The Pressure of Being a Parent

This week's article summary is from the New York Times.  Entitled  “Under Pressure”, the article is a review of the book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

Even though my kids are 26 and 23, I thought a lot about parenthood on Wednesday and Thursday when I was house-bound. 

My 23-year-old son, who recently moved to Atlanta for a new job and who is living with my wife and me until he settles on a different living arrangement, was also house-bound with me. 

Both of us set up our offices on opposite ends of our dining room table and proceeded to work both days. Most of the time we were working on our computers and talking quietly on our mobile phones. 

Still, after two days working almost side-by-side, we were both ready to head back to our places of employment regardless of weather conditions. (I think what drove me to my parenting extreme was when he, during his "coffee breaks", decided to learn the old Fleetwood Mac song "Oh Well" on his guitar. It's a great song when played by professional musicians and heard once in a while. YouTube it and you'll see what I mean!) 

Anyway, my sister—who is now 45—and her husband made the decision early in their marriage to not have kids. My wife and I—veteran parents at that time—tried to laud the benefits of parenthood, but my sister and her husband have held firm to their promise.  

While you'll see by the end of the article summary below that parenting has a tremendous upside, there are many stressful times when the balance of downside to upside seems skewed to the downside, especially when one's offspring is trying to learn "Oh Well". 

Enjoy the weekend—and the Gala if you're attending!

Joe

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Raising children is terribly hard work, often thankless and mind-numbing, and yet the most rapturous experience available to adults. 

Parents are both happier and more miserable than non-parents. Child rearing dictates a wider emotional range than people have generally known before it. 

Parenting stresses its participants to their limits, no matter how much they love their children. 

Children upstage all the other components of their parents’ lives, and good parenting involves both helicoptering and disengagement.

Parents struggle with their children’s teenage years both because of their changed relationship with their children and because of their changed relationship to themselves. It is not easy to have much of your purpose shattered by your child’s independence. This loss can throw parents back on their own inner selves, and self-examination can be painful.

I have never quite sorted out the conundrum of how I could be distracted into thinking about something as tiresome as email when I was with my beloved kids. If I lost all my emails, I’d manage, and if I lost my children, I’d never recover; yet still I sometimes find it hard to stay in the moment with them. There is no contradiction in this seeming paradox: tolerating our children is the cornerstone of loving them. 

Kids may complicate our lives, but they also make them simpler. Children’s needs are so overwhelming, and their dependence on us so absolute, that it’s impossible to misread our moral obligation to them. We bind ourselves to those who need us most, and through caring for them, grow to love them, grow to delight in them, grow to marvel at who they are.