All Joy and No Fun

in 2008, 72 percent of college-educated women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine had not yet had children.

And while today’s fathers are more engaged with their children than fathers in any previous generation, they’re charting a blind course, navigating by trial and, just as critically, error. Many

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ABOUT adolescence is that it’s a repeat of the toddler years, dominated by a cranky, hungry, rapidly growing child who’s precocious and selfish by turns.

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Today parents pour more capital—both emotional and literal—into their children than ever before, and they’re spending longer, more concentrated hours with their children than they did when the workday ended at five o’clock and the majority of women still stayed home.

by postponing children, many modern parents are far more aware of the freedoms they’re giving up.

It takes a lot of ego strength to be in the pit crew. It means ceding some power to your children, for one thing—decisions that were once under your purview move to theirs—and it means receding somewhat, accepting that they’ve recast their lives without you, or your goals, at the center.

Kids are no longer allowed to drop out of school in order to work, and the world now requires more and more schooling to succeed. What’s more, parents feel a great need to protect their children. Many, especially in the middle class, have waited forever to have them. They fear for their physical safety and economic security.

that children tended to compromise the psychological health of mothers more than fathers, and of single parents more than married parents.