Mothers who practice “intensive parenting,” which includes the belief that children should be “delightful” and “fulfilling,” are more likely to be depressed. Excuse me while I tell my delightful son to stop kicking his fulfilling sister.
Yes, the new research published last month by Miriam Liss, a psychologist at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, is pretty underwhelming.
Liss and her colleagues write in the Journal of Child and Family Studies that moms who engage in this parenting philosophy are more likely to exhibit signs of depression and stress. Duh: They define intensive parenting as including the beliefs that 1) moms are the best possible people to care for their children (generally true), 2) mothers’ lives should center on their children’s needs (more complicated) and 3) moms should find their children “delightful” and feel “totally fulfilled” by them.
“Totally?” Yeah, a lot of those moms are going to wind up depressed.
Still, these findings will no doubt fuel the next round of the “mommy wars,” with charges that stay-at-home mothers inevitably turn themselves into neurotic messes.
This, on top of Anne Marie Slaughter’s complaint in an Atlantic cover story that women “still can’t have it all.” But that title turns out to be a bit misleading: Women can actually be top deans at Princeton University and have supportive husbands and spend plenty of time with their children. What they can’t do is move to another state to take a high-level government job, leave their families behind and handle their adolescent children’s emotional crises on the weekends.
Hmm. Come to think of it, men can’t really do that, either.
Still, Slaughter won wide praise for helping us have a “conversation” on how women balance work and family. In fact, this conversation never stops. The number of columns, blogs and news stories devoted to the “juggle” has exploded in recent years.
Last year’s essay collection, “Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career, and the Conflict of Modern Motherhood,” summed up the whole genre. In a kind of working-mom exhibitionism, the writers — lawyers, policy analysts, journalists, soldiers — told us just how much they manage to fit into each day, then analyzed to death the choices they’ve made.
It all feeds into mommy one-upsmanship: “Oh, I’d never leave my child with a nanny for that many hours.” “That woman is clearly wasting her college education babbling with toddlers all day.”
It’s striking how all these folks (the “Torn” writers and their mommy readers) are constantly monitoring their level of happiness. Mothers (the middle- to upper-middle-class ones, it goes without saying) are now stuck in a constant state of navel-gazing. How many minutes did I spend with my children today? How satisfying were those? Did I check my BlackBerry too many times during the playdate? How intellectually stimulating was my job today? Should I quit? Work fewer hours? Find something more flexible?
Women lay awake at 3 a.m. pondering these questions — while their husbands are (mostly) fast asleep.
And rightly so. Sensible people would rather spend their time making money or playing with their kids than reading another article on whether they’ve found the perfect balance of the two.
Not that mothers are entirely to blame. Everyone likes to measure happiness these days — economists, sociologists, political scientists. “Happiness studies” are all the rage.
But even if your children do (like mine) bring much fulfillment, there’s more to life than happiness. Does anyone ask women if they feel what they’re doing is worthwhile? Having kids, according to most research, doesn’t actually make us happier at all. But should we stop? Maybe there’s something in the project of raising children to be strong, principled, compassionate beings who’ll carry on our ideals after we’re gone that happiness surveys can’t measure.
The Americans most likely to have children and most likely to have more children are those who feel it’s their religious duty: God wants them to be fruitful and multiply. So perhaps they don’t need to stay up at night wondering whether they’ve achieved their perfect balance of work and family and thereby found their peak level of happiness.
Of course, religious people are also twice as likely to report being happy as their secular counterparts. Maybe their kids are just more delightful?
Naomi Schaefer Riley writes frequently on religion, education and culture.