How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  And the coach who excluded one boy from his extra teams? Years later, says Rebecca Goff, “he told our family how much he had grown in respect for our family and our convictions.” They’re still in touch.

  Keep Sports and Activities in Their Place

  One of the joys of being a modern kid from a fortunate family is that you get to do a whole bunch of stuff for fun that most adults don’t get to do at all. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a big mistake by us grown-ups—see the final section in this chapter, “Find Your Own Thing.” But there you have it. Adult people drive you around and pay for you to run and jump or learn drums or sing on a stage, and then they cheer and clap. With any luck, everyone has fun, and then everyone goes home.

  That’s not always the way it works. When we start to take it too seriously, the fun goes away quickly, and if you’re dragging your kid to a “have to” practice instead of helping him get somewhere he wants to go, no one is happy.

  For most children, a sport or activity is not a ticket to college. When it comes to sports, as Mark Hyman, author of The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today’s Families, says, “If you want to get a scholarship for your kids, you’re better off investing in a biology tutor than a quarterback coach.” In most sports, fewer than 10 percent of kids go on to play in college, and even fewer get any kind of sports-related financial aid—only around 3 percent of that 10 percent. The odds of “going pro” are orders of magnitude smaller. But an astonishing 26 percent of parents with high-school-age children who play sports hope their child will become a professional athlete one day. The percentages are even greater among less-educated and lower-income parents: 44 percent of parents with a high school education or less and 39 percent of parents with a household income of less than $50,000 a year are dreaming of the bigs and the majors for their kids. A lot of money and time is spent on those dreams.

  This is a game, an activity, an art, a joy, and just one piece of a happy life. Sure, we want our kids to take their commitment to the cast of the school musical or their soccer or robotics teammates seriously. And we hope they’ll learn some things about dealing with other people, about failure, about the need to work hard to improve. But parents are happier when we treat our children’s favorite pastimes, no matter how blown up they may be by the youth soccer industrial complex et al., as just that—their favorite pastime. That means we talk about it as fun and we don’t worry too much if things go wrong. We might be at every performance if they’re rare, less so if they’re not, and we know it’s okay if we don’t make every game.

  When the adults in their lives keep things in perspective, children learn to do the same, and that tends to make everyone happier. Maybe our children do need sports and activities to round out a college application eventually, but spending four years devotedly and happily tending the school’s saltwater fish tank is better than four miserable years on the debate team. Ask yourself, and your child—if this was just for fun, would you still do it? Would you do this much of it? Would it take this much money and time?

  If the answer is no, think again.

  Embrace It (and Make Your Own Fun)

  Who has not been made crazy, on a particularly mundane-seeming day, by the clichéd appearance of the phrase from poet Mary Oliver: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” There it is, mocking you in an appealing font over some form of inspirational image while you contemplate your planned weekend of driving children to various games, competitions, or rehearsals all over the state. What will you do? it demands, and some part of you thinks, Is this it?

  How’s this for an answer? Yes.

  Yes, this is it. Would you really want to do something different? Would you want your child not to have chosen this thing that he loves? Would you want someone else to be there for his big day, whatever that is? Isn’t this really where you want to be, even if it’s in the car at five a.m. on the way to the state finals?

  Of course, we carpool when we can, and we don’t need or want to go along every time. But when you do, embrace it. Welcome the car time with your child, the joy of watching whatever it is, the pleasure of seeing your healthy, happy child getting to do this fun thing. “You’re really not going to get to do this for that long,” says Andrea Montalbano, author of the Soccer Sisters series for middle graders. She played soccer herself through college and now has two kids who play in Massachusetts. “We pulled into a tournament in New Jersey recently, and I grabbed my daughter, and we took a picture in the parking lot. I don’t get to do this with my mom anymore. I try to treasure it. There’s no place I’d rather be.”

  Think about the reasons you love this for your kid or your family, not about the slog. In her book Flight of the Quetzal Mama: How to Raise Latino Superstars and Get Them into the Best Colleges, Roxanne Ocampo describes her family’s decision to enroll their young son in a debate program that required a three-hour round-trip on Saturdays: “It wasn’t convenient,” she says (an understatement), but it was “a great investment in Emilio’s future.” Because their family had collectively decided that success in the highest levels of academia was a goal they would all work toward, they “stepped up” and made it happen.

  Once you have made it happen, find a way to make it fun—for you. I knit during hockey games, and I love the feeling of doing something I enjoy while my kids do the same. And when we travel around the state, I make those trips worth my while. They know that if I drive, we might skip a team meal in favor of a good ramen place or taco stand. They know they’ll be spending time in the local bookstore and that if the town sports a fancy grocery store like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s (our area has neither), we’ll be there. Also I control the timetable, the radio, and any snack stops. The result is that hockey becomes a series of road trips that, at least most of the time, are fun for everyone in the car (so much so that another kid often tags along). I miss it when the season ends.

  Find Your Own Thing

  Here’s an idea: sports and activities aren’t just for kids.

  There are improv groups, arts-and-crafts classes, and adult leagues for team sports. You can take surfing lessons, painting lessons, or piano lessons. Can’t swing a babysitter or rely on a partner? For solo endeavors, there are online groups, courses, and instruction videos. Many a real community has formed around a virtual writing or crafting community. Keep chickens. Be a beekeeper. Invest less time worrying about whether your kids have found their passion and more time finding yours.

  Spending too much time on your child’s activities and not enough (or none) on your own pulls on your happiness. In my research, parents who were still enjoying a hobby or activity from “before kids” tended to be more satisfied with their lives, and when their kids were older, they also felt happier in their parenting. “One of my daughters is a swimmer,” says Jamie Wilson, mother to eighteen-year-old triplet daughters and a twenty-year-old son in South Carolina. “Her coach was starting a Masters Swim team,” she says, and she joined because she was once a swimmer who had quit the sport in high school, and she was now looking toward an open-water charity swimming event six months away. That was four years ago, and Wilson hasn’t stopped swimming since. “I was having so much fun,” she says. With times that qualified her for national meets and a team of other adults all sharing her interest and enthusiasm, “I became obsessed. When your kids are getting older, you need something of your own, because if you’re still spending a lot of time helping them do things they could do themselves, you’re really not helping—you’re hurting.” Nothing prevents you from doing all the planning and packing for your teenager’s swim meet like being away already at a meet of your own.

  While “returning” to an old passion might feel easiest, and even more justifiable, finding something new can also spark your old urge to learn, develop, and improve. We’re adults now, and we can decide to adopt a hobby or sport that intrigues us, or even one we dreamed o
f as kids, and if we want, we can bring our kids along. Having kids who join in your activities, rather than the other way around, also correlates with life satisfaction. I was the kind of child who saved up money for trail rides at a local park, and when I signed my older kids up for the riding lessons I’d always wanted, I signed up, too. Now, as I’ve mentioned, we own a barn and run it as a family business, and working around the farm isn’t optional.

  But just the fact that you could bring your kids into your adventure doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Your “thing,” whatever it is, might be entirely new, entirely frivolous, and entirely for you. Before Jamie Wilson rediscovered swimming, when her children were very young (the triplets were three and her son, five), she took up the guitar. “I was at home with the kids, and I wanted to be there,” she says, but at the same time, the energetic Wilson needed something more. While her peers were shepherding their preschoolers to Suzuki violin, she scheduled her own music lessons, which gave her the push she needed to set up babysitting and ignited her drive to improve. “I played every night for seven or eight years,” she said, and eventually began to write and perform her own songs (you can find her on Spotify as Jamie Twang). Her kids, she said, needed her, but they didn’t need all of her, all the time.

  If we want to raise grown-ups (and we do), we have to make this grown-up thing look good—for their sakes, and for our own. Find something fun, and give yourself permission to do it.

  Don’t think you can fit that in? Consider this rant from Madeline Levine in her book Teach Your Children Well:

  If you’re willing to give up your life, interests, friendships, and profession so that your child gets to see you week after week passively sitting in the bleachers watching whatever game he’s playing; if you spend night after night sitting next to your child, helping with homework or overseeing her efforts instead of going out with a friend or your spouse; if money goes to prep course after prep course, tutor after tutor instead of to a family vacation or even a weekend away for you and your husband, then . . . [y]ou have taught your kids that the moon and stars revolve around them and that the needs of adults, adults charged with the responsibility of taking care of and supporting a family (and often taking care of aging parents as well) can’t hold a candle to a twelve-year-old’s soccer game or a sixteen-year-old’s math test.

  Don’t do that, and you’ll all be happier.

  five

  HOMEWORK: MORE FUN WHEN IT’S NOT YOURS

  Our family’s homework travails began when my oldest son changed schools for second grade. In his old school, he had no homework; in the new one, he had some—one worksheet of math problems a few nights a week, and a weekly spelling list and test. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than ten minutes of homework per grade per night, and he should easily have been able to complete the work within that time.

  He couldn’t. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work. He just . . . didn’t. He twirled his pencil. He balanced his chair on two legs. He gazed into the distance, contemplating the specks of dust glistening and drifting in the sunlight of the window. He didn’t complain or even seem particularly unhappy (and he did not then, and does not now, have attention issues). He sat there, pencil in hand, work on the table, and did other things. Leave him alone, and later, you’d find him on the floor under the chair, zooming the pencil around airplane style. Sit with him, and he’d engage you in constant, non-homework-related conversation about the pencil, the dust, the view out the window, the political situation as he understood it.

  If this sounds rather charming, it was (now in high school, he’s still charming). It did not, however, get the job done, and that didn’t make anyone happy. We consulted the teacher, set timers, adjusted the workload, found ways to direct his attention back to the task at hand, but he didn’t change much. In third grade, the work increased (slightly) and so did the time he spent with it. Not on it, because for at least 50 percent of the time he and his homework spent together, no one could say he was “doing” homework. It drove us crazy. Why could he not just zip through the math problems, which were nothing he couldn’t easily do, copy the spelling words or whatever, and be done so he could do something else?

  Meanwhile, the parents around us were having different homework struggles. Perfectionist children who couldn’t be persuaded that they’d done enough on their State Fair poster by midnight, frustrated tantrums over fractions, twins in different classrooms with entirely different homework loads, family dinners ruined, and younger siblings tugging and distracting parents trying to help struggling older kids. Then there was the mother of one child’s classmate who would call to see if she could pick up our child to come play.

  “After homework,” I’d say.

  “What homework?” she’d ask. According to her kid, there never was any.

  All of this added up to substantial amounts of misery for everyone involved—and our pencil-twirling oldest turned out to be a piece of cake in comparison to one of his younger siblings. Homework was hard on everyone.

  Surely, somewhere, there were children who went home, did their homework without comment, and turned it in the next day—or children who were blissfully homework free. If that’s the case in your family, you can skip this chapter (or save it for later). Homework isn’t a universal problem, but when it’s a problem, it feels overwhelming. Some parents described teachers complaining about the homework. It was undone, poorly done, not turned in, not up to potential. Then there were the parents who were complaining right back. Homework was stressful, homework interfered with play and family time. Children were too worried about homework, or too confused, or needed help but then insisted their parents were “not doing it right.”

  Is there any way to salvage some parent and family happiness out of this? Because in general, parents, students, siblings, and even, I soon learned, many teachers are united in one belief: homework sucks.

  What Goes Wrong

  Our homework didn’t make our parents’ lives miserable. In many cases, it barely appeared on their radar. Those of us who finished school at the end of the twentieth century can look at our own children and see their time in school as similar to our own, in classrooms where boys and girls are at least nominally equal and college is often the goal. For many of our parents, that wasn’t the case. Their high school experience was very different from ours. Most of our mothers weren’t necessarily expected to excel in rigorous subjects, and they might not have been expected to go to college at all. High school, as an institution, evolved very rapidly. Unless they were from wealthy families, their parents (our grandparents) were probably the first children in their families to even attend high school, and not finishing wasn’t unusual. In 1910, just 9 percent of the population graduated from high school; by 1940, that percentage had increased to just over 50 percent.

  That democratization of secondary education was uniquely American. Immigrant parents would have had even less experience with the classes, activities, and homework that were becoming a standard part of adolescence here, let alone with the process of applying to colleges that follows. So for generations, instead of shepherding a child through a familiar experience, parents either struggled with what it means to raise a child with a new set of expectations or stepped back and let those children handle it. Hovering over homework, or school in general, wasn’t part of the picture.

  But when our generation of parents sees our children embarking on the path from kindergarten and beyond, we’re seeing a process we know intimately, and we want to help. Oddly, though, much of our “help” is less than helpful. Both individually and as a society, we’ve upped the ante for upper- and middle-class kids by packing their schedules with enriching non-school activities. Our parents didn’t have to concern themselves about whether homework could get done in the limited space between violin, soccer, and Kumon (oh, the irony). We’ve also pushed schools, especially in affluent communities, toward more academic rigor. Kinde
rgarten is no longer just for playtime, and recess along with music and the arts is rapidly disappearing from the lower school schedule. In high school, electives like photography and metal shop lose out to extra academic offerings thought to be more impressive to college admissions officers, and those classes often involve additional homework.

  That means that if you suspect your own children have more homework than you once did, you’re probably right. While there’s no evidence of an enormous nationwide increase in homework load, data on two groups of kids suggests a significant uptick: homework for nine-year-olds went from no homework at all to some, and while the national average homework load for high schoolers has hovered at less than two hours a night for decades, students in high-performing (and high-income) schools reported more than three hours. (It’s worth noting that homework itself is not correlated with student performance.)

  Those small-sounding changes have made a big difference for many families. If you’re the parent of a nine-year-old, or a younger child who has been assigned to bring in four interesting facts about marmosets, you know that—as we discovered when our oldest hit the homework roadblock for the first time—the difference between “none” and “some” is more than just “significant.” For some children, it’s the end of the world, or you’d think it was, as you watch them rolling around on the floor and screaming in protest over five math problems that could easily be done by now if they’d just get over it.

  “No” homework is no homework. “Some” homework can change the family dynamic, turning parents into taskmasters and evenings into stress-filled power struggles, or at the very least demanding accommodation where once there was just free time. Even that’s harder than it sounds if, for example, pick-up from the after-school program is at six p.m., there’s still dinner to be made and eaten, and the assignment is “read and discuss the story of Johnny Appleseed with a parent.”