Kay's Reviews > All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

Well-reported, well-researched, and intellectually curious about the philosophy parenthood, this book is basically catnip for me.

Jen Senior applies adept reading of studies about childhood and parenthood (and its effects on marriage) and synthesizes it all with some anecdotal evidence from real couples, mostly in Minnesota. The reason for this, I suspect, is because Minnesota is a state with a firm commitment to early childhood education. She meets parents at ECFE, a program that I remember attending when I was a kid.

But she doesn't do this to dispense advice or offer parents a guidebook. Instead what she does is try to get at a very difficult thing about entering parenthood: Why do we do it even though it sometimes makes us miserable?

The answers are not easy. She looks at many stages of childhood — from the challenging nature of toddlerhood to the emotional distress of raising teenagers — and how it affects parents as humans. This shouldn't be revelatory. In many ways, it is not. But when you look at the heap of books for parents, it is certainly unusual.

I'm a new parent, and I often find myself in the complicated identity changes that come with the role. I am still the same person I was, but this experience has totally changed me. I'm also forced to re-evaluate all those things I thought I would "never" do on a near-daily basis. I'm looking at you, chapter four, which details the frenzied pace at which parents shove their children into enrichment programs and after-school activities.

Senior's book, in many ways, takes that identity crisis seriously. She doesn't offer solutions, but she does offer diagnosis. She points to the fact that, even though women are doing less housework, they are still doing more parenting.

It's also not just about parenting; it's about the placement of identity. Terrifyingly, she points to one study that shows more marriages are doomed when there's a greater difference in how highly the two partners place parenthood in their ranking of identities (women almost always rank motherhood higher than men rank fatherhood).

All this is to say that this book, though it certainly isn't comprehensive — she's open from the get-go that this book applies to middle class, mostly partnered parents — it does a great job of helping me think in a rational ways about some of the hard parts of parenting. The last chapter, touchingly, talks about the ways in which children bring true meaning to our lives in a way that isn't always happy, but it is joyful. Spoiler, I guess.

Anyway, I am perhaps biased because I am the target audience for this book, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.