All Joy and No Fun

New York journalist Jennifer Senior narrates her exceptional book at breakneck speed, but good phrasing makes everything comprehensible. Her pacing gives this audio vigor and keeps the author's passion for her topic in view. The book is not a how-to but a satisfying overview of how raising children impacts parents. Before the late 1940s, she says, children were valued mainly as workers; parenting was less burdened by our outsized aspirations for them and emotional attachments to them. She illustrates her insights with absorbing interviews of ordinary parents, stories that give her writing a touching humanity. The research and cultural history she distills provide listeners with a satisfying long view on the real costs and joys of parenting. T.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

November 4, 2013
In 2010, New York magazine published contributing editor Senior’s feature of the same title with the telling subhead: “Why Parents Hate Parenting.” Here, Senior analyzes how children affect their parents from birth through adolescence, attempting to understand why middle-class millennial parents find this to be a “high-cost/low reward activity.” Three modern developments have complicated parenting: choice in family size and timing; flexible workplaces, with long(er) hours and inadequate sponsored childcare; and the transformation of the child’s role from “useful” to “protected” status. Senior utilizes academic studies and survey data about sex, marriage, pregnancy, childhood, sleep loss, earning power; she also cites data about why women and men approach parenting differently, and she also quotes many noted parent-child experts along the way. Her interviews with parents participating in Early Childhood Family Education classes offer different parenting styles and scenarios, and Senior adds a personal dimension, taking a good look at herself and her peers. In the end, readers will hopefully see the parenting journey as more about the children and less about adult emotions, that children’s behavior is culturally mediated, and that negotiating with a toddler is futile. While Jennifer Valenti’s Why Have Kids? addressed unmet expectations versus daily reality, this book airs the “I love my kids; I hate my life” litany of parents who, statistically, spend more time with their kids than the previous two generations. Agent: Tina Bennett, WME.

March 15, 2014

Journalist Senior's (contributing editor, New York magazine) new title will likely be shelved next to parenting books filled with do's and don'ts, but this isn't another "how to" book. Rather, it aims a social science lens at parents themselves and addresses questions such as: How does having kids affect our lives? Does it make us happier? Does it make us less happy? Senior profiles clans in Minnesota and Texas as she looks at the realities of family life. She doesn't shy away from the "no fun" aspect of her findings. Parts of the book feel bleak as we hear of strained marriages, parental guilt, and general exhaustion; the joy comes in the simple moments. Senior says, "By spending time with young children--building forts and baking cakes, whacking baseballs and making sand castles--we're afforded in some respects, the opportunity to be our most human." VERDICT Full of fascinating ideas and information about the family structure and its history, this work is sure to be of strong interest to parents, in particular, as they look for meaning beyond the day to day. [See Prepub Alert, 8/12/13.]--Mindy Rhiger, Minneapolis

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2013

Featured on the 2013 BEA Editors Buzz Panel, Senior's book started out as a New York Magazine cover story that prompted incredible response. All of which recommends your checking out Senior's discussion about parenthood today, which focuses on how parents are shaped by their children. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 15, 2014
What can we learn from studying the effects of children on parents? The past 10 or 15 years will likely be looked back on as a period when parents sank into a morass of identity crisis, with "helicopter parents," "tiger moms," and legions of hand-wringing moms and dads trying to figure out where the line is for good intentions based on sound science. It naturally follows that researchers would turn their gazes away from the effects of parents on their children--enough has been written about that to fill a library--and toward the effects of children on their parents. From the starting point of parenting being a "high cost/high reward activity," New York contributor Senior delves into a broad survey of the topic, parsing out the different arenas in which children are molding the lives of their parents. Employment, marriage, hobbies, habits, relationships with friends and other family, even a parent's sense of his- or herself: Senior takes an analytical approach to each of these areas, looking at them through a variety of lenses--historical, economic, philosophical, anthropological. She finds that French mothers simultaneously enjoyed caring more for their children and spent less time actually doing it than American women. She examines the phenomenon of "concerted cultivation," with kids being overscheduled to boost their performances in years to come, and how both narcissism and concern about future opportunities go hand in hand with this level of control. Teenagers, with a heady combination of being both "wild horses and penned veal," have a great deal of influence over their parents, and the author does an admirable job of reviewing the current state of affairs with technology--specifically, the reversal of roles, with parents asking their kids to friend them on Facebook. Senior could have made this book twice as long given the minefield parents and their kids face, but what she did produce is well-considered and valuable information.

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