035: Parenting: All joy and no fun?

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Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Before we get going today, I’d like to ask you for a favor.  I’ve been doing some reading about goal setting lately and I’ve read that if you set a goal you should both tell other people about it and ask for help in achieving it, so I’d like to do that today.  I’ve set a goal for myself to double the number of subscribers I have to this podcast – subscribing doesn’t cost anything at all; it just means that new episodes show up in your podcast feed when they’re released on a weekly basis, so you don’t have to remember to go and look for them.  Weekly podcasts on science-based parenting advice delivered straight to your feed?  What could be better?  The trick here is that if you subscribe through iTunes, I’m afraid I can’t count that as meeting my goal – iTunes never actually tells podcasters that a person has subscribed or how many subscribers I might have in iTunes at any given time.  Let’s just say it’s yet another way that iTunes doesn’t help podcasters out.  So to count toward my goal, new subscribers have to go to my website at YourParentingMojo.com, enter your email address in the box at the top, and hit ‘subscribe’ – you actually get a gift for doing it that way too, which is a package of seven relationship-based strategies to support your child’s development – and maybe make life a bit easier for you.  So if you haven’t yet subscribed to the show on my website I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t mind doing that, and if you have already subscribed then would you consider telling a friend (or perhaps many friends) about the show?  I’ll let you know when I reach my goal – thanks so much for your support! Now on to today’s episode, which is about a book I read way before I started the podcast, called All Joy and No Fun by Jennifer Senior.  I actually got a question from a listener recently asking me whether there’s any research on whether and how her divorce might have impacted her son’s development.  It turns out that there is, and quite a lot – so I decided to make a mini-series out of it with one episode on how divorce impacts children, and a second on single parenting and step families, and we’ll open the whole lot up with this one on All Joy and No Fun, which is basically about the idea that if you ask a parent what is their greatest joy they will pretty much invariably say “my kids,” but if you ask them moment-by-moment if they’re having fun with their children then unfortunately the answer is pretty often “no.”  I know that a lot of factors can lead to divorce but surely “all joy and no fun” is among them, so I’m going to lump these three together in a sort of mini-series.  Since I first read the book several months ago I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit, so I’ll start as usual with the research and will end with some thoughts on how we can change this idea to “some joy and some fun too.”  And because I think I’m an especially interesting case study for this phenomenon, I’m going to illustrate today’s episode with some personal experience.  Because, why not? Before we get going I should pause and say that if you are not a family that looks like a mother and a father with children then I’m sorry, but there is not a ton of research on your kinds of families which does suck.  I imagine it’s possible that one of you might work longer hours than the other and take on the more “father-ish” role and the other works shorter or no hours and spends more time with the kids that looks like a more “mother-ish” role.  If so, there will still be plenty here for you.  And even if not (and if you really do split everything evenly then you should send me an email and you can be a guest on the show), if you’ve ever found yourself wishing there was as much fun as joy in your life then there will still be something for you to learn. A sociologist named Alice Rossi was one of the first people to study the effect of parenting on the parents, rather than just on the child.  She describes four factors that inhibit our abilities as parents: firstly that preparation for the role of parent is virtually non-existent, in large part because our educational system provides for children’s cognitive development, but not for emotional development or the subjects most relevant to successful family life, which Rossi says are “sex, home maintenance, child care, interpersonal competence, and empathy.”  I’d say this was doubly so for me because I never really liked children that much, so while I had few opportunities to engage with children as a teen and young adult I actually went out of my way to avoid those opportunities I did find simply because I wasn’t interested – and anyway, babies cried whenever I held them. Secondly there is limited learning available during pregnancy – I was among the lucky ones here in the U.S. to have health insurance that provided a couple of prenatal classes, so I had actually changed a diaper on a doll before my daughter’s birth, even if not on a real baby.  I spent a great deal of time reading about pregnancy and labor and delivery and was determined to have a natural birth for two reasons – firstly because I was afraid I would struggle to bond with the baby and secondly because I wanted to do a 10-day backpacking trip around Mont Blanc a few weeks after the delivery, which would have been impossible if I’d had a C-section.  So let’s just say that I was highly motivated to avoid that recovery from surgery, but that means I spent virtually no time trying to think through what it’s like to be a parent.  I figured I had 18 years to work on that part, although I will say that I don’t have too many regrets in parenting so far, but one of the few I do have is that I didn’t find the idea of respectful parenting until my daughter was about four months old, and I now look back on those first few months with a bit of sadness that I wasn’t able to begin our relationship in a way that really respected her needs rather than just assuming that no crying = good, so do whatever you can to stop the crying. The third of Rossi’s four factor is the abruptness of the transition to parenthood – there simply is no internship for parenting as there would have been in our society in centuries past, or that still exists in other societies today where young adults see others in their families with young babies and can ‘practice’ their own skills in advance, and today more than ever our lives totally and permanently shift when we have our first child, and I would argue are irrevocably changed once we have two.  My husband and I had a pretty nice life before we had our daughter – we rode bikes on mountains or on the road most weekends during the summer and skied 15-25 days over the winter, and I hiked a lot, and I did yoga classes pretty much whenever I felt like it.  Life was busy and full and pretty fun.  In fact, even though it was my husband who wanted children whenever I would ask him “are you ready yet?” he would say “let’s just get through bike season first” and then at the end of bike season he’d say “let’s just do one more ski season first,” so finally I said “if you keep saying that, there’s never going to be a baby.”  To which he responded “well then I’m ready now” – famous last words, as it turned out.  With one child we are still able to do some of these things; one of us can cover while the other goes out for a road ride, although we haven’t mountain biked in months.  I’ve been able to do a lot of hiking with our daughter on my back, although now we’re at the unfortunate age where she is too heavy to carry and also won’t walk in a straight line.  But if we had two children as I know many of you do, so I’m probably preaching to the choir – the chances of you being able to engage regularly in things you used to find interesting and enjoyable are pretty slim. Fourthly, there is a lack of guidelines to successful parenthood, by which Rossi means that it isn’t too hard to figure out what are nutritional and clothing and medical needs and follow the general advice that a child needs loving physical contact and emotional support, but what else is needed to help a child develop into a successful adult?  Surely there must be something?  Well it turns out that there are just one or two things, which is a major reason I started this podcast in the first place, to fill that gap between all the books about how to support an infant’s growth and development, and the changing skillset a parent needs once the child becomes a toddler and preschooler. This suddenness of transition is the major theme in an even earlier paper by E.E. LeMasters, who found that thirty eight of forty six couples he interviewed in urban middle-class Wisconsin between 1953 and 1956 reported “extensive” or “severe” crisis, the two most severe criteria on a five-point scale, in adjusting to the arrival of their first child.  89% of these couples rated their marriages as “good” or better, ratings that were confirmed by close friends in all but three cases, and thirty five of thirty eight pregnancies in the crisis group were either planned or desired – so it wasn’t that the couples were in crisis because of an unplanned pregnancy.  The parents didn’t have major psychiatric disabilities and were, in general, of average or above average in what LeMasters called “personality adjustment,” but all of the couples in the crisis group seemed to have romanticized parenthood and felt ineffectively prepared.  As one mother said: “We knew where babies came from, but we didn’t know what they were like.”  The couples’ descriptions of early parenthood could have been lifted from any Facebook parenting forum today – the mothers reported loss of sleep, chronic tiredness or exhaustion, confinement to the home and loss of social contacts, giving up the satisfactions and income of a job, having endless laundry to do, feeling guilty about not being a better mother, being “on” 24/7 in caring for an infant, the decline in their housekeeping standards (although I have to say I wasn’t personally afflicted by this problem) and worry over their appearance (including increased weight after the pregnancy).  The fathers apparently echoed most of these adjustments and added a few of their own – the decline in the wife’s sexual responsiveness (which I’ll just leave right there without further comment), economic pressure from becoming the only breadwinner at a time when expenses are increasing, worry about a second pregnancy in the near future, and a “general disenchantment with the parental role.”  These are sobering statistics, and are among the more dire ones that have been reported – subsequent studies have confirmed the sudden deteriorations in the relationship between couples after the birth of the couples’ first baby, but have found smaller to medium-sized effects rather than the large-scale crisis event that LeMasters reported. As several researchers have noted and Jennifer Senior comments as well, one is more likely to be happy raising children as part of a couple rather than raising them alone, and also that the level of happiness in marriages tends to decline over time whether a couple has children or not.  But at no point in a marriage does it seem to decline as far and fast as after that first baby is born, and while we can debate the extent of the decline there is little doubting its pervasiveness. And what causes this erosion in happiness?  It seems as though there are two factors.  Between the parents themselves, there is one topic that causes more arguments than any other, and if you don’t know what it is then you haven’t been living in my house lately: it’s the division of work between parents.  Men and women work, on average, about the same numbers of hours each day but women, on average, still do about twice as much “family care” – which is defined as housework, child care, shopping, and chauffeuring – as men.  My husband would be quick to add that he commutes for 2 ½ hours a day, which is true – a situation he chose for himself over my objections for precisely the reason that I knew he would walk in the door most nights shortly before bedtime expecting the child to be fed and bathed and his own dinner on the table.  And he’s not alone – in a study that analyzed a set of video recordings of families in Los Angeles on weekday evenings, mothers were found most often in shared spaces with the children, while fathers were observed most often alone.  The least frequently observed configuration was the couple together without children.  And we all know that there’s a reason why doing the dishes after dinner, that once loathed task, is now seen as the ‘plum’ assignment over supervising bath time – it’s because doing the dishes is far mentally easier than wrangling a two-and-a-half year-old into the bath “But I don’t WANNA bath!” followed after shampooing and soaping by “But I don’t WANNA get out!”.  But most nights I end up doing bath AND the dishes anyway, so the choice isn’t so bad.  And at my house we see this pattern repeated on the weekends as well – if my daughter and I are in the living room together then my husband sees himself as “relieved” and free to read drivel on the internet at his leisure.  I will say that he may be better than most husbands at making some effort to protect a small amount of leisure time for me; he will suggest that I go out for a bike ride some weekend mornings, as long as it’s not more than an hour and I don’t expect things to be any further along at home by the time I get back than when I left – things like getting either of them dressed, for example.  He’s quite happy to just enjoy his time with her and leave the ‘chore’ aspect of childcare to me – unless I set expectations about what I’d like to have done while I’m gone, which I’ve started to do even though I wish I didn’t have to. A subset of this first factor causing the erosion of marital happiness is the overscheduled nature of our children’s lives these days.  Recall that “family care” includes chauffeuring the kids around to various activities, often one or more each night of the week (especially when you factor multiple children into the equation).  This never-ending series of activities is apparently a uniquely middle-class affliction – it’s what middle class parents do (in the short term) to try to expose their child to a variety of experiences, and (in the long term) to give them the ‘edge’ they’ll need to get into an elite college.  And it’s exhausting for both the parents and the children. So the second main factor I see in the decline of marital quality is more related to the children and, specifically, what it’s like to spend time with children – especially young children.  Now I have to say that I’ve been very lucky to have a relatively easy-going child, although she has just, over the last few weeks, started saying “No, I don’t WANT to [insert activity here],” no matter what the inserted activity is and how much she really wants to do it – if I want her to do it then it’s enough for her to say she doesn’t.  And a side-effect of being over-scheduled when children are young is that they don’t know how to tolerate boredom, and they look to us to alleviate it when it occurs.  While our parents were cooking, cleaning, hanging out with their neighbors, and running a network of nonprofit organizations, they would typically tell us to go clean their rooms if we were bored.  We are more likely to ship our own children off to a gymnastics class. I want to digress here for a moment to discuss the concept of “flow” – please trust me that it will all come together in just a couple of minutes.  This term was coined by the psychologist Mihaly Cheeks-sent-mi-halyi, although the idea has existed in other forms, most notably in some Eastern religions, for thousands of years.  When you’ve achieved “flow,” you’re in the zone.  The original six characteristics of flow are: (1) intense and focused concentration on the present moment; (2) merging of action and awareness, (3) a loss of reflective self-consciousness, so you’re not easily distracted, (4) a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity, (5), a distortion of temporal experience – some people say time seems to slow down; others say it seems to speed up; and (6) an experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding.  These...