All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (21 page)

“And what do you want me to work on?” asks Laura Anne. “What else does he need?”

Andrew draws a beard on the doll, plus some shorts and a belt. “Look!” He adds a gray hat.

“I love that! Where are your oil pastels? He needs some dirt.” She leaps up and pulls them out of a cabinet.

At this point, I ask Laura Anne: Why is she offering to help with this? With all due respect to Andrew, this project is, in the end, just a doll.

Laura Anne says she’s aware of that. But it’s her habit now. Some of the projects the teachers assign are much more involved, practically demanding parental assistance; she’d feel remiss if she just sat around while he did them. “Let me show you the Scotland project,” she tells me and heads out to the garage. This is an ancestry project that all the kids had to do the previous year. She returns a few minutes later with a spectacular black triptych. “Scotland, by Andrew Day” it says on top. A kilt hangs like a pageant sash over its center panel. “I couldn’t throw it away.”

It’s certainly impressive, dappled with photos and essays under tidy headings: “Land and People.” “An Interview with a Modern Day Bagpiper.” I ask if it was the snazziest-looking assignment submitted that day.

She shakes her head. “There was one with a giraffe that went all the way up to here.” She stretches her arm as high as it’ll go. “And there was this other project where the kids had to do a building in the city, and one boy did the retractable roof” (of Reliant Stadium). She runs the kilt through her hand. “I was
making
a kilt in case I couldn’t get one,” she says. “I had the sewing machine out with the pattern. . . .”

Robert interjects at this point that he’s finished his assignments. Laura Anne looks them over. “Wow. Those are good sentences. You finished your homework packet, and it’s only Tuesday!”

She takes a seat and resumes working on Andrew’s archaeologist doll. The table has been given over completely to art supplies, notebooks, workbooks, markers, and pencils. It could be a workbench in a classroom. “I think homework has replaced the family dinner,” says Laura Anne. She lets the observation hang for a moment, then adjusts the archaeologist’s shirt. “Maybe it’s sad, but it’s true. Because this is when your children tell you stuff. This is the time you’re sitting down with your children and creating something with them.” She admits that one of the reasons homework may have replaced dinner in her family is that she’s not all that big on cooking. In a city, it’s easy not to be. The kids ate takeout tonight, and the Styrofoam detritus is still scattered about. “I always knew my mom cared about me because she fed me, right?” She looks up from her son’s project. “She put love and time into the meal. But I’m not like that.” Housewifery was for her mother’s generation. Her generation transforms their kitchens into homework outposts. She snips a strip of fabric and hands it to her son. “So this is me,” she says, “doing my gifts of service. Putting in love and time.”

SUZUKI, A METHOD OF
musical instruction first developed in the aftermath of World War II, was designed to teach very young children how to play the violin. At the heart of the method lay a very generous theory, which is that all children are capable of musical accomplishment if given the right tools, techniques, and environment. The Suzuki method requires a high level of commitment from a child. But what makes it truly unusual is that it requires a high level of commitment from parents too. Parents must attend music lessons and pay attention to what’s being taught. They must supervise practice every day. They must immerse their children in a musical environment, playing symphonies in the home and taking them to concerts during their free time.

Today, people use the Suzuki method to teach all kinds of musical instruments, not just the violin. It also serves as a pretty good metaphor for the way middle-class parents approach their children’s activities. Everything they do has to be full-saturation involvement, done side by side. It’s not just violin. It’s making the pinewood derby car for Cub Scouts. It’s playing the role of sports agent during travel-team season. It’s curating summers at six different kinds of camps. It’s playing restaurant when your kid’s bored. It’s doing Kumon drills. It’s working as collaborators on school projects. It’s signing off on assignments, a practice more and more schools seem to require.
Homework is the new family dinner.

But what gets lost in all this?

One wonders if
actual
family dinners, whose numbers have fallen quite a bit since the late seventies, might happen a bit more frequently if they hadn’t been supplanted by study halls at the dining room table, and if that time wouldn’t be more restorative and better spent—the stuff of customs and stories and affectionate memories, the stuff that binds.

Family time isn’t the only thing that suffers under this new arrangement. Couple-time suffers too. If homework is the new family dinner, soccer practice is the new date night (itself a modern invention). Steve Brown said as much, as we were sitting on the sidelines, watching his son play. “Last week, my wife and I were able to do this together,” he told me. “This, uninterrupted, is good mommy-daddy time to have a conversation.” A breeze swept through, fluttering the trees and rippling the grass. He shut his eyes.

And I did see what he meant. The sun was setting, the shade was cool, his handsome kid was playing a glorious game. But there has to be a better venue for mommy-and-daddy time than a soccer game. Parenting pressures have resculpted our priorities so dramatically that we simply forget. In 1975 couples spent, on average, 12.4 hours alone together per week. By 2000 they spent only nine. What happens, as this number shrinks, is that our expectations shrink with it. Couple-time becomes stolen time, snatched in the interstices or piggybacked onto other pursuits.

Homework is the new family dinner.
I was struck by Laura Anne’s language as she described this new reality. She said the evening ritual of guiding her sons through their assignments was her “gift of service.” No doubt it is. But this particular form of service is directed inside the home, rather than toward the community and for the commonweal, and those kinds of volunteer efforts and public involvements have also steadily declined over the last few decades, at least in terms of the number of hours of sweat equity we put into them. Our gifts of service are now more likely to be for the sake of our kids. And so our world becomes smaller, and the internal pressure we feel to parent well, whatever that may mean, only increases: how one raises a child, as Jerome Kagan notes, is now one of the few remaining ways in public life that we can prove our moral worth. In other cultures and in other eras, this could be done by caring for one’s elders, participating in social movements, providing civic leadership, and volunteering. Now, in the United States, child-rearing has largely taken their place. Parenting books have become, literally, our bibles.

It’s understandable why parents go to such elaborate lengths on behalf of their children. But here’s something to think about: while Annette Lareau’s
Unequal Childhoods
makes it clear that middle-class children enjoy far greater success in the world, what the book can’t say is whether concerted cultivation
causes
that success or whether middle-class children would do just as well if they were simply left to their own devices. For all we know, the answer may be the latter.

Back in the late nineties, Ellen Galinsky, the president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, had an inspired idea. Rather than blithely speculating about how children experience their parents’ efforts to balance work and home, she decided to ask them directly. Her organization did a detailed, comprehensive survey of over 1,023 kids, ages eight to eighteen, and in 1999 she published and analyzed the results in
Ask the Children: What America’s Children Really Think About Working Parents.
The data were quite clear: 85 percent of Americans may believe that parents don’t spend enough time with their kids, but just 10 percent of the kids in Galinsky’s survey wanted more time with their mothers, and just 16 percent wanted more time with their dads. A full 34 percent, however, wished their mothers would be “less stressed.”

Maybe dinner should be the new family dinner.

chapter five

adolescence

They don’t tell you, when you become a parent, that the hardest part is way, way down the road.

—Dani Shapiro,
Family History
(2003)

IT’S A WARM EVENING
in Lefferts Gardens, one of those pretty Brooklyn neighborhoods that was still affordable to middle-class New Yorkers before the city’s real estate boom, and six mothers, all interconnected through the usual ties (work, kids, community groups), are clustered around a kitchen table in an old brownstone, discussing their adolescents. Their conversation is lively and somewhat mischievous, but not all that surprising at first. Then Beth, a public school teacher and the youngest of the lot, mentions that her fifteen-year-old, Carl, has lately “been using his intelligence for evil.”

The women in the group all stop talking and look at her.

“Instead of getting good grades, he figures out how to get around the administrator,” she says, referring to the software she’s installed to regulate his computer use. “He’s been on Facebook and not doing his homework. And then I see, like, three inputs for ‘Russian whore.’ ”

Or so I thought she said when I first transcribed the tape. When I followed up with Beth sometime later, she informed me that I’d misheard: It was “
three-input
Russian whore.”

At any rate, Samantha, who also teaches public school, dives in at this moment with the force of a cannonball. “Take the freaking computer, Beth!” she cries. “Take it!”

“He has to use it. They turn things in online.”

“On yours, then,” Samantha answers. “Take it, Beth! Take it!”

“Put a desktop in the kitchen,” suggests Deirdre, the hostess of the evening. She and Beth work in the same building.

“That’s what we did,” says Beth. “We put it in the living room.” She goes on to explain that her son’s buzzing around for porn isn’t what’s bothering her per se (though she’s not thrilled with this
particular
porn, which she thinks is disfiguring his ideas about sex). What’s really bothering her is that he’s spending far too much time online generally, and he’s willfully disobeying her by doing so, and his grades are sliding.

Samantha is not yet appeased. “But if he flunks out of school, Beth, what’s going to happen?”

“He’s not going to flunk out. He only got one D.” Then she pauses and considers. “Though when I called his therapist and said, ‘I found hours worth of porn on his computer,’ the therapist had no idea. So he wasn’t talking about that.”

“Yeah, but I’ve had that too,” says Gayle, a substitute teacher, quite suddenly. She has, until now, said little. All heads swing her way. “Mae”—her daughter and the best friend of Samantha’s oldest, Calliope—“was in therapy and spent a year’s worth of my money not talking to the therapist about the real issue, which is that she was cutting herself. Instead, what they talked about was how much she hated violin.”

And so the stories slowly seep out. Kate, who first met Deirdre at the local park when their firstborns were toddlers, says her oldest, Nina, did something this summer that created so much tension between her and her husband that she couldn’t even bring herself to discuss it. (I would later learn that it involved a minor shoplifting incident.) While at college earlier that year, Nina had also made the mistake of forwarding a paper to her professor that still contained visible traces of proposed edits by her father.

At this point, Samantha finally gives in. She puts her elbows on the table, bows her head, and rests her brow in her hands. “Everyone’s in the same club,” she says. “Everyone has the same stories.” She looks up at the group. “I mean, please. I have
police
stories.”

Police stories?
All along, as Samantha’s friends have been speaking, I’ve been under the impression that she’s been spared these misadventures and is even a tad scandalized by them. But it turns out to be quite the opposite. She’s been identifying with everyone’s troubles from the start.

whose transition is it?

When prospective mothers and fathers imagine the joys of parenthood, they seldom imagine the adolescent years. Adolescence is the part of parenting that is famously unfun, the stretch of childhood that Shakespeare dismisses as useless save for “getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting,” and that Nora Ephron opined can only be survived by acquiring a dog (“so that someone in the house is happy to see you”). Gone are the first smiles, warm nuzzles, and cheerful games of catch. They’ve been replaced by 5:00
A.M
. hockey practices, renewed adventures in trigonometry (secant, cosecant,
what the
—?), and middle-of-the-night requests for rides home. And these are the hardships generated by the
good
adolescents.

But here’s the truth of the matter. The children of those women at Deirdre’s table? Also the good adolescents. Almost all attend either very good universities or competitive New York City public high schools (one child attends a private high school, also good); all have well-developed interests and talents outside of school. All, in person, come across as self-confident, thoughtful, and considerate.

Yet their parents are still going half-mad. Which raises an important question: Is it possible that adults experience adolescence differently from children? That the category, in fact, might be more useful for
parents
than the children it attempts to describe?

Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University and quite possibly the country’s foremost authority on adolescence today, thinks there’s a strong case to be made for this idea. “It doesn’t seem to me like adolescence is a difficult time for the kids,” he tells me. “Most of them seem to be going through life in a very pleasant haze. It’s when I talk to the
parents
that I notice something. If you look at the narrative, it’s ‘my teenager who’s driving
me
crazy.’ ”

In the 2014 edition of his best-known textbook,
Adolescence,
Steinberg debunks the myth of the querulous teen with even more vigor. “The hormonal changes of puberty,” he writes, “have only a modest direct effect on adolescent behavior; rebellion during adolescence is atypical, not normal; and few adolescents experience a tumultuous identity crisis.”

For parents, however, the picture appears to be a good deal more complicated. In 1994, Steinberg published
Crossing Paths,
one of the few book-length accounts of how parents weather the transition of their firstborns into puberty, based on a longitudinal study he conducted of over two hundred families. Forty percent of his sample suffered a decline in mental health once their first child entered adolescence—nearly one-half of the mothers and one-third of the fathers. Respondents reported that they experienced feelings of rejection and low self-worth; that their sex lives declined; and that they suffered increases in physical symptoms of distress, including headaches, insomnia, and lousy stomachs. It may be tempting to dismiss these findings as by-products of midlife rather than the presence of teenagers in the house. But Steinberg’s results don’t seem to suggest it. “We were much better able to predict what an adult was going through psychologically,” he writes, “by looking at his or her child’s development than by knowing the adult’s age.”

Which is to say that a mother of forty-three and a mother of fifty-three have far more in common, psychologically speaking, if they both have fourteen-year-olds than two moms of the same age with kids who are seven and fourteen. And the mothers of the adolescents, according to Steinberg’s research, are much more likely to be experiencing distress.

Steinberg has a theory about why this is. Adolescents, in his view, are the human equivalent of salt, intensifying whatever mix they’re in. They exacerbate conflicts already in progress, especially those at work or in the marriage, sometimes unmasking problems parents hadn’t recognized or consciously acknowledged for years. Steinberg might even go so far as to say that the so-called crises of midlife would be a good deal less troublesome if adolescents weren’t around. But teenagers have an uncanny way of throwing problems, whatever they are, into high relief.

All children do this, of course, to some degree. The question is, why do adolescents have this effect more than, say, children of seven? For that, a historical explanation is useful, and it would run something like this: adolescence, more than any other phase of child-rearing, is when the paradoxes of modern childhood assert themselves most vividly. It is a particularly problematic time for a child to be, as Viviana Zelizer would say, useless.

Adolescence is a modern idea. It was “discovered” by Stanley Hall, the psychologist and educator, in 1904, twenty-eight years
after
Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone. This is not to say that adolescence didn’t exist before 1904, and that it isn’t a physiologically distinct phenomenon, accompanied by discernible biological changes. It most certainly is, and I’ll be talking about them in this chapter. But adolescence is a cultural and economic phenomenon too, born of a particular moment in time. It is not an accident that Hall “discovered” adolescence at the exact moment when the nation was becoming sentimental about its young, extending them special protections and keeping them home rather than sending them off to work in the expanding cities and factories. For the first time, parents found themselves protecting and supporting much older children. And their conclusion, after staring at those children at close range during the teen years, was that they had to be going through a terrible period of “storm and stress,” as Hall put it. How else could parents explain the chaos they were witnessing?

Yet it could simply be that the advent of the modern childhood—the protected childhood—is especially problematic for older children. Parents today have no choice, of course, but to shelter their children for long stretches of time. Kids are no longer allowed to drop out of school in order to work, and the world now requires more and more schooling to succeed. What’s more, parents feel a great
need
to protect their children. Many, especially in the middle class, have waited forever to have them. They fear for their physical safety and economic security. They’ve been told—by experts, by other parents, by a variety of media—that they ought to spend untold hours nurturing them. Nurturing has become their way of life.

But as children get older, they crave independence, agency, a sense of their own purpose. Keeping them sheltered and regimented for so long, while they’re biologically evolving into adults and striving to become who they’re meant to become, can have some pretty strange and exhausting consequences. The contemporary home becomes a place of perpetual liminal tension, with everyone trying to work out whether adolescents are adults or kids. Sometimes the husband thinks the answer is one thing while the wife thinks the answer is the other; sometimes the parents agree but the child does not. But whatever the answer—and it is usually not obvious—the question generates stress.

I SAID IN THE
introduction that this is a book about the effects of children on parents. During adolescence, those effects can be especially intense, exposing us in our most vulnerable and existential states. It’s not an accident that most parenting blogs are written by mothers and fathers of small children. Part of it, yes, is that these parents are responding to the novelty of their situation. But part of it, too, is that the challenges they’re writing about are usually so generic that they’re betraying no confidences in revealing them. It does not violate your children’s privacy to say they detest peas, and it’s not a particularly poor reflection on your parenting either. Whereas writing about adolescents is different. They’re incipient adults, with idiosyncratic habits and intricate vulnerabilities; they’re unlikely to welcome daily blog posts from their mothers and fathers about their lives. Their parents are no longer inclined to share these stories, either, at least not publicly. The fears that parents harbor are no longer about what foods to feed their children, or what activities they should do. They’re about whether their children are moral, and whether they’re productive, and whether they’re comfortable and sensible and capable of fending for themselves.

Nevertheless, there’s clearly a pent-up desire to talk about this stage. When Steinberg first began working on
Crossing Paths
(which he ultimately wrote with the assistance of his wife, Wendy)
,
he identified 270 families who met his requirements. In the end, 75 percent of them agreed to participate. In most social science projects, he notes, the number of willing participants is closer to 30 percent. “We were astounded by the enthusiastic response,” he writes in his introduction, “and soon found out the reason why: Parents of this age group are extremely perplexed by the changes they see in their families and are interested in why this period of their lives is so disturbing.”

Because this period can be so complicated, I use only first names—and not real ones, but ones supplied by the subjects themselves—in this chapter. It’s the only place in the book where I do so. But it seems necessary. In adolescence, children’s lives become difficult and messy; there’s too much potential harm and not much point in revealing their identities, or that of their parents.

the useless parent

Though she’s wearing her workout clothes, you can still make out the hippie that Samantha once was—she’s got a gorgeous gray mane of hair, which I hadn’t fully noticed at Deirdre’s house but can now see in all its glory because she’s let it loose from her ponytail following her run. We’re sitting in her kitchen in Ditmas Park, one of those miraculous Brooklyn neighborhoods that continually surprises out-of-towners, with its grand stand-alone houses and wrap-around lawns and proper driveways for that rare New York commodity, the family car. Samantha and her husband, both teachers in the New York City public school system (Bruce is also a musician), had the good sense to buy a place here nineteen years ago, when the getting was still cheap by city standards ($234,500) and the neighborhood a bit more diverse. Samantha is African American. Bruce is “the whitest guy ever,” according to Calliope, their daughter. Calliope is a fierce beauty, now twenty years old and home for the summer, going into her third year at one of the most competitive colleges in the United States. She joins us at the kitchen table.