By talking directly to parents and carefully reviewing the existing scientific literature, Senior has crafted an incredibly insightful and easily accessible book about what happens to parents as a result of parenting.
Senior takes us through the various stages of parenting: planning, early childhood, the middle school years, and adolescence, making pointed and careful observations about how having children change us, burdens us, and truly enriches our lives.
Senior makes no bones about who she is surveying: her book is strictly directed towards middle class parents. She doesn't discuss the upper crust, who can spend the big bucks outsourcing whatever painful parts of parenting they wish to eschew. She also doesn't discuss poorer parents, where financial burdens of existence may supersede many parenting issues in day-to-day life.
Modern, middle class parenting was born sometime in the 1940s. Between 1890 and 1920, child labor was banned, and the seeds of the era of the 'useless child' were planted. Since that time, children have been been transformed from unsentimental cogs in the family machine to cherished commodities that contribute little to a family's bottom line. Feeding, clothing, educating, and caring for our children places incredible emotional and monetary strain on parents and we have to do this with little overall contribution to the family effort from the children themselves. Moreover, as a society we are having children later in life and having fewer children. This means that we not only miss the freedom we had before deciding to have children later in life, but we have fewer children, making them even more of a precious commodity.
Senior reviews the repercussions of these changes in parenting in a decidedly unsentimental, journalistic way. She never sugarcoats or pulls any punches but she doesn't gripe or exaggerate either. When she interviews parents, she has a unique way of getting to the heart of an issue. She makes a cogent analysis and then looks to scientific studies that validate her experience in the field.
Parenting--as it turns out--ends up being the one of the most harrowing and rewarding experiences of modern existence. As parents we derive incredible meaning from our lives by caring for our children, but we also have a burden of responsibility that strains our life. This, as the subtitle purports, is 'the paradox of modern parenthood.'
The book was gripping from the get-go. Senior's interviews with sample parents might as well have been interviews with me or with my peers. Even when Senior's interviewee's circumstances were clearly different from mine, their thought process was nearly identical.
Senior fully admits in her introduction that there are few 'answers' to the problems that she poses in the books. However, there is a great deal of wisdom and quite a number of lessons that can be learned from understanding the whys and wherefores that Senior describes in the book.
Sometimes the lessons in this book are painful and other times they are full of a great deal of humor. But after reading this book I realized that this is exactly the kind of book that I have been waiting to read for a very long time--I just didn't know it!
Highly recommended.
Click Here For More Information About All Joy No Fun Parenthood
0 comments:
Post a Comment