‘Children strain our everyday lives…but also deepen them.’
This quotation, as much as the full title of the book, perfectly encapsulates the content of ‘All Joy and No Fun: the Paradox of Modern Parenthood’. I started reading the opening pages and was immediately hooked (I love reading about research in an accessible way); I took it home and quickly confirmed that the rest of the book was equally fascinating.
What’s it about?
Rather than taking the well worn path of examining the effects of parents on their children, Senior seeks to conceptualise the impact of children on their parents. Specifically, the impact on parents’ marital satisfaction, jobs, friends, hobbies and sense of self. She considers how the nature of parenting has progressed over the last fifty years, particularly how it has shifted since ‘parenting’ emerged as a verb in the seventies, as a separate occupation and activity from ‘housewife’ or ‘mother’, and how this has made modern parenthood so incredibly complicated to navigate.
Chapters take a loosely chronological approach, exploring the impact of babies, toddlers, children and adolescents on their parents, then considering the nature of the joy children engender, despite the absence of fun encountered in most of the above stages! Senior considers the difference qualitatively between happiness (seen as surface level and ephemeral) and joy (seen as connected to deeper needs) and ultimately reminds readers of the value of embracing duty, stating that:
‘Those who start with Lanchester’s very simply idea – that they will love and they will sacrifice – are probably at a great advantage. Finding pleasure in the idea of duty alone goes a long way.’
Ultimately, Senior posits that we do not care for our children because we love them, but come to love our children because we care for them, and that there’s ‘something deeply satisfying’ about striving to meet the needs of someone so dependent on us that it simplifies our hectic lives.
What’s it like?
From the opening pages, I was cheerfully nodding along to Senior’s discoveries. Yes, having very young children feels like that. Oh, that makes so much sense, even though I never thought of it like that. Early on Senior reflects on the sheer scale of choice and freedom that can almost overwhelm members of the Western world:
‘[We developed] a culture abundant in choice, with middle-class American men and women at liberty to chart the course of their lives in all sorts of ways that historically had been unthinkable.’
Not only do we have the freedom to choose our lives, we are constantly encouraged to keep choosing, keep striving, and prioritise our personal wants and ambitions in ways that, even two generations ago, were impossible. Senior notes that this focus on autonomy makes the advent of children a more challenging transition than was historically the case; when we have been programmed by society to seek our dreams and focus on our happiness (through consumerism, self care ideology and through fulfilling careers), it is a shocking imposition on our sense of self to suddenly be solely or jointly responsible for a baby who could not care less about your ambitions or even your most basic needs.
Throughout each chapter Senior makes detailed references to research into parent-children relationships and also makes extensive use of anecdotes from parents she has interviewed, giving ‘All Joy and No Fun’ a richness of content and ideas that makes it a genuinely interesting read.
Final thoughts
I found myself agreeing with the quotation on the cover: ‘so real that I fear perhaps Jennifer Senior has been spying inside my house…’ So much of what Senior has to say about the effects children have on their parents is unsurprising (surely we all know by now that having a baby to fix cracks in a marriage is a disastrous plan, as having a small baby is practically a recipe for marital disharmony), but worth saying in order to locate the reasons that this is the case.
The exploration of how the concept of ‘parenting’ and the notion of ‘childhood’ has developed and shifted over the last fifty years is really interesting and validating. My abridged version:Â Why does this parenting malarkey sometimes feel so impossible? Because the expectations have never been so high yet so unclear.
Recommended for an insight into why people who have children still recommend them – genuinely and with a straight face – to adults who don’t have them yet! (Hint: it’s to do with the separation between our ‘experiencing’ selves and our ‘remembering’ selves.)