All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (32 page)

notes

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introduction

  4  
“fragile
and
mysterious”
Alice S. Rossi, “Transition to Parenthood,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
30, no. 1 (1968): 35.

  4  
What was the effect of parenthood on
adults?
Ibid., 26.

  4  
“We
knew
where
babies
came
from”
E. E. LeMasters, “Parenthood as Crisis,”
Marriage and Family Living
19, no. 4 (1957): 352–55, 353.

  4  
“Loss
of
sleep”
Ibid., 353–54.

  5  
economic pressure, less sex, and “general disenchantment”
Ibid., 354.

  5  
another
landmark
paper
Norval D. Glenn, “Psychological Well-being in the Postparental Stage: Some Evidence from National Surveys,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
37, no. 1 (1975): 105–10.

  5  
children
tended
to
negate
its
effects
Paul D. Cleary and David Mechanic, “Sex Differences in Psychological Distress Among Married People,”
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
24 (1983): 111–21; Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, “Parenthood and Psychological Well-being,”
Annual Review of Sociology
13 (1983): 237–57.

  5  
Throughout
the
next
two
decades
Recent papers showing this phenomenon include: David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, “International Happiness: A New View on the Measure of Performance,”
Academy of Management Perspectives
25, no. 1 (2011): 6–22; Robin W. Simon, “The Joys of Parenthood Reconsidered,”
Contexts
7, no. 2 (2008): 40–45; Kei M. Nomaguchi and Melissa A. Milkie, “Costs and Rewards of Children: The Effects of Becoming a Parent on Adults’ Lives,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
65 (May 2003): 356–74.

  5  
ranked
sixteenth
out
of
nineteen
Daniel Kahneman et al., “Toward National Well-being Accounts,”
American Economic Review
94, no. 2 (2004): 432.

  5  
In
an
ongoing
study
Killingsworth uses an iPhone app to track people’s emotions as they go about their daily lives. For more details about his project, see http://www.trackyourhappiness.org; to see published material derived from this data set, see Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,”
Science
330, no. 6006 (November 2010): 932.

  5  
“
I
nteracting
with
your
friends
is
better”
Daniel A. Killingsworth, interview with the author, February 6, 2013.

  6  
more
highs
as
well
as
more
lows
Arthur Stone, Distinguished Professor, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Science, Stony Brook University, communication with the author, May 30, 2013.

  6  
greater
feelings
of
meaning
and
reward
The most comprehensive and forward-thinking of these studies is by Debra Umberson and Walter Gove, “Parenthood and Psychological Well-being: Theory, Measurement, and Stage in the Family Life Course,”
Journal of Family
Issues 10, no. 4 (1989): 440–62.

  6  
“high-cost/high-reward
activity”
William Doherty, interview with the author, January 26, 2011.

  6  
as
much
as
being
legally
drunk
Michael H. Bonnet, interview with the author, November 17, 2011.

  7  
adults
often
view
children
as
one
of
life’s
crowning
achievements
See, for example, Andrew J. Cherlin,
The Marriage Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today
(New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 139.

  7  
between
the
ages
of
twenty-five
and
twenty-nine
US Department of Commerce and Office of Management and Budget,
Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-being
(March 2011), 10.

  7  
resulted
from
assisted
reproductive
technology
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Assisted Reproductive Technology,” available at: http://www.cdc.gov/art/ (accessed April 3, 2013); for total number of live births, see Brady E. Hamilton, Joyce A. Martin, and Stephanie J. Ventura, “Births: Preliminary Data for 2010,”
National Vital Statistics Reports
60, no. 2 (2011): 1.

  8  
“some
at
inauspicious
times”
Jerome Kagan, “Our Babies, Our Selves,”
The New Republic
(September 5, 1994): 42.

  8  
34
percent
of
women
Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Women in the Labor Force: A Databook,
report 1034 (December 2011), 18–19.

  9  
male
comic,
Louis
C.K.
“Louis C.K. on Father’s Day,” June 20, 2010, available at: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6600481n (accessed April 4, 2013).

10  
“economically
worthless
but
emotionally
priceless”
Viviana Zelizer,
Pricing the Priceless Child
(New York: Basic Books, 1985), 14.

10  
every
three
minutes
Cheryl Minton, Jerome Kagan, and Janet A. Levine, “Maternal Control and Obedience in the Two-Year-Old,”
Child Development
42, no. 6 (1971): 1880, 1885.

11  
when
teenagers
fight
most
intensely
with
their
parents
Brett Laursen, Katherine C. Coy, and W. Andrew Collins, “Reconsidering Changes in Parent-Child Conflict Across Adolescence: A Meta-analysis,”
Child Development
69, no. 3 (1998): 817–32.

11  
the
most
work-life
conflict
Kerstin Aumann, Ellen Galinsky, and Kenneth Matos, “The New Male Mystique,” in Families and Work Institute (FWI),
National Study of the Changing Workforce
(New York: FWI, 2008), 2.

12  
perhaps
most
recently
Judith Warner,
Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 20.

chapter one

15  
“I
held
the
baby
up
to
the
light”
Melvin Konner,
The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit
(New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 297.

16  
Minnesota’s
Early
Childhood
Family
Education
program
Mary Owen, Minnesota Department of Education, communication with the author, April 9, 2013.

17  
“I
have
not
been
alone
in
the
bathroom
since
October”
Erma Bombeck,
Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 16.

18  
“human
happiness
is
realizable
on
Earth”
John M. Roberts, “Don’t Knock This Century. It Is Ending Well,”
The Independent,
November 20, 1999.

18  
“Our
lives
become
an
elegy”
Adam Phillips,
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), xiii.

19  
30.3
years
old
Skip Burzumato, Assistant Director, National Marriage Project, communication with the author, March 27, 2013. See also Kay Hymowitz et al., “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America,” The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, 2013, 8, available at: http://nationalmarriageproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/KnotYet -FinalForWeb.pdf.

19  
“have their first child more than two years after marrying”
Hymowitz et al., “Knot Yet.”

21  
the
population
seems
to
divide
roughly
in
thirds
David Dinges, interview with the author, November 18, 2011.

21  
who’d
had
six
hours
of
sleep
or
less
Daniel Kahneman et al., “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,”
Science
306, no. 5702 (2004): 1778.

22   “
worth
a
$60,000
raise”
Ibid., 1779; Norbert Schwarz, Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan, communication with the author, September 15, 2011.

22  
parents
of
children
two
months
old
and
younger
National Sleep Foundation, “2004 Sleep in America Poll,” March 1, 2004, available at: http://www.sleepfoundation.org/sites/default/files/FINAL%20SOF%202004.pdf (accessed May 6, 2013).

22  
parents
of
newborns
average
the
same
amount
of
sleep
Hawley E. Montgomery-Downs et al., “Normative Longitudinal Maternal Sleep: The First Four Postpartum Months,”
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology
203, no. 5 (2010): 465e.1–7.

22  
“the
effects
of
sleeping
for
four
hours
every
night”
Michael H. Bonnet, interview with the author, November 17, 2011.

23  
“the
more
willpower
people
expended”
Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney,
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
(New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 3, 33.

23  
fighting off the urge to sleep
Ibid.

24  
“Babies
may
be
sweet”
Adam Phillips,
Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 66.

25  
“The modern child”
Ibid., 78.

25  
“Children would be very surprised”
Ibid., 79.

25  
“One
of
the
most
difficult
things”
Adam Phillips,
On Balance
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 33.

26  
distinction
between
a
lantern
and
a
spotlight
Alison Gopnik,
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 129.

26  
“Anyone who tries to persuade a three-year-old
Ibid., 13.

27  
“Everybody
would
like
to
be
in
the
present
”
Daniel Gilbert, interview with the author, March 22, 2011.

30  
the
work
of
the
Hungarian
psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
, 1st paperback ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991). All subsequent citations refer to this edition.

31  
“goal-oriented and bounded by rules”
Ibid., 49.

31  
“rules that require the learning of skills”
Ibid., 72.

31  
“This
expansive
lantern
consciousness”
Gopnik,
The Philosophical Baby,
129.

31  
“at
the
boundary
between
boredom
and
anxiety”
Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow,
52.

32  
“To
the
extent
that
we
are
not
maximally
happy”
Daniel Gilbert, interview with the author, March 22, 2011.