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Thousands of books have examined the effects of parents on their children. In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior now asks: what are the effects of children on their parents?In All Joy and No Fun, award-winning journalist Jennifer Senior tries to tackle this question, isolating and analyzing the many ways in which children reshape their parents'''' lives, whether it''''s their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half century have radically altered the roles of today''''s mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear.
[...]... that she found it dull to play “My Little Pony” when her daughter was small “That was the most negative emotion I experienced as a father,” recalls Gilbert “Boredom Throwing the ball back and forth and back and forth and back and forth The endless repetition, the can-you-do-it-again, the can-you-readthe-same-story-one-more-time There were times I just thought, Give me a gun.” In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi... husband comes home, there’s nothing he has to do But perhaps the hardest and most elusive quantity for a time-use survey to measure is the psychic energy that mothers pour into parenting the internal soundtrack of anxieties that hums in their heads all day long, whether they’re with their children or not That’s one of Mattingly and Sayer’s more subtle hypotheses: perhaps mothers feel rushed because the. .. the 1970s, allowing women the economic freedom to leave marriages that made them unhappy The culmination of all these developments was 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 And the liberalization of the 1970s was nothing compared to today’s emphasis on self-realization... combined their paid and unpaid labor, employed women of the 1960s and ’70s worked a full month extra—of twenty-four-hour days—over the course of a year That’s not true today Women are doing far less housework than they used to, and men are doing more; fathers also do more child care; and mothers put more hours into the workforce, in greater numbers (In 2010, 50 percent of mothers of three- to five-year-olds... that life is long and teeming with potato chips They want them now, because now is where they live Yet somehow mothers and fathers believe that if only they could convey the logic of their decisions, their young children would understand it That’s what their adult brains thrived on for all those years before their children came along: rational chitchat, in which motives were elucidated and careful analyses... us all into the car I mean, maybe my mom was just a social person, but— No, it was the same in my house: every Sunday we’d load in the station wagon and just go visit someone And now you feel like you’re intruding, because everyone’s so busy ANGELA: SARA: Without the pop-in, without the vibrant presence of neighbors, without life in the cul-de-sacs and the streets, the pressure reverts back to the. .. by the idea of its own potential ago, most people didn’t wake up in the morning and fret about whether or not they were living their lives to the fullest Freedom has always been built into the American experiment, of course, but the freedom to take off and go rock-climbing for the afternoon, or to study engineering, or even to sneak in ten minutes for ourselves in the morning to read the paper—these... be referring to it from now on) is immensely popular and unique to the state, which is the reason I’ve come here For a sliding-scale fee and in some cases, no fee at all any parent of a child who’s not yet in kindergarten can attend a weekly class And they do, in great numbers: in 2010, nearly 90,000 moms and dads signed up for one The themes of the classes vary, but what they all have in common is an... part-time employee Just over half of the women had temporarily given up their jobs to care full-time for their infants and toddlers; the others worked part-time, trying to balance work and home, which in almost every retelling was like trying to stand on top of a bowling ball At twenty-nine, Angie, whom you met in the introduction, was one of the youngest women in the group She was also one of the. .. back and a crying one-year-old, and she had little luck soothing either one The one-year-old in question, Xavier (“Zay”), is in her arms as she opens the door (“he’d cry if I put him down”), and Eli, her three-year-old, is eating dinosaur oatmeal on the back deck We walk outside to join him He’s a serious young man, thoughtful and focused and sporting an awfully spiffy crew cut Angie rubs his head and . father,” recalls Gilbert. “Boredom. Throwing the ball back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The endless repetition, the can-you-do-it-again, the can-you-read- the- same-story-one-more-time is long and teeming with potato chips. They want them now, because now is where they live. Yet somehow mothers and fathers believe that if only they could convey the logic of their decisions, their. Rusty contents dedication introduction one - autonomy two - marriage three - simple gifts four - concerted cultivation five - adolescence six - joy acknowledgments notes index about the author copyright about the publisher introduction THERE’S