The Love and the Hate of Parenting

A Mommy-friend from our prenatal class recently sent us this article from New York Magazine called "All Joy and No Love: Why Parents Hate Parenting". An interesting read by Jennifer Senior, who explores the wealth of academic research that suggest that non-parents are happier than parents, and some possible explanations for the happiness gap.

I balked at first, and then had to smile when the article mentioned that most parents don't like to hear this news. Fine. Of course we don't. Who wants to think that a choice we have made that amounts to an 18+ year commitment may have made us unhappier. Not me.

I freely admit that since becoming a mother, I've had a lot of struggles. Sleep deprivation, exhaustion, monotony, extreme frustration, questioning who I am and what I'm doing with my life, conflict with my spouse like we never experienced before. If you gave me a psychological test like the well-known and reputed "Beck Depression Inventory" on a bad week, I may look pretty depressed. The test asks questions like whether your sex drive has decreased, whether your ability to sleep has decreased, and whether you often feel irritable. Yeah, of course. So what?

But on the whole I feel happier for having become a mother. I've faced more challenge to my physical and emotional limits than ever before, yes, but I also now know myself to be stronger than I imagined. I feel like my life has purpose in a way that I didn't quite feel before Boodge, and I have much less time for navel-gazing and worrying about the opinions of others, which is good for me.

I've also experienced so many of what the article describes as "moments of transcendence". At last once daily, usually many times, I am struck by a giant wave of awesome feeling--amazement, gratitude, amusement, pride, tenderness, LOVE. Prior to parenting I don't remember feeling that kind of transcendence often, aside from when I fell in love or otherwise connected deeply with other people. Usually I had to get out of my daily grind, go out into nature, and sit by a lake for a day or two. Now, that awe-inspiring beauty is right there in my living room, the very source of my daily grind.

Here is one of my husbands regular moments of transcendence:


Happiness is a difficult thing to measure objectively. People devote their entire careers to coming up with a reliable measure for some small component of happiness. As a counsellor, I find psychological research helpful in some ways. It is helpful to know, for instance, that mine isn't the only marriage that experienced stress during the transition to parenthood. I appreciate when research can normalize an experience that feels threatening and confusing, or when it can highlight a social problem that we need to work on.

In other ways, I'm very skeptical. I'm just not sure parents and non-parents can legitimately be compared. Becoming a parent is such a huge transition. I remember feeling as if my whole brain and body was being re-wired. And what made me happy before I was a parent, I can barely remember now. What gives my life meaning, what I value, my spiritual beliefs and practice, who I am closest to and how I relate to those people--all different now. Parents and non-parents really are like two different cultures.

Legitimate scientific research (and I could write a post on that concept, believe me) depends on having two groups that are similar in all ways except the variable being measured. If you tried to compare, for example, the level of happiness of kids in two kindergarten classrooms, one full-day and one half-day, you'd better pick two classrooms with pretty much identical social, economic, and cultural backgrounds, or your research will be quickly discredited.

I do think Senior is right on in some of the reasons she suggests for less parental happiness. Lack of financial or social support, too high expectations for kids and parents in a competitive society, and so many choices that we can endlessly question whether we made the right one. Our culture is so based on individual gratification, and we pursue that right up until we become parents. Often that pursuit takes us far away from our parents and hometowns.

But once we have children, we need our communities, our extended families. We need to live in such a way that our own needs are not our primary focus. We need help, and we are often too tired, isolated, and discombobulated to get it. I think our individualistic culture probably makes the transition much harder on parents. We are so used to thinking only of ourselves, and we have been conditioned to believe that sacrificing our own forward progress for someone else is a no-no.

At any rate, it is a bit of a catch-22, isn't it? Because once you have kids, you have crossed over. I have yet to meet a parent that doesn't feel like losing one of their children would be a tragedy they could hardly withstand. It doesn't matter how stressful, tiring, and frustrating parenting is--once you are there, you can't imagine living without it.

So probably the best thing we can do is be grateful every day that our kid is there driving us insane, sucking our energy, and testing our limits, and forget all of the other things that we could be doing. And do whatever else it takes to get the help and support and time you need to survive these 18 years, including being easy on yourself. Then soak up those wonderful moments of transcendence when they come.


Good luck and blessings to all of you!