I have to admit, when I read the recent title, “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life,” on the July 12, 2010 cover of New York Magazine, I lit up and got quite excited.
I don’t hate my life — far from it. But, with two young children, a dog (the second dog is on “loan” to dear friends), and other ambitions, life oftentimes feels very difficult. There have been many times at which I looked at my life and wondered why I wasn’t happier.
The idea that parents are less happy than non-parents has become commonplace in academia.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 18
The Statistics
Apparently, many academic studies that have tried to measure the impact of children on happiness have shown negligible, if any, contributions towards happiness.
“Perhaps the most oft-cited datum comes from a 2004 study by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, who surveyed 909 working Texas women and found that child care ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out of nineteen activities.”
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 18
I’m Not The Only One Who Doesn’t Always Enjoy The Job — YAY!
Soon after my first daughter was born, almost three years ago, I was talking to a male colleague at a Christmas party. Having just gotten married and trying for their first child, this colleague was curious about my new experience with motherhood and how my return from maternity leave was.
I remember telling him that I had separated my experience into two parts: (1) there is the job of motherhood / parenting, which I really didn’t enjoy; and, then, (2) there is the love that I feel for my daughter. Two separate issues.
Parenting is an extraordinary activity in both senses of the word extra: beyond ordinary and especially ordinary. While children deepen your emotional life, they shrink your outer world to the size of a teacup, at least for a while.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 20
I was at peace with this distinction at the time, while working for a large institutional employer. Over time, three years later, as a mompreneur, I had forgotten this perspective and had become lost in the guilt of whether I do enough and whether what I do is good enough. And whether I should even pursue work outside my family, even though I didn’t enjoy the parenting and household responsibilities.
Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist and host of This Emotional Life on PBS, says, “When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good. The problem is, 95% of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time” — the moment-to-moment happiness — “or the one you experience rarely?”
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 84
Jennifer Senior: Thank You For This Article!
This article, “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting” by Jennifer Senior, was insightful and contained results of studies and hypotheses by “experts” that I found delightful to read.
“I think this boils down to a philosophical question, rather than a psychological one,” says Tom Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell. ”Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. He recalls watching TV with his children at three in the morning when they were sick. ”I wouldn’t have said it was too fun at the time,” he says. ”But now I look back on it and say, ‘Ah, remember the time we used to wake up and watch cartoons?’” The very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification, nostalgia, delight.
It’s a lovely magic trick of the memory, this gilding of hard times. Perhaps it’s just the necessary alchemy we need to keep the species going. But for parents, this sleight of the mind and spell on the heart is the very definition of enchantment.
– “I Love My Children. I Hate My Life” by Jennifer Senior; New York Magazine; 2010 July 12; article title: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting“; page 84
Reading this article removed a lot of the isolation and confusion that I was experiencing. With this broader perspective of what many other parents go through, maybe — hopefully — if I’m lucky enough to have a third child, I’ll embrace the sleepless nights and routines (I have a hard time with routine) with an inner smile.
I only wish that this article had come along sooner!
Click on My Notes from “All Fun and No Joy” by Jennifer Senior for more from the article; or, read the actual article: “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting” in New York Magazine online.
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This is really fascinating stuff. I sometimes think it’s a shame we humans have this overdeveloped capacity for analytical thinking. We might think ourselves right out of continuing the human race. I’m going to play in the sandbox now.
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