All Joy and No Fun

middle parenting years—elementary school mostly—when parents feel immense pressure to prepare their children for an increasingly competitive world, thereby turning afternoons and weekends into a long procession of extracurricular activities.

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

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.

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

These perennial difficulties are worth dissecting and will certainly play a role in this book. But I am also interested in what’s new and distinctive about modern parenting. There’s no denying that our lives as mothers and fathers have grown much more complex, and we still don’t have a new set of scripts to guide us through them. Normlessness is a

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

The way most historians describe this transformation is to say that the child went from “useful” to “protected.” But the sociologist Viviana Zelizer came up with a far more pungent phrase. She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

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.