All Joy No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting
The year Jennifer Senior’s All Joy No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (2014) hit shelves, I became a mother for the second time. Not long after my second daughter joined our family, I picked up Senior’s book. At this time, with a newborn and a preschooler, I often found myself contemplating the paradox on parenthood: it is a joyful and transformational experience that many of us eagerly await prior to becoming parents, but especially in the early years, it is also a drudgery that can make days feel like weeks colliding into months. With thoughts like these, I happily found myself with Senior’s book in my lap one day and from the introduction Senior’s prose struck a chord. For the past four years I have often alluded to Senior’s book when discussing parenthood with friends. Even when I read the book years ago, I knew it was one to keep nearby that I would appreciate rereading at various points in my parenting life. As my daughters move into the school-aged phase of childhood, I decided to reread it this spring. Again, I found Senior’s writing captured me as I frequently nodded my head in agreement while reading or stopped to think, that’s where I read that!
Unlike most of the myriad books available about parenting, Senior’s All Joy No Fun focuses on what the act of parenting does to modern parents (rather than what various parenting styles do to modern kids). Breaking with the style of many parenting books, in which the author/parenting guru seeks to convince the reader that a specific technique, outlook or turn of phrase will transform their children into cooperative, obedient children, Senior’s book investigates parenthood from all angles. She mixes interesting historical facts (like the creation of “teenager” as a concept) with social science data to create a well-researched and engaging portrait of the modern American parent. She focuses on things like what parenting does to both individuals and couples and how American children’s role in a family has drastically shifted since the Industrial Revolution. She also investigates the psychological fallout modern parents face as a result of our modern outsourcing of most traditional parental obligations to professionals outside the home. All Joy No Fun includes chapters on parenting through early childhood, elementary years, and adolescence, as well as grandparents parenting their children. As such, it is a book that will appeal to parents at any stage in their parenting, and as a result, one I hope to revisit again in the future.
Ultimately Senior pinpoints some of the complicated paradoxes that are at once the modern parent’s experiences. She acknowledges the anxiety and perfectionism with which many modern mothers approach parenting (as well as the distinct gender inequality in day-to-day parenting). She investigates the fun that modern fathers are able to have with their children, while also guarding time for themselves. She ponders the complexity of preparing our children for a future that we parents cannot fathom in a world where everything changes at such a rapid pace. After exploring parenting at all stages in the game, All Joy No Fun circles back to the individual (where it began) and makes some fascinating conclusions about the disconnect between what we parents experience in the moment and what we recall. And, even amidst the many paradoxes of modern parenting, Senior’s book concludes with the meaning people seem to acquire as parents, as well as the joy with which we remember our young children looking back years later.
This is a book I encourage parents of all ages to pick up, as it will doubtless inspire new levels of reflection, and perhaps, provide a helpful lens through which to view the paradoxes we daily face. While this book did not shift my parenting style, it did shift my perspective on parenting in positive ways. But more than anything, this is a book that having read years ago I continue to think about some of Senior’s points; it is a book that stays with you.
A Few Great Passages:
“One day you are a paragon of self-determination, coming and going as you please; the next you are a parent, laden with gear and unhooked from the rhythms of normal adult life. It’s not an accident that the early years of parenting often register in studies as the least happy ones. They’re the bunker years, short in the scheme of things but often endless seeming in real time” (17).
“[U]nencumbered by outsized cultural expectations about what does or doesn’t constitute good parenting, and free from cultural judgements over their participation in the workforce, good fathers tend to judge themselves less harshly, bring less anguished perfectionism to parenting their children [. . .] and—at least while their kids are young—more aggressively protect their free time. None of this means they love their children any less than their wives do. None of this means they care any less about their children’s fates” (92).
“Had the children’s role been the only roles to change within the family, that alone would have been a significant historical development. But industrialization and modernization inevitably changed the role of parents too. As time when one, mothers and fathers also lost their traditional function in the family economy. Before the Industrial Revolution, parents provided educational, vocational, and religious instruction to their children; they also tended to them if they got sick, helped make their clothes, and supplied the food on the table. But with industrialization, these jobs were gradually, one by one, outsourced to non-family members of entire institutions., to the point that the idea of the ‘family economy’ practically ceased to exist. The sole job of parents became the financial and physical security of their children” (130).
“The conventional wisdom about adolescence is that it’s a repeat of the toddler years, dominated by a cranky, hungry, rapidly growing child who’s precocious and selfish by turns. But in many ways the struggles that mothers and fathers face when their children hit puberty are the very opposite. Back when their children were small, parents craved time and space for themselves; now they find themselves wishing their children liked their company more and would at least treat them with respect, if adoration is too much to ask” (192-193).
Bibliography:
Senior, Jennifer. All Joy No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. Harper Collins, 2014.
