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Parenting and Happiness Pair Well, Despite What You Read

1 year ago
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Sarah Wildman
Sarah Wildman
Foreign Policy Correspondent
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New York Magazine has been doing a good job, lately, of beating parents into the ground. First there was a devastating piece about the abuse of nannies in Brooklyn and Manhattan, about the utter exploitation of babysitters – one to the point of physical abuse – their total import to families, their total powerlessness. That alone, surely, was enough to make the child-less (child-free?) feel pretty happy.
Study after study, Senior wrote, has shown that your little bundle o' joy is not joyous at all. Parents surveyed show a distinct drop in happiness after kids. Or, as one of her friends aptly put it, kids are "all joy and no happiness." In other words – tough luck if you've got a kid, too late for you. And if you're considering parenthood, better take a second look.
As the parent of a toddler, I read the piece in one fell swoop, swallowed it whole and took a week to digest it. And what a week it was. My 18-month-old has hit the terrible twos a good six months early. She's prone to tantrums, suddenly, squalls that take over her entire body, arching her back, howling at the moon, pulling my hair as she tries to take me down to the floor with her. And these aren't confined to un-mortifying places, like the living room. No. We're talking at the supermarket. In the farmers market. At the library. Last week she and a friend got in a pinching-hair-pulling-slapping-jeeeeeez-biting fight. She doesn't want anyone but mommy; she doesn't want anything to do with anyone at all.
And then just as suddenly as it came on, the storm passes, and when its gone, it's like the warmth of 1,000 suns. She laughs. She giggles. She hides and she seeks. She strokes your arm, face, knee. She throws her arms around you spontaneously with so much force she could knock you down; she smiles so broadly when you walk in the room you can't imagine anyone being that happy to see you. She knows her nose and her ears and her eyes and her toes and likes to show you. Might sound dull, you child-free-ers. But, trust me, you'd be suckered too.
She is like the toughest boyfriend/girlfriend you can imagine. Just at the point you want to pack it all in, she lures you back with sweetness and light.
Parenting all joy and no happiness? Not at all. It's all happiness and joy, but also all frustration and anxiety and, yes, anger. It's schizophrenia, it's mania. It's missed dinner dates, it's destroyed work opportunities.

And it is strange, primal joy, crazy dancing fun to old hip-hop that comes on the radio and gets her moving her tush back and forth back and forth. It's running in a summer fountain at the park, something you'd never ever normally do in this skirt but . . . why not? It's a re-evaluation of time -- it's screw the gym, let's walk together, let's hold hands, let's be little.
I used to travel constantly for work. From 2003 through the end of 2008, if it was Tuesday it was Berlin. I was based in Madrid, I went to Paris once a month, I stayed in Paris for two months, Vienna for four. Seriously. I've got some good clothes to show for it.
And it's not that I don't miss it. Schlepping the kid to Europe, though we've done it and will again, doesn't have quite the panache of a solo flight from Paris to Madrid, like the one on which I met a fashion designer and subsequently hobnobbed with his friends from the Prado to South Beach.
But babies, as crazy exhausted as they can make you, have this delicious smell, this insane skin, this ability to make you forget everything (maybe it's the sleep deprivation.) It's not for the faint of heart, but it's not for nothing that parents keep coming back for more. As one doctor I interviewed for a story once said, "They're like potato chips -- hard to have just one."
Senior points out that part of the problem is our own expectations, our own delays. As my mother likes to note, she was well and done with both pregnancies by the age of my first pregnancy. My grandmother as well. We wait a long time now, most of us. We think we need to live first, and then, if ever, have kids.
And that's part of the problem – if we live first, then of course having a baby will feel like the end of everything. We set it up that way. If we don't integrate our children into our lives, we will feel leaden and old, gray and unhappy. When I got pregnant, my first thoughts were, "I'll never live for myself again!" and "Oh God! I needed six more months to get things done!" In Germany, pregnant that summer, a friend at the Financial Times not-so-delicately asked if the bump was a mistake. It wasn't.
But beyond waiting to "finish" everything, before we have kids, the second part of the happiness-equation that stumps us, is how disastrously our society is (not) set up to help out. In America it takes a village – a hired village that is – to care for a child. Babysitters and nannies, day cares and play groups – thousands of dollars out the door each month because most of us don't live near family that can help care for our children along side us, and because we don't have a social safety net like Sweden or Germany or other northern European nations, where women are subsidized, where child care costs a tenth of what we pay, and where women have registered levels of happiness far greater than our own. For God's sake in Sweden, men are basically forced to take paternity leave. How could we possibly compete with that?
As Judith Warner says to Jennifer Senior, "We've put all this energy into being perfect parents, instead of political change that would make family life better."
Senior ends on a happy note, finding a researcher who shows we can't think of happiness as immediate with kids, but as a life-lived-well, looking-back-what-did-you-regret kind of thing. One study showed that regret only came for those who didn't have children, not for those who did.
But that seems a dire spin. The "you'll look back and be happy" version.
I was never the type that fully imagined life with kids. And yet the moment mine arrived I realized I'd never known love like this before -- passionate, bowled-over, take-your-breath-away love that scares the heck out of me pretty much daily. And maybe it's that, as Babble pointed out in the online debate about New York's story, that fierceness.

Or, put another way, being a parent is a little like being an expat.

When we were expats we liked to say the intensity of experience was different, different from living at home. Living in another language, in another culture, sharpened our senses. When things went wrong, they went disastrously, horribly wrong. But when they were right, the reward was so much sweeter.
Having a kid is a little like being an expat in the world -- the highs are that much higher, the lows that much lower, the intensity like nothing else. Joy and pain; tears and laughter; everything that much sharper than it was before.
Filed Under: Woman Up
Tagged: germany, happiness, i hate my life, i love my kids, jennier senior, kids, nannies, new york magazine, parenting, sweden
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5 Comments

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Michael

As a veteran of these conflicts, I begin to wonder why any of this comes as a surprise to a young adult of intelligence and education. Billions of humans have gotten through these moments with more or less grace.

My advice: study up, and suck it up. We all get through it.

July 13 2010 at 8:48 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Amanda

You're absolutely right about many of the things you wrote. I'm 22, just graduated from college and getting ready to start my career. I'm already panicking - am I going to have time to have children? Will my own life end when I do? Am I going to wait too late and then be used to my own selfish life and be unhappy? I grew up in the northeast in a family who encouraged waiting, but now I live in a place where people begin their child rearing years in their late teens and early twenties and there are benefits to both methods. You can have your life back @ 40 having them young and sacrifice your young life, or you can live your young life and sacrifice your old life. My mom was 38 and my dad was 46 when I was born and they're not looking @ retirement anytime soon because they just finished helping me get through college. I feel like they should have been doing this 20 years ago! And yes, our society did create this dilemna in many ways, but maybe it was only because women wanted something more. I'm not really sure it worked out how we planned, I think it just made things more complicated.

July 13 2010 at 2:04 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Amanda's comment
Michael

Oh, grow up. Pick a path and live with it, knowing that life is less generous to women than to men when it comes to timing and choices. The survival of the species is secure with or without your contribution. If you think you could raise a great person (or more) who might contribute to the advancement of the species, by all means have at it, and stick to it!

July 13 2010 at 8:52 PM Report abuse -1 rate up rate down Reply
nowafewthoughts

Amanda -Don't let Michael intimidate you. Men are not as different in regard to timing and choices as it may seem on the surface. Men do have biological clocks, for example. See "The Male Biological Clock: The Startling Truth About Aging, Sexuality and Fertility in Men."

I don't agree with you, however, that "And yes, our society did create this dilemna in many ways, but maybe it was only because women wanted something more. I'm not really sure it worked out how we planned, I think it just made things more complicated."

You apparently are two young to have been part of the women's movement. So, why do you say, "how we planned."? Read a book like "The Gender Knot" by Allan Johnson and you will understand more about how patriarchy has harmed women, and men as well.

Life has always been complicated.

Please don't have a child unless you and the father really want one. Father parenting & care is every bit as important as mother parenting & care. This is another myth. See "The Daddy Shift."

July 13 2010 at 9:09 PM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply
nowafewthoughts

I liked this article.

Do we need to move to "state subsidization" of women or can we women do a better job picking mates, negotiating with them, and showing them it's in their interest to take paternity leave, do 1/2 the unpaid work, spend as much time being a father as we do being a mother, etc?

July 13 2010 at 12:50 PM Report abuse +1 rate up rate down Reply

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