All Joy and A Lot of Fun

Parenting isn't a drag, you guys.

There’s a 2015 book called All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. I have not read it, but I have read about it, and from what I can tell it encapsulates the High Discourse message these days about having kids: it’s deeply fulfilling in a roundabout way but kind of a drag in the day to day. I guess the author, Jennifer Senior, interviewed a lot of parents. And their message echoes one I heard from many folks online when I announced my first pregnancy in 2021: It will be really tough, you’ll have to give up a lot, and say goodbye to having fun—but you’ll be filled with a nifty sense of purpose.

This is a terrible message to give prospective parents. And while I suppose it has been some people’s experience of parenting, it has not been mine. Yes, parenthood does usher in all those high-level emotions people rave about. But parenting is also a lot of fun.

This past weekend we went to the Cincinnati zoo’s Festival of Lights. We’ve been to the Kings Island Winterfest recently and the museum center downtown and a holiday craft fair and a Chanukah Bazaar. We do lots of things like this these days—zoos, museums, amusement parks, farms, pumpkin patches, playgrounds, church festivals, neighborhood festivals, county parks, and so on. Many of these activities wouldn’t much interest me without kids. But having a kid along let’s you see and experience everything as they do, and suddenly all these activities you outgrew decades ago are a blast once more.

One of the best parts about having a kid is enjoying kid things again. Their wonder and lack of self-consciousness (about what’s cool, or productive, or whatever) becomes your wonder and lack of self-consciousness, too.

Visit all the Winterfests!

I’m sure it helps that I spent nearly two decades doing all the grownup things I wanted whenever I wanted. I lived in big cities, and went to big parties, and met all sort of folks who did smart and creative and interesting things. I stayed up late carousing (or sometimes binging Netflix series or reading books). I went to all the happy hours, and all the rooftop shmoozes, and concerts and dive bars and book launches and think-tank galas and beach weekends and weird art events and so on.

I was very young for a very long time in a certain sense of the word. And, honestly, it was starting to get a little old—a little expected and monotonous doing all these supposedly cool things all of the time. Raising kids lets me be young in a different kind of way now, and it’s new and exciting (and also I have way fewer hangovers).

I might feel differently about being a parent if I hadn’t lived so much first. But who knows, maybe not. In any event, I’ll save my ode to The Joy of Being an Old Mom for another post. All I’m trying to say now is that my husband and I had a whole lot of fun being childfree and we are both having even more fun now. We still do the things we did pre-kids, just with less frequency, and we also get to do a whole of new things.

I’ve been thinking about all this lately thanks to a new piece by Rachel Cohen at Vox (“How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood”) and various responses to it.

One response that sticks out is from Cathy Reisenwitz, who suggested that “parenting is boring, rote, and cognitively undemanding 99% of the time.” Cathy does not have kids, and I understand how someone without kids might get this impression, especially given the prevailing messages around motherhood in media and on social media in the past decade. (This discouraging discourse is one of the main themes of Cohen’s essay, and we’ll come back to that in a bit.)

But for me, having kids—my eldest is now two, and I gave birth to a second son in September—has been anything but “boring and rote.” These little people are changing drastically all the time. They’re constantly delighting me with new skills, interests, quirks, and perspectives. And their happiness and excitement is contagious. I had more fun this summer following my toddler around as he discovered the outdoors for the first time than I did at many adult happy hours and parties I’ve been to.

Backyard treasures

As for cognitively demanding? I don’t know, I suppose that depends on how you define it. Some commenters to Cathy noted that applying intellectual and psychological principles to raising a child elevated it out of this “cognitively undemanding” status and—OK, sure. But I guess my take is I really don’t care if it’s cognitively demanding or not, because my primary experience of parenting is just that it’s a lot of fun.

Of course, it helps that raising children isn’t my whole world. Perhaps—probably—I would chafe, over time, at doing absolutely nothing except child-rearing. But having kids has not stopped me from having other interests as well.

I still have a full professional and intellectual and creative life, while also spending a ton of time with my boys as well. It can be done. I even have time for sleep, too.

This runs counter to a lot of modern messages about motherhood, which is one of the things that Cohen tackles in her Vox essay. For various—and understandable—reasons, negative or conflicted messages about parenting reign in pop culture today.

We rarely here from people who find juggling kids and work (and/or other pursuits) perfectly manageable. We don’t see stories about people whose worlds feel expanded, not contracted, by parenthood. We don’t hear from moms whose male partners are emotionally engaged and hands-on dads, whose mental health is as good as ever, whose bodies have basically (and quickly) returned to their pre-pregnancy norms, and whose “breastfeeding journey” has been neither a major traumatic struggle nor some sort of sentimental, life-affirming pursuit.

For too long, negative or mixed messages about motherhood were shunned. So I’m glad conflicted feelings about raising kids—not to mention issues surrounding women’s postpartum bodies and brains and boobs—are no longer swept under the rug. And the fact that folks can now speak openly about things they couldn’t for a long time surely helps explain why messages of struggle dominate motherhood narratives today.

There’s also an understandable media and creative industry bias toward stories that involve conflict (not to mention stories written by people of particular socioeconomic classes, which happen to be the same classes given to overthinking things). And, yes, a bit of cultural cache coming with victimhood narratives, combined with a feeling (especially among women) that’s is crass to talk about one’s positive experiences when other people might not be as privileged. Besides, for women with certain politics or professional ambitions, talking about the joys of motherhood can sometimes feel like you’re betraying the cause or walking into a trap.

But I think young(ish) people today also need to hear that motherhood isn’t always a struggle. And I think they need to hear this sometimes from weirdos and nerds and people of all political persuasions—not just trad wives and social conservatives, people who describes themselves as crunchy, or people for whom being a mom is part of their lifestyle brand. I bear no ill will toward any of those groups (in fact, there are things I kind of love about them all). But it would be nice to see more varied types of parents happily parenting…

… People who are good and devoted parents but also passionate about their careers. People who love parenting but will never do a popsicle stick craft or dress their kids in brown linen prairie dresses. Moms who still find time to care about politics, art, fashion, hiking, coding, writing, or whatever it is that makes them happy aside from their kids. Moms who don’t feel like motherhood has rendered them invisible or unrecognizable. Moms who don’t fall into some trad-Mom or earth mother stereotype but are still loving parenthood.

Cohen’s piece gets at a lot of this better than I am doing here, so you really should go read the whole thing. While the “dread” and ambivalence around having kids that she identifies surely has many causes, the bottom line is that it isn’t produced in a cultural vacuum.

Yes, women have more choices than ever—and this not only frees folks who don’t want children but increases the opportunity cost of having kids for those who do. That’s real. But it’s also very obvious if you talk to young(ish) women about these matters that today’s dominent message about parenthood (and motherhood in particular) is a serious contributor to their hesitation. And since that message is so incomplete, it’s seriously skewering people’s views.

Also fun: dressing your baby in ridiculous holiday-themed outfits

I’m grateful we live in an era when it’s not simply expected that people—and especially women—will have kids. (There’s still a lot of societal pressure and expectation in that department, but it’s surely not as socially awkward or isolating as in the past.) It’s important that we keep presenting this as a valid option and providing positive examples of what a childfree life can look like (Farrah Storr has been hitting this note a lot recently).

All that said, I wholeheartedly agree with Cohen and others that we need more positive—and varied—examples of millennial and Gen Z parenthood, and especially motherhood, right now. We’ve gotten so many cultural messages growing up about how hard life is for mothers, how stressed you’ll be, how you’ll never look or feel like yourself again, how no one appreciates you, how it’s too hard to be a working mom, how “you can’t have it all” actually, and you’ll do more physical and emotional labor at home, and so on and so on.

It’s no wonder so many people in my generation are afraid of having kids. But it is shame. Because, you guys, you’re missing out on a whole lot of joy and a whole lot of fun.