What There's Time For

7 Ways to Be a Happier Parent, Starting Right Now, for FREE!

Finally, the happy finale to our week pondering the elusive happy parent!  These are my best ideas - chime in at the comments with yours!

1.  Sing!  Or at least put on some good music.  Singing pulled me through colic with my first child (it in no way made him stop crying, but it gave me something other than the crying to focus on).  These days, when the melting hour hits at 5PM, things always go better for at least a few minutes if I can remember to put on some music and do a silly dance for the kids.

2.  Trick your brain.  When I'm in a terrible mood for the bedtime routine, I take a second to transport myself twenty years in the future and imagine what I would give to hold my little three-year-old boy in my lap just one more time.  Changes my whole attitude instantly.

3.  Declutter.  Smooth out your race through the day by throwing out the sippy cup that always leaks or the toy that takes up too much space and no one plays with or the socks that haven't had mates since last summer.  Reduce ruthlessly - I'm a much happier parent since deciding we only need three sippy cups per kid.

4.  Join something.  It will give you places to go and people to talk to.  Joining my local MOMS Club when my first child was a year old was the beginning of breaking my stay-at-home isolation.  I should have done it sooner!  Ditto for StrollerStrides, which gave me some much-needed exercise, too (it's not free, though).  I've also heard good things about MOPS.

5.  Be imperfect!  Don't compare yourself to the magazines (heck, don't even read them).  Don't compare yourself to the mommy blogosphere (but please keep reading!).  Don't even compare yourself to other moms you know.  No one does it ALL.  Admire others, but don't lose sight of the admirable things about you.  (Read Marta Dansie's hilarious piece on blogging&jealousy for an inspiring laugh.)

6.  Practice gratitude.  On a bad day, try GRRRattitude.

7.  Reduce the daily stress.  Make basic household tasks habitual so that you never have to check if the dishwasher's been unloaded or worry there isn't any clean underwear or wonder at 6 o'clock what you could possibly serve for dinner.  Know how long it takes to get out the door and plan for it (I have a get-out-the-door alarm on my phone set for school mornings, which I know I can hit "snooze" on three times while I'm getting everybody ready).  Know how long it takes to get from assembling dinner to kids-in-bed (turns out it takes me 2 hours - I have a "start evening" alarm set on my phone for that now, too).  Forgive yourself when you don't follow through.  Forgive your spouse and children when they don't follow through.  Try again tomorrow.

Have a great weekend, everybody!  (Oh, man, I was going to put Enjoy the weekends on the list.  Oh, well.)  Next week - guess who's walking?

Why parents should be thrilled and yet somehow aren't

So, today I'm going to ponder reasons that being a parent now might be a sharper blow to your near-term happiness/pleasure than it maybe used to be.  But Mr. SickPants woke up at 5:30 this morning to throw up and so my Thursday (Thursdays are the long day at school) is not going to go as planned.  C'est la vie!

Point being, this post might feel more like a brainstorming session than a coordinated essay.

First of all, how could we modern parents be anything but thrilled?  For my part (and I speak for many, though clearly not all), most of the fervent prayers of parents throughout the ages have already been answered, almost magically.  I never worry that I won't have food for my children.  I never worry that I will not have enough wood or blankets or thick enough coats to keep them warm through the winter.  When they wake up with a fever, I can make them feel better almost instantly with some cheap over-the-counter medicine that tastes like cherries.  I know if that doesn't cut it, there are worlds of miracles available from the doctor or even at the hospital.  I know my kids have historically unimaginable opportunities for education and personal choices ahead of them, not to mention a really good chance of a very long and healthy life.

And YET all these studies and articles keep telling us how unhappy parents are.

With so many of the ever-present fears and pains gone from our lives, maybe one problem is new parents have much less experience with physical or emotional difficulty to draw on when confronting parenting challenges.  Especially boredom.  We're not well prepared to deal with boredom anymore.  And limitations on our freedom to go where we want when we want and do what we want.  We're not so used to limitations anymore, but serious limitations used to be a fundamental fact of life.  Like air.  Maybe it's just that a few generations back, life before kids wasn't quite as different from life after kids.  Not to mention that most parents probably had a lot more personal experience with babies and household-running than they do today.  They were more prepared.  And daily life was demanding enough that I don't think many parents were spending a lot of time fretting over any of the things parenting magazines tell us we are fretting over.

This puts me in mind of Parenting for Primates, which is another fascinating book - all about studies done on parenting in a variety of different primate species.  The little monkeys the author raised herself, for instance, are absolutely abysmal parents if they weren't raised in a social group (and by "absolutely abysmal parents", I mean they completely freak out when their babies are born, killing them quickly if the keeper doesn't intervene).  They have to learn to be parents by watching other monkeys do it right.  And some monkeys (sorry for the lack of species details, here - read the book if you're interested) will abandon their babies if they do not have social support - they simply can't raise their young in isolation; it's too demanding.

Which brings me to the other HUGE problem with modern parenting - loneliness and isolation.  Did you watch the TED Talk about Parenting Taboos?  Did you notice the audience reaction to Taboo #2:  You can't talk about how lonely having a baby can be?  I've talked more eloquently about loneliness before and it's not a problem confined to parents, though mothers of young children suffer in great numbers.  It's a relatively recent problem, I think, and directly resulting from the ease of our regular lives.  Community has a chance to be strong when neighbors need each other, but most people just don't need their neighbors anymore, not in the way that's traditionally understood, anyway.  And most of the time, your neighbors just aren't there.  Stay home with your babies and toddlers for a while and you realize no one else is home.  Most mothers of young children are back at work.  Parents of older children are busy with soccer, school, work, and just plain being thrilled not to be in the early phase of parenting anymore.  Parents of adult children are trying to catch up on their 401K contributions, and non-parents are either quite committed to their chosen childless lifestyle or working hard to enjoy their freedom before their eventual children do arrive.

I remember reading criticisms of our schooling system that segregates children so strictly by age and how that robs them of learning from older children and being role models for younger children.  The truth is, much of our society is ruthlessly age stratified (or at least stage-of-life stratified) and it's doing no one any good.  (Not that I have any answer...)

There have been books written on the economic stresses on modern parents and I have no ability to cover that complicated question here.  (I thought The Price of Motherhood was fascinating and I meant to read Nickel and Dimed ages ago but never got around to it.  Any other suggestions?)

If I had the temperament to go back for a PhD in Economics (although, I'd probably go for Evolutionary Psychology first), my dissertation would consider the monetization of domestic/community labor as a tragedy of the commons problem.  As in, vast amounts of labor used to be unpaid (a good bit still is, of course).  It was directly applied to the family (and community) unit, providing a very real but generally unnoticed benefit to the community as a whole.  The past hundred years or so has seen a dizzying rush of (wo)man-hours into the paid marketplace (and away from the family/community) because for each individual, there was more to gain from monetizing as many productive hours as possible than there was to lose from reducing the unpaid contributions to the family/community that would have been done otherwise.  The previously unpaid work is then either hired out or left undone (or done with less labor due to technological advances).  

Result being, economic output measures (GDP) rise, but the common resource of unpaid community- and home-keeping is destroyed in the process (and its value remains unexamined).  (It's now occurring to me that it's probably economic HERESY to think of individual's labor/time as a community resource - so it's a good thing I'm not actually trying to get someone to sponsor that dissertation - but...  the *community* IS a community resource, right?  and what is a community but a collection of individuals putting some of their labor/time/skills in the pot without monetary compensation?)   ...OK, enough on that from me, but do tell me what you think since Mr. Right will only say, "It sounds interesting, but I'm not familiar with the tragedy of the commons."  :)

I think it was The Price of Motherhood that had a very interesting insight:  when we talk about all the opportunities available to women now, we are overlooking the type of jobs that many women entering the marketplace are taking - childcare, cleaning, and eldercare.  It's a mistake to talk about the great advances of women getting away from changing diapers and cleaning houses because someone still has to change those diapers and clean those houses, and it's still usually women doing those jobs (trickling down the economic ladder, of course), just now they're doing them for strangers instead of their own family and getting money in return.

OK, that's all I've got today.  Your comments have been great (the quote from Gift from the Sea was beautiful, Kelly, and home renovation is an excellent example, Gina) and I'm glad you've all stuck with me through a week of philosophizing!  Tomorrow (I hope!), an upbeat finale!

Why should a fruitful marriage not be happy?

Every time I read about one of these studies showing how much your marriage suffers after having kids, I wonder what's going on because I really feel like our marriage is more satisfying now that we have kids.  And I don't think we started off with a marriage of anything beyond ordinary greatness.

Having a child for the first time is certainly a huge shock to a relationship.  It's a huge shock to the parents as individuals, too.  Entirely new, entirely adult roles need filling and no matter how much you've anticipated that, it takes some getting used to.  There's also a lot more work to do at home, which can easily fuel resentment (especially when piled on lack of sleep) even when that new work is split evenly, which it usually isn't.  (Interesting article on how fathers are happier when they do more of the housework, mentions at the end that mothers still do more housework; I know I read somewhere once that women actually do MORE of the household work after a child enters the family than they did beforehand, even if they are still employed outside the home, but I can't find a link for that right now.)

But still, within two years of our first child's birth (rather than the 18 predicted in these studies), I felt our marriage had improved over what it was before kids.  We still have our points of contention, but we've gotten reasonably used to the new world order and the kids focus our attention on our family in a much more unified way than we spent most of our time pre-baby.  We feel more like a team.

I'm sure it helps tremendously that Mr. Right is a very hands-on father (the argument is over how much time he spends away from home, not what he does when he's here).  We're also in the statistical group most likely to report marital improvement after having children, being married longer than a year before baby and earning a good income.

But there might be something else going on, too.  The author of the study, Scott Stanley, is quoted on MSNBC noting that marital satisfaction declines over time whether you have kids or not (it's just more gradual if you don't) and that for couples with children, "there is a whole dimension of family happiness and contentment based on the family that couples are building" which wasn't considered in the research.

Robert Wright touches on this in The Moral Animal saying, "...the birth of a child often cements a marital bond, if obliquely; the love of spouse is partly diverted to the child and then refracted diffusely onto the family as a whole, mate included.  It is a different kind of love for the spouse, but it's sturdy in its own way." (emphasis by the author, p. 125)

In fact, I think I remember reading an article a few years ago on the brain chemistry of love which pretty much said romantic passion is short-lived, the question is whether you lose all attraction to your mate when the passion wanes or whether the passion morphs into a deeper affectionate bond.  

Maybe part of the problem is just that we've been culturally conditioned to believe that the early high-flying romantic crush feeling is the defining characteristic of a "good" relationship, so when someone asks about our "marital satisfaction", we end up measuring our seasoned relationships against a mental yardstick based on early infatuation?  Apples and oranges?

What's so great about happiness?

(See yesterday for a rambling sort of introduction...)

First of all, I think it's worth pointing out that all the articles in recent years about how unhappy you'll be if you have kids revolve around just two kinds of studies (as far as I can tell, chime in if you know something I don't).  There are the ones that show couples experience a sharp and long-lasting decrease in marital satisfaction after having children.  And there are the ones that show parents do not enjoy the activity of "childcare"; they would rather, given the choice, be doing any of a number of other things, even things normally not thought of as pleasurable, like exercising, or doing housework.

Sure enough, there are plenty of times every day when exercising, or doing housework (unpestered) would be much more pleasurable than whatever child-related tedium or difficulty I'm dealing with.  (My mother used to wax the kitchen floor on Mother's Day while Dad took us out of the house.  I actually almost get that now.)  But that just doesn't feel like the whole story, does it?

I could argue with the studies themselves - the methodology, or the concepts that were left out. There are a few nuances to the marital satisfaction study we can talk about tomorrow, for instance.

But then there's the bigger question - What's so great about happiness? - which I think is probably what Kelly's getting at when she says she "doesn't see the point" of all this worry over happiness (am I right, Kelly?).

Love, pride, relief, excitement, comfort, contentment, satisfaction, transcendence... these are all good feelings, plenty of which aren't quite the same as "happy" and often only come about after experiences during which you probably were decidedly not happy (especially not in the narrow way these studies tend to define "happy").  Not to mention the negative feelings we all experience from time to time, which are not fun or pleasant, but it's hard to imagine life without them.  What would love even mean if we couldn't feel grief?

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert is mostly asking (and trying to answer), What are we doing wrong that keeps us from spending more of our moments feeling happy?  And he has some really fascinating insights into that question that can, for instance, help you make better decisions about how to spend your gift budget (money spent on an experience typically makes us happier than the same amount spent on a material object).

What he's not asking is (if I'm remembering correctly a book I read a few years ago), Will maximizing my happiness from moment to moment maximize the satisfaction that I get from my life?  which has the feeling of a failing greedy algorithm from the get go, doesn't it?  And he's not asking whether happiness is fleeting because that's the way happiness is in some essential way, not because we've made some mistakes in trying to grasp it.

In fact, Gilbert spends a lot of time pointing out how silly we are for judging our experiences based on how we feel at the end of them (instead of on the sum total of how we felt during them), or for making decisions (like whether to have kids) based on how people say they feel when asked about it (people usually feel good when *thinking* about their kids), rather than on how people actually feel during the majority of the moments while carrying out that decision (parents spend more time doing less happy things like changing diapers, doing laundry, carpooling, supervising homework, etc. than they do sitting back and thinking about how great their kids are).

The problem is, I don't think that most people who consciously choose to have kids imagine the experience will be one long sunlit romp through a field of flowers (sorry, Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman).  And I don't even think you need the oft-cited "Mother Nature" excuse to understand why so many people choose to be parents even though parenting looks like a tough slog.  

People embark on extremely challenging activities all the time, knowing full well that they will not be happy during all or even most of the experience.  Can you even imagine the headline, Studies Show Climbers Cold and Miserable During Most of Everest Ascent?  How many people dreaming of climbing Everest would read that and say, REALLY?!  Never mind then!

As is I think well-documented on my blog and plenty of other places, parenting is often really tough.  It is definitely tedious and frustrating and messy and exhausting...  But the rewards are not only those rare and fleeting happy moments when your child cuddles their fuzzy little head into your chest in just they way they do in ads for fabric softener, or runs through an actual field of actual daisies while wearing a (clean!) and color-coordinated outfit that would not be out of place in the most glossy parenting magazine.  The real rewards of parenting (or any other challenging activity) are a direct result of the crappy parts.  It's the crappy as much as the happy (maybe more than the happy) that teaches me so much about myself, about empathy and compassion and love, about essential truths of the human condition.

Plus, I now have two WHOLE NEW PEOPLE to be quite in love with for the rest of my life.  No one ever said love was easy or a smooth road to happiness, did they?  But it is good.  And so is the chance to see a dandelion with real wonder one more time.