All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (33 page)

32  
“setting
aside
a
chunk
of
time
”
Benjamin Spock,
Dr. Spock Talks with Mothers
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 121, quoted in Ann Hulbert,
Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children
(New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 353.

32  
“the
most
negative
emotion
I
experienced”
Daniel Gilbert, interview with the author, March 22, 2011.

33  
apart
from
everyday
life
Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow,
58, 60, 158–59.

33  
“Let
me
tell
you
a
couple
of
things”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, interview with the author, July 25, 2011.

35  
roughly
one-quarter
of
employed
men
and
women
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work at Home and in the Workplace, 2010,” TED: The Editor’s Desk (blog), June 24, 2011, available at: http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110624.htm.

36  
rats
seeking
pellets
For a modern comparison of the Internet and Skinner boxes, see Sam Anderson, “In Defense of Distraction,”
New York Magazine
(May 17, 2009), available online at http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/; also Tom Stafford, “Why email is addictive (and what to do about it),” MindHacks (blog), available online at http://mindhacks.com/2006/09/19/why-email-is-addictive-and-what-to-do-about-it/. For a thorough explanation of Skinner boxes, see, generally, B. F. Skinner, “The Experimental Analysis of Behavior,”
American Scientist
45, no. 4 (1957): 343–71.

37  
“Email
apnea”
Linda Stone, communication with the author, April 11, 2013.

37  
“work
from
home
all the time
” Dalton Conley,
Elsewhere, U.S.A.
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 13, 29.

37  
we
don’t
process
information
as
thoroughly
Mary Czerwinski, interview with the author, June 8, 2011.

38  
“There’s
a
warm-up
period”
David E. Meyer, interview with the author, June 10, 2011.

38  
“This is over and above the stuff”
Ibid.

41  
you
believe
that
women
should
stop
getting
in
their
own
way
Sheryl Sandberg,
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
(New York: Knopf, 2013).

41  
much-discussed
story
about
work-life
balance
Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,”
The Atlantic
(July–August 2012).

42  
too
many
children
running
around
Andrew J. Cherlin,
The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today
(New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 44.

42  
Women
gained
a
bit
more
control
over
their
lives
Stephanie Coontz,
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
(New York: Basic Books, 1992).

42  
median
age
of
women
at
first
marriage
fell
to
twenty
US Census Bureau, “Figures,” at “American Community Survey Data on Marriage and Divorce,” available at: http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/marriage/data/acs (accessed April 22, 2013).

42  
birth
rates
increased
Coontz,
The Way We Never Were,
24.

42  
women
started
dropping
out
of
college
Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 243.

42  
had evened out again
Ibid.

43  
“Regardless
of
their
educational
level”
Cherlin,
The Marriage-Go-Round,
188.

43  
“get un-married and be free”
Claire Dederer,
Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 283.

43  
Americans
have
come
to
define
liberty
Coontz,
The Way We Never Were,
51.

44  
“learn
to
live
somewhere”
Phillips,
Missing Out,
xi.

chapter two

45  
“My
wife’s
anger
toward
me”
Barack H. Obama,
The Audacity of Hope
(New York: Vintage reprint edition, 2008), 531.

47  
83
percent
of
all
new
mothers
LeMasters, “Parenthood as Crisis,” 353.

47  
90
percent
of
them
experienced
Brian D. Doss et al., “The Effect of the Transition to Parenthood on Relationship Quality: An Eight-Year Prospective Study,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
96, no. 3 (2009): 601–19.

47  
correlation
between
children
and
marital
satisfaction
J. M. Twenge, W. K. Campbell, and C. A. Foster, “Parenthood and Marital Satisfaction: A Meta-analytic Review,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
65, no. 3 (2003): 574–83.

48  
indicated
that
their
marriage
was “in
some
distress”
Carolyn Cowan and Philip A. Cowan,
When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples
(New York: Basic Books, 1992), 109.

48  
more
likely
to
be
happy
raising
children
as part of
a
couple
W. Bradford Wilcox, ed., “The State of Our Unions: Marriage in America 2011,” National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, available at: http://www.stateofourunions.org/2011/index.php (accessed April 19, 2013).

48  
marital
satisfaction
curve
bends
noticeably
See, for example, Thomas N. Bradbury, Frank D. Fincham, and Steven R. H. Beach, “Research on the Nature and Determinants of Marital Satisfaction: A Decade in Review,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
62 (November 2000): 964–80; Daniel Gilbert,
Stumbling on Happiness
(New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 243 (chart).

48  
“By
the
time
our
children
were
in
elementary
school”
Cowan and Cowan,
When Partners Become Parents,
2.

49  
92 percent of their sample couples
Ibid., 107.

49  
lesbian
couples
also
showed
increases
in
conflict
Abbie E. Goldberg and Aline Sayer, “Lesbian Couples’ Relationship Quality Across the Transition to Parenthood,”
Journal of Marriage and Family
68, no. 1 (2006): 87–100.

49  
In
2009
an
elegantly
designed
study
Lauren M. Papp, E. Mark Cummings, and Marcie C. Goeke-Morey, “For Richer, for Poorer: Money as a Topic of Conflict in the Home,”
Family Relations
58 (2009): 91–103.

49  
in
another
study,
the
same
researchers
Lauren M. Papp, E. Mark Cummings, and Marcie C. Goeke-Morey, “Marital Conflicts in the Home When Children Are Present,”
Developmental Psychology
38, no. 5 (2002): 774–83.

49  
“When
parents
are
really
angry”
E. Mark Cummings, interview with the author, January 21, 2011.

53  
worked
a
full
month
extra
Arlie Russell Hochschild,
The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home
(New York: Penguin, 2003), 4.

53  
women
are
doing
far
less
housework
Suzanne M. Bianchi, “Family Change and Time Allocation in American Families,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
638, no. 1 (2011): 21–44.

53  
updated
introduction
to
her
book
Hochschild,
The Second Shift,
xxvi.

53  
men’s
economic
fortunes
have
fallen
Hanna Rosin,
The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
(New York: Penguin, 2012).

53  
nearly
one-third
of
all
married
women
Paul R. Amato et al.,
Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 150.

53  
men
and
women
work
roughly
the
same
number
of
hours
Rachel Krantz-Kent, “Measuring Time Spent in Unpaid Household Work: Results from the American Time Use Survey,”
Monthly Labor Review
132, no. 7 (2009): 46–59.

53  
2011
cover
story
called “Chore
Wars”
Ruth D. Konigsberg, “Chore Wars,”
Time,
August 8, 2011, 44.

54  
“
I
do
the
upstairs,
Evan
does
the
downstairs”
Hochschild,
The Second Shift,
46.

54  
“When couples struggle”
Ibid., 19.

54  
“The deeper problem such women face”
Ibid., 273.

54  
“
household
division
of
labor
being
a
key
source”
Amato et al.,
Alone Together,
153–54, 156.

54  
perhaps
the
most
intriguing
tidbit
Darby Saxbe and Rena L. Repetti, “For Better or Worse? Coregulation of Couples’ Cortisol Levels and Mood States,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
98, no. 1 (2010): 92–103.

55  
mothers of children under six still work five hours more per week
Konigsberg, “Chore Wars,” 48.

55  
women
were
three
times
more
likely
than
men
Sarah A. Burgard, “The Needs of Others: Gender and Sleep Interruptions for Caregiving,”
Social Forces
89, no. 4 (2011): 1189–1215.

55  
I
once
sat
on
a
panel
with
Adam
Mansbach
Brooklyn Book Festival, “Politically Incorrect Parenting,” panel discussion, September 18, 2011.

56  
“satisfaction
with
the
division
of
the
child-care
tasks”
Cowan and Cowan,
When Partners Become Parents,
142.

56  
women . . . still devote nearly twice as much time
Bianchi, “Family Change,” 27, 29.

56  
a
father
in
a
room
by
himself
Belinda Campos et al., “Opportunity for Interaction? A Naturalistic Observation Study of Dual-Earner Families After Work and School,”
Journal of Family Psychology
23, no. 6 (2009): 798–807.

57  
if
a
married
mother
believes
that
child
care
is
unfairly
divided
Amato et al.,
Alone Together,
170. Additionally, in 2012 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) determined that women in the United States work twenty-one minutes more per day than men, which is exactly on a par with the worldwide average. Catherine Rampell, “In Most Rich Countries, Women Work More Than Men,” Economix (blog),
New York Times,
December 19, 2012, available at: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/in-most-rich-countries-women-work-more-than-men.