Books: ‘All Joy and No Fun’

Title: All Joy and No Fun

By: Jennifer Senior, 2014

Ecco, 265 p., hardcover

What I’m about to describe, I’m afraid, cannot be characterized as a particularly unusual day for a typical Eastside parent.

Woke up at 6:15 a.m. Tuesday to get one daughter to school. My wife woke up as well to make breakfast for us and then get some bookkeeping done herself while the other, non-school age daughter slept.

Drive to Mammoth (we live in Swall) to drop daughter. Work ‘til noon.

Pick up 3rd grader at 12:15 p.m. (early release Tuesday). Drive her down to Bishop for an appointment. Restock some newspapers at Vons and Manor Market while we’re at it.

Drop daughter at 2 p.m. appointment. Pick up other daughter from wife, who teaches dance in Bishop on Tuesdays.

Get eldest daughter from appointment. Drive both home. Fall asleep briefly while watching Dora The Explorer.

Drive back to Mammoth because I’d made a commitment the week before to judge the MHS Talent Show (only learning the day before that the afternoon childcare for the 2-year old had cancelled). Drop both daughters at a friend’s house for a few hours (the friends themselves had just gotten home from work).

Retrieve daughters, drive home, have dinner … and then actually get back to work for a few hours before crashing.

 

I don’t think there’s a parent among us who doesn’t wonder … is parenting harder now than it was when I was growing up? Or am I just being a wimp?

While author Jennifer Senior doesn’t offer an explicit answer to those questions, she does do an excellent job in giving an overview of the modern landscape of parenthood and the forces that have shaped that landscape.

In the introduction,. Senior quotes Sociologist Viviana Zelizer, who characterizes the modern child as “economically worthless, but emotionally priceless.”

As Senior writes, post-World War II, with the outlawing of child labor practices, children stopped working, forcing their parents to work twice as hard. As Senior writes, “Children are no longer economic assets, so the only way to balance the books is to assume they are future assets, which requires an awful lot of investment, not to mention faith. Because children are now deemed emotionally precious, today’s parents are also charged with the psychological well-being of their sons and daughters.”

Meanwhile, the book describes the ever-tightening middle class squeeze.

Ob the one hand, according to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, the cost to raise a middle-income child, as of 2010, was $300,000 (college not included).

Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted wages of middle-income folks haven’t budged since the 1970s, even though there are often two parents in the workforce as opposed to just one.

What’s also changed, according to  Economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano, is that traditionally, the people who made the least throughout the 20th century had to work the longest hours. That has now been reversed.

Being wired and available 24/7 hardly helps matters.

In 2012, Sociologist Robin Simon measured the difference in happiness levels between parents/non-parents in 22 industrialized nations. The country with the greatest gap is the United States. Simon found the gaptended to be larger in countries which have less generous welfare benefits.

Child Care Aware of America, in a 2011 study, noted that it costs families more to put two kids in child care than it does to pay rent – in all 50 states.

Interestingly, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman observed: “The French enjoy caring for their children a good deal more, and actually care for them a good deal less.

Noe, of course, theer’s plenty of reasons to have children and plenty of ways they bring joy and fulfillment to a person’s life. Senior talks a lot about that as well. But as she says, the goal of the book is this: if parents understand a little bit more of what’s happening on a macro level, they might be a little easier on themselves.