?
That kind of dadfail is one of the reasons babies are the source of so much misery and marital stress, but Jennifer Senior talks about lots of others in her chatty, generous and yet statistically grounded reverse-angle of the usual studies of what parents do to children. What about what children do to parents? A phrase from her friend provided the book’s dead-on title, “All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting.”
To get an idea of how little fun it is to mind your average tiny psychotic, consider that in surveys moms ranked child care below even housework among favorite activities. That’s right: Doing the dishes or dusting the furniture is actually a step up.
And here’s how people report the hierarchy of others they most enjoy spending time with: “Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse, which is better than interacting with other relatives, which is better than interacting with acquaintances, which is better than interacting with parents, which is better than interacting with children. Who are on a par with strangers.”
Hey, younglings, cheer up: We’d rather hang with you than with your average al Qaeda operative, though. Probably. As Louis C.K. put it, “You want to know why your father spent so long on the toilet? Because he’s not sure he wants to be a father.” At a visit to a parental-support group, Senior observes wittily, “Everyone had the look of a passenger who’d been trapped far too long in coach.”
Drunk On Sleeplessness
Foundation said babies cost you
an hour of sleep a night.Shutterstock
Sleep deprivation is the most pressing problem: Polls vary but a 2004 study by the National Sleep Foundation said babies cost you an hour of sleep a night. Doesn’t sound so bad? The gap in reported well-being between those who log six hours a sleep a night and those who get seven is greater than the gap between those earning under $30,000 a year and those taking home $90,000. Parental sleep also tends to be fragmented, hence of lower quality, hence every mom’s jokey-but-not-really Mother’s Day wish: “For some sleep.”
From sleep deprivation other problems result. Sleeplessness makes you dopey, for instance. Simply going 20 hours without sleep (say, getting up at 3 a.m. and driving home at 11 that night) leads to a 50% cut in cognitive function and yields a driving ability on a par with 0.05% blood-alcohol content, almost the legal limit.
John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister’s book “Willpower” reimagined self-control as a fixed pool that gets steadily drained by various factors such as hunger and stress. Lack of sleep drains that pool, which means parents endure a decreased ability to control themselves.
So, what do moms and dads fail to repress when they can’t get a grip? Senior mentions only “the urge to yell,” but you may be able to think of others, such as increased reliance on friends like Sara Lee and Johnnie Walker. Losing your temper (or your waistline, or your sobriety) may in turn make you feel even worse than you did when your kid first started screaming her insistence about having gummy bears for dinner.
Deadbeat Dads
Then there’s the inability to hold back criticism of your partner. If you didn’t have one of those shouty marriages, you may have one when Junior arrives. Much of the tension comes from the division of labor.
Despite “second shift” cliches, it isn’t true that women work more hours than men overall. But the breakdown of work does favor men: Women get left to do the least enjoyable stuff more. (“Honey, I’ll go tune up the car while you clean up this vomit. Deal?”) Remember that almost any chore is more enjoyable than child care, and women spend nearly twice as much time on kid-related activities as men do. (Men with kids spend more time at the office — but is it to pay for those Chinese lessons or the escape? You make the call.)
In a UCLA video analysis of 32 middle-class families, “father in a room by himself” was the most frequently observed person-space configuration.
Men also overestimate how much they’re helping out: They claim they do about 42% of the baby drudgery, whereas the actual number observed is 35%. (And frustrated women credit dads with only 32% of the child care). Subdividing even further, men tend to devote what kid time they do spend on interactive, more enjoyable things with kids (tossing a ball around) while women are more likely to get stuck with non-fun chores like feeding and changing.
Measuring cortisol, the stress hormone, in men and women turned up an interesting difference: Men lowered stress with leisure activities, but this didn’t work as well for women. What relieves women’s stress? Seeing their husbands do child care. Dudes, if you want your wife to be happy, try to nudge your share of child care a little closer to 50%. If this seems like a drag, try to remember the break you had for nine months of pregnancy, during which you put in 0%.
Lonely Moms
didn’t have enough friends and
58% said they were lonely.Shutterstock
A less intuitive reason moms are agitated is that the kids destroy their friendships. A survey of some 1,300 mothers found that 80% reported they didn’t have enough friends and 58% were lonely.
Many of these women were stay-at-home moms or had cut back on their working lives or worked more from home, which meant cutting back on the social aspect of work and the serendipitous friendships we all make there. (Stay-at-home dads, by the way, are even lonelier, feeling not only stuck with the kids but also left out of mom groups.)
Reading interviews with Senior’s moms at the stressed-out parent makes you realize how central home-life stresses are to so many women’s unhappiness, and yet this isn’t what we talk about as a culture. Instead the media gush irrelevant stories about how few women are senators or Fortune 500 CEOs. These are abstractions. No woman is going to wake up happier tomorrow morning if news breaks that there are suddenly 100 female CEOs of top companies instead of 20.
And a key source of stress for moms (more than dads) is guilt about falling short as a parent. More time spent at the office tends to exacerbate that, and it’s clear which role women put first: Even moms who work full-time identify themselves primarily as mothers rather than workers, by a margin of 50%. Taking into account surveys that show women’s job satisfaction is at least as high as men’s, what the average mom needs to boost her happiness is not to lean in at work but for her husband to lean in at home.
And yet Senior is surprisingly open to the idea that mom could learn a lot from dad’s parenting style. Visiting one couple, Clint and Angie, Senior finds that the mom can’t bear to sleep-train their second child, which leads to getting up five times a night, even though she agreed (on her husband’s urging) to simply let the first baby cry himself to sleep every night until, after two weeks, he could slumber straight through.
Senior writes, “Clint believes he does 50% of the child care. He counts it as child care if he’s doing one thing and the kids are doing another, so long as they’re safe. Whereas Angie feels obliged to immerse herself completely in their world.”
Clint complains that Angie won’t take any number of “small and reasonable measures to give herself a break.” No, kids don’t need vegetables at every meal. Nor will watching TV destroy their brains. Senior incorrectly blames “cultural expectations” for women’s need to be supermoms; women are simply more anxious than men to conform to what they see as the standard. (They wouldn’t be aware of those “cultural expectations” in the first place if they didn’t load up on the books and magazines that men ignore).
Still, Senior wisely concludes, “Fathers tend to judge themselves less harshly, bring less anguished perfectionism to parenting their children . . . and — at least while their kids are young — more aggressively protect their free time. None of this means they love their children any less than their wives do.”
Love Machines
That love is qualitatively different from anything you can know before you’ve had children. Out of immense annoyance comes an immeasurable reward, a larger life, a strengthened soul. Kids are little memory jolts, bringing back bits of childhood you thought you’d forgotten, renewing your ability to have fun with Legos or sand castles.
They get you to dance and make funny faces in public. In each sudden nude sprint out of the bathtub or strange whispered conversation with a pillow shaped like a sheep they refresh and illuminate. They make you laugh and wonder. (Says a 3-year-old in the book: “Mom? Are we ‘live’ or on video?”) Having kids means closing off options, but in this narrowing there is expansion.
And in their crayon masterpieces you will find more beauty than in a Matisse. Our 5-year-old daughter showed us a picture of herself as stick figure beneath a heart from which a squiggly line had emerged. On the other side of the paper was what had apparently emerged from the heart — a rainbow over a smiling stick figure mommy and a smiling stick figure daddy holding hands with a tiny stick figure in the middle (the artist’s 2-year-old sister). Mom and Dad were puzzled.
“To my famuley,” said the caption.
“What is it?” we asked.
Said our little girl, “It’s a love machine!”