Many moons ago according to my Goodreads, I devoured the newly released book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior. While at the time, I didn’t jot down any formal notes (immediately launching myself into the brainless yet fantastic Mortal Instruments series instead), Senior’s words keep coming back and her ideas haunt me.
As my children have aged, I have gone from a completely overwhelmed, always on the clock stay-at-home mom to a mom with rare moments to be completely alone. I have also found my way back to the full-time workforce. My parenting role has changed – drastically.
But what hasn’t changed is the feeling of losing my identity as a person outside of motherhood. Mr. Family Trip and I have many moments where we ask each other if we are having fun. Or, during some cocktail hours, admit that we aren’t. While parenting has changed, it is still overwhelming and all-consuming. Just in a different way.
I find after hours of pouring myself into my work and my writing, it is hard to switch back into “mom” mode. I can’t walk away from the computer easily. I can’t leave it all behind. I keep thinking of the task I didn’t get to finish, or the “one last thing” I wanted to get through on my list. Then I run off to parent a teen and tween, drive to extracurricular activities they love, and worry myself about if they are eating healthy and if the forms for school were appropriately filled out and if we are meeting our volunteer shift obligations. My mind is always somewhere other than where I am.
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Jennifer Senior’s book All Joy and No Fun asks parents to consider how we choose to parent, what pressures we put on ourselves, and what freedom really means.
In Senior’s book, she tackles “flow” (a concept now becoming more mainstream) and how nearly impossible it is to achieve with the demands children place on us. But flow is essential to be successful, particularly in creative pursuits. Flow is also essential to tap into that feeling of “fun.”
“Flow” is “getting in the zone.” As you get into something, it is the feeling when you lose track of time and your mind is focused solely on the thing you are doing.
Now think of a schedule around kids and their demanding needs. Impossible to achieve flow, correct?
Yet more and more parents are working from home around kids’ schedules. We were jolted into that lifestyle during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or even when the kids are at school, there is a hard stop as to when they need to be picked up, tended to, and when the parenting clock begins. Our time is not, is never, our own.
Simultaneously, our culture glorifies the sentiment that you have to be blissed out about your role as a parent. Adjacent to the sheer fact that flow (time dedicated to something uninterrupted) is impossible to achieve with children’s schedules, our culture asks us to button up frustrations and only announce, beaming, that our kids are our source of joy.
But joy and fun are different. While kids may bring us joy, that does not, actually, mean that we have fun parenting.
Joy happens in parenting but in unplanned, unexpected bursts, and in a way we have absolutely no control over.
As Senior writes:
No graph in the world can do full justice to these unexpected moments. They’re sweet little bursts of grace, and they leave sense-memories on the skin (the small of the child’s shampoo, the smoothness of his arms). That’s why we’re here, leading this life, isn’t it? To know this kind of enchantment?
The question is why such moments, at least with small children, often feel so hard-won, so shatterable, and so fleeting, as if located between parentheses.
It is true: life with my sons has been absolutely sweet, intoxicating, and irreplaceable. Yet one moment of sweet cuddles immediately devolves into a screaming possessed child….in seconds. Getting into any sort of flow, or any place where I can just let go and have fun, is short-lived. It is also absolutely out of my control.
So while I may have found some joy, when am I having fun?
Add in Senior’s well-documented (and what every parent says “duh” to) effects of parenting on sleep deprivation, sex, and recreational entertainment, and you wonder, “What is the point?”
Luckily, while pointing out why parenting is so hard, Senior keeps writing. Attacking this entire topic with a social sciences filter, Senior lays down some tough love on us.
Our society has changed. Gone are the days when children were useful, necessary, and an important construct of how the chores got done and life was accomplished.
She isn’t referring to the exploitation of child labor in the Industrial Age, but she is documenting a noticeable change in how parenthood is broached in our society. We treat children as sweet, precious gifts to be dutifully attended to. And while that might be the case, parenting is the Biggest Job you will ever have, at some point, our society has taken the usefulness out of kids.
That leaves us struggling with what to do with them as well as asking parents to take their entire identity as “Parent To __ Child.” We serve our kids. We are at the beck and call of our kids. All of our resources, time, and energy go into making sure our kids are fulfilled (youth travel sports, anyone?) while at the end of the day, we’re still the ones doing their laundry, cooking their meals, and loading their dirty dishes into the dishwasher because the kids have too much to do.
We don’t go out, we don’t advocate for our own rights, and we get lost in being a parent. So while the bursts of joy radiate through the fog, we don’t get to have fun. Fun is the ability to find flow in something – anything. Fun is the time and the space to get lost in something that matters to us.
Senior is in some ways criticizing helicopter parenting, yes, but also a more insidious shift in society. With our attention on our kids, treating them as heavenly, invaluable beings to be coddled and immaculately attended, we have taken the actual fun out of parenting. We have changed parenting.
Yet.
It is still worth it.
Senior proves this with anecdotal evidence and stories from her subjects.
This line means the most:
We don’t care for children because we love them…We love them because we care for them.
So while my flow is interrupted and while the parenting role model I am expected to fall into these days has vastly shifted, there is still a reason to do it. And we keep doing it. Because it means everything.
I appreciate this book challenges parents to think about what fun is, and how we can reclaim it.
Senior challenges us to look at how we parent, not just why.
Can we find ways to let our kids run around, play free, live free, be creative, and find ways to exist without our Pinterest crafts and planned activities? This, she argues, is not only better for the parent but also better for the kids. A new model.
But then Senior pulls a surprise out of her bag. She holds up a mirror and shows us how adult society has become preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with “freedom.”
This is a relatively new phenomenon. We not only crave freedom but we truly believe it is a God-given right.
Not so, Senior argues. The entire idea of being free to be and do whatever we want is new to society over the last few decades. Perhaps this is where our modern struggles with parenting and the shackles we allow parenthood to bind us with come from. A self-created dilemma because our mental state is preoccupied with what we could be, based on a new societal expectation that we could be anything and that we shouldn’t feel so burdened by anything.
But is that actually freedom? Is freedom really about not feeling burdened by any responsibility or anything?
Witness this passage from Senior’s book:
…freedom in our culture has evolved to mean freedom from obligation. But what on earth does that freedom even mean if we don’t have something to give it up for?
Amen.
So while my flow is interrupted daily, while I try to consciously give my boys time to play without my volcano demonstration/fun noodle car wash/magic bubble formula/DIY fan tent/whatever the new Pinterest craft du jour is, I will remember that I LOVE this obligation. I have joy. I just have to find the path forward to carve out for myself some fun.
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All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood