“Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of the ‘empty next syndrome’ is increased smiling”.

I read this sentence back in 2006 or so, when I first encountered the brilliant mind of Daniel Gilbert in the pages of his bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness. The book was an eye opener on so many levels that I filed the sentence away in some corner of my brain’s attic and forgot about it. I wasn’t yet a father then and given the difficulty we were having conceiving, I probably sniggered at this statement, thanked my fate and moved on to the next eye opener.

Even then, however, the statement stayed with me because it flew in the face of the popular culture. Everybody I knew who had children thought the world of them and wouldn’t have it any other way. So despite my parent’s covert and overt references to how proud they were of having raised me, I attributed their pride to how I turned out, not their accomplishment in parenting a brat.

Last year, I noticed one of our neighbors, who had just entered the empty nest phase, look at Maya several times with what I thought was wistfulness and a little tear. The look in his eyes stayed with me.

Of course, parenting would be hard, I knew at some intellectual level, having heard that statement from my peers who were far more successful than we were in figuring out how to make babies. But I didn’t realize the depths of despair I could sink into sometimes, the relentlessness, the almost complete lack of time for myself and the total ennui of reading the same book over and over again. Being in the here and now with a child can be mind-numbing.

I attributed this difficulty to the insular life we lead here in the civilized, developed, West. Back in India, grandparents, neighbors, friends and other people pitched in to look after the baby, providing the parent with some much needed breathing time. Further, women of my mother’s generation were raised to expect the life they grew into. They had neither TV to glue their eyes to nor much money to spend. Cook, clean, make babies and raise babies was their life. They were not promised much and most didn’t expect much more. Here in the West, our expectations are much higher as is our sense of control and freedom.

Last week, New York Magazine carried an illuminating article that provided a comprehensive analysis of This Parenting Life. Titled “All Joy and No Fun”, it went behind the scenes to dissect Daniel Gilbert’s statement and in the process explores the cultural and psychological landscape of modern parenting.

The article, written by Jennifer Senior, starts with a study published in a scholarly journal last year that challenged Gilbert’s view. “Contrary to much of the literature, our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children”, said the paper. The kick in the story however is that the author withdrew the paper a few months later when he discovered that his analysis was based on a coding error.

The article posits that a large factor in this Unhappy Parent Syndrome is that the experience of parenting has fundamentally changed. From a time when we thanked the gods for letting our children see the light beyond the first year of their life, we’ve come to a place where anything less than admission to a top school, a high paying job and a trophy wife is considered a failure. And to this end, parents have to do everything. Nothing is too much. Thinking that we’re solely responsible for how our children turn out, we rush them to expensive private schools (or expensive homes with good public homes), swimming lessons, karate classes, dance and a host of other activities designed to give them a leg up over the others. The stress to be the perfect parent is one major factor in what ruins the joy of parenting.

Other factors that affect our experience of parenting include the the later ages at which we have children and the support we get as parents from society such as extended time off when babies are born and decent childcare and public schools. According to the author, the only study that showed happy parents came from Denmark, where the state provides substantial support for parents.

Another key observation of the article is that parents tend to be unhappy in the daily moments of parenting, but look back on parenting as a most rewarding time. The author quotes two studies that lead to this conclusion. One is a study in which people categorized activities along the dual quadrant of pleasurable and rewarding. Activities such as work were considered rewarding, but not pleasurable while activities such as eating and watching TV were considered pleasurable but not rewarding. Raising children ranked behind volunteering and prayer as activities that were both pleasurable and rewarding. Another study found that childless couples were more depressed than couples with children and that single fathers without the custody of their children were the most depressed.

The author thus questions whether all these studies that conclude with the happy empty nest syndrome are those that define happiness as the immediate experience of positive feelings instead of being concerned with eudaimonia, of having lived a good life.

I liken parenting to running a marathon. No one who runs it can consider the experience painless. But after it is over, the euphoria of accomplishment is so overwhelming that many rush to run another one.

In any case, do read the article. Highly recommended.

Happy Maya

Related posts:

1. I Still Don’t Understand…
2. Culture and Parenting In Kidspeak
3. Are Parents Irrelevant ?
4. A Toy Around Every Corner
5. (P)raising Kids