All Joy and No Fun summary

Introduction and the Challenge of Parenting

All joy and no fun by Jennifer Senior. What is in it for me? Learn the often uncomfortable truths behind modern parenting. Being a parent today seems easier than ever, thanks to modern amenities like baby monitors and daycare.

And yet, despite these improvements, modern parenthood is not a bed of roses. Raising a child today can lead to increased stress, lack of sleep, and loss of autonomy. Of course, none of this takes away from the joy of raising a child, but no parent should underestimate the hardships involved. Hardships that this summary will explore.

This is all joy and no fun by Jennifer Senior. Chapter 1. Being a parent is a challenging undertaking, knowing what is in store and how to handle it helps a lot. Those of us who plan to have children in the near future have a pretty good sense of what it is going to take, right?

Well, not so fast. No matter how many baby books you have trawled for advice, no matter how many parenting gurus you have consulted, you will never be fully prepared to have a child. For example, you may think you know all the ins and outs of childcare, but there is far more to it than you likely realize. Yes, you know you will be sleep deprived and expected to change dirty diapers, but you will have other concerns, too.

For starters, today's parents are burdened with a crippling desire to be perfect. This stems from a surfeit of choice. Parents get to choose the number of children they want, when they want to have them, what kind of birth they want, and how they want to parent them. The baby's gender is about the only thing left to chance.

You might be thinking that is great, but actually too many options create pressure to do everything exactly right. Parents want to impress others with the way they raise their family and so feel stressed when they cannot quite live up to their own ideals. The role of children in the home and in society is changing, too. Children involve more work than ever before.

We haul them to soccer practice and music lessons and all the other extracurricular activities that are often expected of them and then have to pick them up afterward. Modern parents usually need more time and money than their parents did. It is no surprise that stress and exhaustion are common. The following sections shed some light on the most challenging aspects of modern parenthood.

It should be kept in mind, though, that the advice below applies largely to the U S middle class, not to the poor or the elite. So start off by taking a look at the first difficulty faced by most new parents.

Parenthood Erodes Your Autonomy

Parenthood erodes your autonomy. Prior to having children, you are a self-determined adult, coming and going as you please. You are free to do the things that make you happy.

You want to go out and party. No problem. You want to take a quick weekend vacation. Hop on that plane.

This comes to a rather abrupt end when your child arrives. With this change, adults lose the daily rhythms that have shaped them and given them joy. Now that most parents choose to have children later in life, it is harder for them to suddenly alter their deeply entrenched behavioral patterns. One of the most obvious examples is how newborns disrupt sleep patterns.

We spend a lot of our lives perfecting how much sleep we require to function well. And when a child comes along, we lose control over this. When you start a family, you are also suddenly unable to make reliable predictions about your future because there is no way to accurately predict your child's needs. Those without dependents can map out their lives and spend time planning what they want to do.

Having a child makes it hard to figure out when you will be free in the future. Merely being around children can even stop you from thinking about the future because life suddenly becomes a matter of the here and now. But it is not all that bad either. One way to get on top of things is to plan your work around child care.

Although flexible work schedules might help you juggle both your duties as a parent and your ambitions as an adult, it can also restrict what you are able to do, working from home whenever you want, will likely mean that you spend your time oscillating between tending to your child and tending to your work, an unproductive battle between the two. It is clear then that your autonomy is one of the first things to suffer when you have kids, but what else is threatened?