Parenting As We Know It

Andrew Solomon begins his NYTBR review of Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun with the arresting claim that “parenting as we know it—predicated on the unconditional exaltation of our children—is no more than 70 years old.”

The key shift in the past century has been, Senior says, our children’s transition “from being our employees to our bosses.” 

This shift, Senior argues, is the background fact for the debates and confusions we have about being parents: “Every debate we have had about the role of parents—whether they should be laissez-faire or interventionist ‘Tiger Moms,’ attachment-oriented or partial to the rigors of tough love—can be traced back to the paring down of mothers’ and fathers’ traditional roles.” The one thing we parents agree on is that parenting is  “for the child’s sake, and the child’s alone. Parents no longer raise children for the family’s sake or that of the broader world.” 

Solomon includes a number of choice quotations from Senior’s book, observations that ring true for everyone who has been a parent more than a year: “more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, sex.” 

Adolescence is a trial not only because of changes in kids but because of the way the kids’ maturation affects parents: “The mere presence of adolescents in the house, still brimming with potential, their futures still an unclaimed colony . . . sets off a fantastical reverie of what-ifs.” 

She tries to capture the peculiar joy of being a parent, one that eludes social science: “How it feels to be a parent and how it feels to do the quotidian and often arduous task of parenting are two very separate things. ‘Being a parent’ is much more difficult for social science to anatomize.” Solomon speaks of the “privileged euphoria” of parents watching their children grow and gain confidence in the world, a euphoria familiar to any parent watching a child on a basketball floor or playing at a piano recital.

Senior distinguishes between our “experiencing self” and our “remembering self” in an attempt to capture what’s unique about parenting: “Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids. . . . But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.” 

In a wonderful summary, Senior writes, “Kids may complicate our lives, but they also make them simpler. Children’s needs are so overwhelming, and their dependence on us so absolute, that it’s impossible to misread our moral obligation to them. . . . We bind ourselves to those who need us most, and through caring for them, grow to love them, grow to delight in them, grow to marvel at who they are.”