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Copyright © 2018 by KJ Dell’Antonia
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To my parents, Jon and Jo Dell’Antonia, who gave me my first happy family, and to Sam, Lily, Rory, and Wyatt, who became my second. Most of all, to my husband, Rob. With you beside me I am fearless—and so, so much happier.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: This Could Be Fun
Interlude: Ten Mantras for Happier Parents
one
Mornings Are the Worst
two
Chores: More Fun If Someone Else Does Them, and Your Child Should
three
Siblings: They Can Bring the Fun, and They Can Take It Away
four
Sports and Activities: Fun for Everyone, Except When They’re Not
five
Homework: More Fun When It’s Not Yours
six
Screens Are Fun, Limiting Them Is Not
seven
Discipline: This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You
eight
Food, Fun, and Family Time
nine
Free Time, Vacations, Holidays, Birthdays, and Other On-Demand “Fun”
The End of the Book, Not the Journey
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
introduction
THIS COULD BE FUN
I’d been a parent for close to twelve years by the time it occurred to me to ask myself if the whole thing had to suck quite as much as it seemed to most days.
I have four children. Four amazing, glorious, delightful, stubborn, challenging, bickering other human beings live in my house, plus one equally wonderful, but mostly not all the other things, husband. I expect to spend twenty-some years in the thick of family life, driving, hugging, negotiating, laughing, cooking, playing, cleaning, reading, and all the rest of it. That’s a big piece of my expected life-span. What’s more, it’s a piece I looked forward to. We planned this, my partner and I. We chose this life. This is what we wanted.
I don’t want to spend that time in a haze of resigned exhaustion, longing to be or do something else. I want to raise my family, have my life, and love almost every minute of it. I am lucky to have all this, the house and the SUV and the washer-dryer and the healthy, loving kids. I want to like it.
But up until recently, it wasn’t working out that way. The workload was overwhelming, from the laundry to the dishes to the cooking. The children were sometimes cute, but too often actively unpleasant: they fought with one another and with me; they refused to do the simplest of chores; they started from a baseline of entitlement and seemed to go downhill from there. Far too many days were what I called “get your skates on” days, when my husband and I both got up at dawn, drove children all over creation in the name of education or sports, worked a full day, drove more children to still more places, fed them, tended them, cleaned up after them, devoted an hour to inking in the next day’s continuing insanity, and then collapsed into bed after bickering weakly with each other about whose day blew more chunks. We were always running, often late, and rarely without a child making us all suffer in the name of hating “transitions.”
There was nothing really wrong—far from it. On the surface, we had everything we ever wanted, and below that surface, we had even more. We had good health, loving children, and enough money to do and have the things we really needed and many things we only wanted. We had had a stillborn child, a tragedy, but that was years ago. We’d come through it. There was nothing to complain about, but complain we did. It was just not as great I thought it would be.
I could say that about a lot of things—zip lines, for example, or sitting in the copilot seat of a commuter jet, or nearly every flume ride I’ve ever been on—but in this case, I’m talking about a whole lot more than a ride. This was a lifetime commitment. If it wasn’t turning out like I’d hoped, I needed to find a way to turn it around.
The one thing I knew, as I began to contemplate the question of why I wasn’t more satisfied with my life as a parent, was that I wasn’t alone. During the course of those early years I began to write about family, first for a variety of print magazines, later for Slate, and then for the New York Times, where I ran the Motherlode blog and later became part of its Well Family page. I interviewed hundreds of parents over the course of that decade. Most found happiness more elusive than they’d hoped.
At the same time, research was revealing a dismaying level of stress and dissatisfaction among my parenting peers, even those who are secure in the basics (food, shelter, health) and without any immediately obvious bonus challenges at any given moment. We tell researchers we’d rather do laundry than spend time with our children. We give up our own hobbies and pleasures in pursuit of our children’s betterment. We answer surveys about our satisfaction with our lives and families in ways that lead to headlines like “How Having Children Robs Parents of Their Happiness” and books like All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, and then we devour the results as vindication of our overwhelming sense of being caught up in a race we can’t win. Parenting, writes Judith Warner in her book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, has become “poisoned” through a “cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret.”
What’s up with that, and how can we make it stop? Sure, some moments, and even some days or weeks, are truly terrible. Death, illness, job loss, accidents—those things stalk us all, but most days feature only the ordinary ups and downs of mornings, homework struggles, stuffed in-boxes, and dirty dishes. Why do we have such a collective sense of distress around these fates that we have chosen?
When things are steady, we could be finding satisfaction in our lovely modern lives, so filled with convenience and possibility and abundance. And when the worst happens, those ordinary moments with the families we’ve built should be a comfort and a refuge, not an additional source of anxiety. But I didn’t feel like that was the life I was creating, and I saw the parents around me struggling in the same ways.
So I set out to discover how parents could find the way to our own personal version of happily ever after. How could we bring more joy, pleasure, and even fun to those ordinary days that make up the measure of our lives? What was contributing to our individual and collective unhappiness, and more importantly, what could we do abo
ut it?
I turned first to the community of parents and educators I’ve built up over the years. What makes you unhappy? I asked. When do you feel like you’re not where you want to be, or doing what you want to be doing? I read everything I could find on happiness in general. Books piled up next to my bed: Hardwiring Happiness; Stumbling on Happiness; If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?; Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness trilogy: The Happiness Project, Happier at Home, and Better Than Before; and more. I read books and research studies on parent and family happiness in particular: All Joy and No Fun and Perfect Madness, of course; plus Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time; Maxed Out: American Moms on the Brink; Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family; and The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.
I read research studies on happiness and life satisfaction, on time use and leisure, on community and dinner and wealth and volunteering and sleep, and then I read some more. (I knew it was time to stop when I found one study linking happiness to nudism.) And then, because I still had questions, I worked with Fordham University professor Matthew Weinshenker to create our own research into how choices around common parenting activities like helping with homework and driving to after-school activities affected our overall life satisfaction. We surveyed just over a thousand parents nationwide, and we asked them to tell us how being a parent had changed their approach to things like vacations and eating, and to take a deep dive into what made them happy and what didn’t.
What I found convinced me that we can be happier. It doesn’t even have to be that difficult. We can start by changing the stories we tell ourselves about our lives as individuals and as parents, and reveling in the meaning and excitement that comes from the adventure of raising a family instead of trying to measure our success. Wanting to be happier has its own happiness-increasing effect. The way we interpret our own lives and the way we talk to ourselves about our experiences has an enormous impact on how we perceive them. We can choose to feel satisfied with the (imperfect) lives we have, and comfortable and confident in how we’re raising our kids. When we make that choice, or even when we decide to strive for it, something shifts in our mind-set, and we’re more able to see and appreciate what’s already there.
As I’ve changed how I think about my own parenting, I’ve found that I come back to ten mantras that invite me to see things differently or approach them with more confidence. I’ve listed those at the end of this introduction. But as useful as it is to change how we think about our family lives, it’s not enough. Positive thought is powerful, but you cannot bring about more joyful mornings or less stressful evenings just by wishing it so (sadly, that is not “the secret” to happier parenting).
As we change how we think, we must also change what we do. In our day-to-day lives, we can build stronger partnerships and friendships, share leisure activities with our families, and spend time with our children doing things that are pleasant for all parties. We can increase the things in our lives that correlate with happiness and what researchers like to call “a sense of parental efficacy” (feeling like we’re pretty good at this thing, which is a common measure of parent satisfaction).
Happier parents in general do four things well. They shift from heavier involvement to fostering independence as their children become more capable. They don’t put their children’s everyday needs above their own. They look for the good in day-to-day experiences, and they know what’s really important and what’s just noise and fury.
But those are big, amorphous goals, and here’s something else you find out when you research happiness: most of us are better at making specific changes than we are at fulfilling vague, unwieldy intentions. So how should I divide those big goals into manageable bits we can tackle a bite at a time to create a blueprint for happier family lives?
I considered the chronological—how to be happier when life includes a baby, a toddler, a tween, or a teen. But what if you’ve got all four? Maybe, I suggested to some friends on Facebook, I should structure the book around some of the larger things that parents who are satisfied with their lives often do. I could research and describe the ways people become part of a community of faith or intention, restructure their careers in creative ways, or build a life around a passion, and find lessons we could apply to ourselves in large and small ways.
“I do absolutely none of those things,” responded one friend. “I can think of no better way for you to make me feel like crap.” Scratch that, then.
Ultimately, I kept coming back to what felt like the most obvious plan—taking it one trouble spot at a time. Those big questions of how to foster independence, keep your sense of self, make room for happiness, and see the forest for the trees don’t come up all by themselves. They come up again and again, all day, every day, within the seemingly smaller challenges. How can I get these children to go to bed? How can I get them to stop fighting? Should I let my ten-year-old use Instagram? What’s for dinner?
So each of the chapters of How to Be a Happier Parent focuses on a single challenge spot for parents. To find those challenges, I started by doing exactly what any of you would do—I listed the things that were the most difficult for me and my family. (Mornings. Homework. Sibling relationships.) Then I turned to my research and found a surprising consensus—just under a third of the parents who responded to an open-ended question about what they liked least about parenting offered up some variation on “discipline”: “Enforcing rules, taking away privileges.” “I don’t like having to punish my children.” “Discipline. I know it’s important to have consequences, but it is still hard to discipline.” We know we need to teach our children to behave and meet the expectations of the family and community they’re a part of, but it seems we really don’t enjoy it.
I’d start with discipline, then, but where to go from there? “You cannot write this book without talking about screen time,” said Bruce Feiler, author of The Secrets of Happy Families. “Everyone is trying to figure that out.”
“What about chores?” said one of my editors at the Times. “I can’t believe your kids do chores every morning before school. We can barely get out the door.” After I corrected her vision of my children skipping off to work in our barn every morning with a merry whistle like so many of Snow White’s dwarfs, I promised to cover chores.
To their ideas and to that formal survey, I added the results of a more informal version, in which I asked a few thousand parents to name their top three challenges. Two of mine (homework and sibling bickering) also appeared at the top of many lists, followed by screen time (“SnapFREAKINGchat”), meals, driving, “so many negotiations,” mornings and bedtimes, activities, “dressing the toddler,” manners, chores, getting no respect, and lack of sleep. I turned those two lists into chapter headings and went from there.
For every topic, from discipline through mornings, siblings and vacations and leisure time, I start by describing what commonly goes wrong, for me and for other parents. The first thing I do is to consider what lies underneath the seemingly straightforward challenge of things like getting children up, fed, dressed, and out of the house by 7:37 every weekday morning. Yes, there are things we can do to make it better. But it’s important to look around us and see what’s holding us down. In so many ways, from school hours and vacations to typical activity schedules to the challenges of finding good, flexible childcare, our society makes it difficult to manage both caregiving and breadwinning, whether two parents have largely divided those roles, one parent is riding them solo, or your family has two adults working on all fronts. It’s hard to find happiness when every day is a race against a clock we don’t set, but knowing what we’re up against can help us change what we can, and accept what we can’t. How to Be a Happier Parent is focused on creating the best possible family life we can with the hand we’ve been dealt.
Then I get at the larger question: what can we do about it? I’ve taken each of those tough spots and
I’ve tackled them with fellow parents and experts to look at what works. How can we make things like dealing with homework or grocery store temper tantrums better? Over and over again, as I considered topics from discipline to vacations, I found the same pattern. First, we need to change how we think about it. Then, we need to change what we do about it. The bulk of every chapter gets into the nitty-gritty of that last part. Mornings (or sibling battles, or screen time arguments, or mealtimes) suck. So what do we do to make it feel better?
How to Be a Happier Parent isn’t a memoir. Far from it. I’m still right with you, learning how this is done every day. But let’s own this much: it is a “self-help” book. I didn’t set out to research what makes for happier families without hoping that the results of my work would actually help some parents—that would be you and me both—find a way to a life that’s regularly, consistently satisfying, that includes ample joy and fun, one that allows you to look around and sigh and let your shoulders drop down out of your ears and say, yes, this is what I wanted. Maybe not every single minute of it. Maybe not the dog barf I just cleaned up or the mid-vacation who-will-sleep-in-which-bed squabble or the dirty dishes in the sink, but the children and the dog and the vacation and the dishes and the sink, yes, this is the journey I want to be on.
So while How to Be a Happier Parent contains my story of finding a place of joy and satisfaction with my life and my family life, it’s more often a guide to how you can find your own way to that place of your own, and the answer certainly isn’t “by doing everything just exactly like KJ does, because KJ’s life is perfect, rah-rah!” If I feel like I’ve got a handle on something, you’ll hear about it. But more often, you’ll join me in working through advice and ideas from other parents and families, in the hope of finally finding a better approach to the things that challenge you most. It worked for me—I am now living proof that it is possible to be happy and satisfied with your life as a parent even while there is a child on the floor of your kitchen, screaming and writhing because dividing with fractions is just too hard.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 1