Not on Board with Baby
It's no surprise that Jennifer Senior's insightful,
provocative magazine cover story,
"I Love My Children, I Hate My Life,"
is arousing much chatter---nothing gets people
talking like the suggestion that
child rearing is anything less than
a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience.
Rather than concluding that children
make parents either happy or miserable,
Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness:
instead of thinking of it as something
that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy,
we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition.
Even though the day-to-day experience of
raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard,
Senior writes that "the very things
that in the moment dampen our moods
can later be sources of intense gratification and delight."
The magazine cover showing an attractive mother
holding a cute baby is hardly the only
Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week.
There are also stories about newly adoptive
---and newly single---mom Sandra Bullock,
as well as the usual "Jennifer Aniston is pregnant" news.
Practically every week features at least
one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be,
smiling on the newsstands.
In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation,
is it any wonder that admitting you regret
having children is equivalent to admitting you
support kitten-killing? It doesn't seem quite fair,
then, to compare the regrets of parents
to the regrets of the childless.
Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder
if they shouldn't have had kids,
but unhappy childless folks are bothered with
the message that children
are the single most important thing in the world:
obviously their misery must be a direct result of
the gaping baby-size holes in their lives.
Of course, the image of parenthood
that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present
is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents
are single mothers like Bullock.
According to several studies concluding
that parents are less happy than childless couples,
single parents are the least happy of all.
No shock there, considering how much work
it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on;
yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it,
raising a kid on their "own"
(read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.
It's hard to imagine that many people are dumb
enough to want children just because Reese
and Angelina make it look so glamorous:
most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut.
But it's interesting to wonder if the images
we see every week of stress-free,
happiness-enhancing parenthood
aren't in some small, subconscious way
contributing to our own dissatisfactions
with the actual experience,
in the same way that a small part of us
hoped getting "the Rachel"
might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston