It's hard not to read Jennifer Senior's piece in New York Magazine on parents being unhappy with parenting and not think it's one long invented middle-class problem. Several studies over the years have asked parents to rate how they feel about various daily activities, and parenting ranks very low, but if you ask what makes them happy, parents say their children do. The discrepancy, as she points out much later in the piece, probably has to do with the difference between moment-to-moment happiness and long-term fulfillment, and the fact that we probably define "parenting" activities as those annoying-for-everyone moments when one has to be the boss of his or her child.
Her example of this is a parenting video in which one mother tries to pull an obstinate son away from the television and toward his homework. That sure sounded annoying. But on the scale of difficult child moments, I can think of many that rank higher, like being unable to get your hungry child food, for example; or watching your child die as the victim of violence. Senior's thesis is that parental happiness has changed because the point of being a parent has changed. Today's parents look for their offspring to fulfill them in some way, and are always carting them to violin lessons and soccer practice so that they can have the best.life.possible. She acknowledges, as an aside, that this is a middle- and upper-class problem but doesn't recognize how that undermines the tone of her piece.
Poor families are likely unhappy for many different reasons, but on the whole Senior notes that the parents with the highest happiness rankings are Danish parents, who benefit from a large social safety net, free child care, and extended parental leave. It's an argument for doing that here.That would solve the problem for poor families, too; so much of the stigma against government assistance involves stereotypes on who the assistance is for. If everyone got a blanket of benefits that helped middle-class parents think they are raising the next Einstein as surely as it helped poor parents look for jobs without worrying about their children's safety, then we would all be happier.
-- Monica Potts
