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All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood
All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood
Jennifer Senior
Ecco, 2014
320 pp., 26.99

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Rachel Marie Stone


Better Parenting? Better Schooling?

Maybe less is more.

Call me curmudgeonly, but I really dislike the expression "we're trying" in reference to couples' attempts to become parents. Not only does it push the bounds of what I consider to be tasteful in conversation, but it also suggests an earnestness in the pursuit of parenthood that has always struck me as somewhat unnatural, especially when the phrase is employed by people who are not undergoing fertility treatments or forms of assisted reproduction. Thank you very much for sharing, and I will be happy to celebrate the good news of your pregnancy, but I am content not to know the extent to which you and your beloved are actively pursuing that blessed state.

Statistically speaking, I was an oddball when, as a woman with a graduate degree, I became pregnant with my first child at age 23; in 2008, when I was 27 and had just given birth to my second child, 72 percent of college-educated women aged 25-29 had not yet had any children. (In 2010, the average college-educated woman was 30.3 at the birth of her first child.) "Many adults don't consider having children at all until they've deemed themselves good and ready," writes Jennifer Senior in her excellent new book, All Joy and No Fun: Parenthood in the Age of Anxiety. With highly effective birth control and increasingly advanced methods of assisted reproduction, "first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes [insert blushing groom's name here] with a baby carriage" is by no means a given.

That's just one of the reasons, Senior argues, that parenting has become more complicated, more anxiety inducing. My grandmother didn't particularly like children and didn't particularly want any of her own, but she had what I've heard called "the respectable two" partly because that's what was expected of her and partly because what family planning methods she had access to were less than effective. In generations and contexts prior to hers, children were economic assets to working families both in city factories and rural farms, not to mention a biological inevitability for most couples. Now, parenthood is a choice, and, in the words of the sociologist Viviana Zelizer, the modern child is "economically worthless but emotionally priceless."

Or as Senior more tersely puts it: "children went from being our employees to being our bosses."

And the job isn't an easy one, or one with well-defined boundaries. Through spending time with middle-class American parents and their children, Senior chronicles the storms and stresses of parenting today. Whereas once upon a time parents' roles were defined by concrete activities—sewing clothes, cooking, keeping house, tending wounds—"parenting" as it is understood today, Senior argues, has become a rather nebulous concept with goals that are far from clear. We want our kids to be happy; we want them to succeed; we want them to be independent, we want them to be securely attached. Books and blogs and gurus advocating particular parenting 'styles' abound, not least those that say that Americans are doing it wrong (at least from the point of view of the French.)

One woman Senior interviewed pointed out that the shift in parental focus is neatly summed up in the language we use: whereas my paternal grandmother called herself a "housewife," women of my generation are more inclined to describe themselves as "stay-at-home moms." Women today do a lot less housework, Senior argues, but spend a lot more time "parenting." It's not uncommon to hear women of my grandmothers' generation say that when their babies were born, they were placed in the playpen so that Mother could get on with the dusting and ironing. On into childhood and adolescence, parents of yesteryear did much less hands-on caring for their kids then parents of today. (My mother never played with us!" my father said. "I took the subway to Manhattan when I was nine!" says my mother.)

Most of the parents in Senior's book inhabit an entirely different world: one in which babies need lots of tummy time and cognitive stimulation in the form of direct parental attention, toddlers and kids lead scheduled lives full of "playdates" and "enriching" activities and kids and teens are driven around to all kinds of structured classes and programs with an intensity and focus that Senior refers to as "concerted cultivation," and days end with parents crowded around the table with kids, helping with homework ("the new family dinner," as one parent in Senior's study put it). But seeing the almost unbearable pressure these parents place on themselves, Senior wonders whether "dinner should be the new family dinner," and whether if parents could stop fretting over their parenting according to the standards set by who knows who, they might just have a little more room to breathe—and maybe even a little more joy.

Peter Gray, who is a professor of biopsychology at Boston College and a blogger for Psychology Today, reaches many insights similar to Senior's. The tension between parents and children, particularly in adolescence, derives in part from their craving for "independence, agency, and a sense of their own purpose," writes Senior, the very things, Gray argues, that conventional elementary and high schools squash. He begins Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life with a personal story. His six-year-old son, fed up and frustrated with school, told Gray and a roomful of school administrators to "go to hell." Gray broke down in tears, sought an alternative school for his son, and began looking deeply into the psychology of play and learning.

Gray's strong emphasis on evolutionary psychology and near-rhapsodic description of how hunter-gatherer children learn naturally and playfully comes on a little strong; in one passage, he praises the learned stoicism of the cheerfully egalitarian hunter-gatherers who, when wounded, do not cry or give evidence of any pain. Gray attributes this to the unusually strong and healthy psyche and sense of competence conferred by a childhood and adolescence lived in complete freedom. Outward expressions of pain, however, are strongly culturally coded—women giving birth in Malawi rarely make a sound despite having no pain medications. Gray's casual and sweeping remarks on the deleterious effects of settled agricultural societies and the development of monotheistic religions is also astonishing: "Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—each founded on the idea of a steeply hierarchical cosmos headed by a single all-powerful god who demanded continuous devotion and worship."

Religion had the effect of crushing children, says Gray, conveniently forgetting, perhaps, that when Roman midwives and male heads of households decided that an infant was not fit, Christians would rescue the abandoned babes left exposed to die. His reading of Protestantism is also unrecognizable to this Protestant. According to Gray, who seems to have learned what he knows of Protestantism solely via a cursory reading of Max Weber, Protestants are a bunch of capitalists who "rais[e] themselves up by their own bootstraps" and provide their own livelihoods "through their own God-given abilities and hard work." The idea of sola gratia and the spread of near-universal literacy in the Puritan colonies does not follow Gray's narrative and thus goes unmentioned.

This is not to say that Gray's book is without merit. On the contrary, his brief history of formal education is readable and in some places enlightening if not entirely novel to anyone who has looked into the matter a little way: compulsory schooling was conceived as a highly nationalistic means of social control by King Frederick William II of Prussia in the late 18th century; his ideas were eagerly adopted by Horace Mann in the mid 19th century in Massachusetts, and schools as they are today (with schedules, bells, and locked doors) very much resemble factories—where they don't, in fact, resemble prisons. Gray is at his best when he turns from history and anthropology and describes "seven sins of our system of forced education" (e.g., #3: turning learning into work, which leads to anxiety; and #6: inhibition of critical thinking) as well as alternative models—such as the Sudbury Valley School, founded in (when else?) 1968 by a young professor from Harvard—that work with, not against, children's innate capacity for learning.

I'll admit to a certain amount of skepticism when it comes to the question of "free" schools like those working with the Sudbury model. How on earth will kids learn what they need to know if they "just" play all day? But after finishing Gray's book and reflecting on it, I found myself looking up Sudbury schools on the web. Gray's own son landed in the Sudbury school after his "go to hell" outburst, although Gray himself was anxious. But in a long-term study that was later published in The American Journal of Education, Gray and his colleagues found that most graduates of Sudbury had little difficulty doing what they wanted to do, including going to college, and most had a high motivation for continued learning. None said that their lives would have been better if they'd attended a traditional school instead of Sudbury. A Philadelphia newspaper recently profiled a University of Pennsylvania PhD student in Ancient Near Eastern studies whose elementary and secondary education had been at Sudbury. She, too, had nothing but praise.

And when I consider the things that I know most about—and the things I am most interested in—I am struck that very little of what I know and love deeply was forced upon me by others. Creativity and pleasure and satisfaction, Gray and other researchers (notably, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi) have found, is much less likely to develop in coercive and stressful situations. Just as "overparenting" can get in the way of joy, "overschooling" seems to get in the way of learning, and both get in the way of happiness.

Both of these books bang drums that have been sounded before. Yet somehow, as both Gray and Senior implicitly acknowledge, we are slow to trust that less may really and truly be more. For whatever reason, it's still hard for us to let go.

Rachel Marie Stone is the author of Eat with Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food, published last year by InterVarsity Press.

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