You don’t have to be on Facebook, or at Target, or even on my blog for long to see evidence that parenthood, while amazing, is also aggravating and exasperating. As Jennifer Senior entitled her best-selling book, parenting can sometimes feel like All Joy and No Fun.
In that book, Senior explored why today’s parents are so stressed out, and why parents are actually less happy than non-parents. In fact, a 2004 study showed that, when asked to rank activities in terms of their pleasurableness, women ranked child care sixteenth out of nineteen. It ranked below cleaning the house!
How can we bring more joy to parenting?
I think we can look at Senior’s analysis and bring in a bit of ancient wisdom…
FIVE WAYS TO MAKE PARENTING (AND LIFE) MORE JOYFUL
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” -Buddha
1. Surrender to Kid Time
Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn call children our “live-in Zen masters,” for they constantly tether us to the present. In many ways, our kids are far better than we are at living in the present, as their minds are not distracted by past regrets or future worries.
Senior describes part of the frustration of parenting as our inability to achieve “flow”: we cannot lose ourselves in our writing or reading or other pleasurable activities amidst the chaos of lunchtime and playtime and “Mommmmmm!!!!”
Sometimes we simply must set aside everything else and surrender to kid time. Senior writes, “carving out time in the permanent present is a worthy goal. It’s possible to join children in their futureless worlds for even ten minutes, if that’s all we’ve got to spare.” It’s the practice of mindfulness, of parenting, of life itself.
“Don’t worry about what others do or don’t do. Rather, pay attention to what you do or fail to do.” -Buddha
2. Repeat: “I am the standard.”
Senior suggests a new mantra for parents: “I am the standard.” We cannot hold ourselves up to Pinterest-worthy standards of perfection. You ARE a good parent. In fact, I think the very existence of our parental anxiety and self-criticism is a sign of being a good parent. We care enough to think deeply about our parenting. We reflect on it. And that’s important – if there are things that need changing, we should change them. But WE are the standard. Not our neighbors. Not the mothers in the parenting magazines.
“If one knew oneself to be precious, one would guard oneself with care. The sage will watch over herself in any part of the night.” -Buddha
3. Make self-care a priority.
Interesting note: the French spend less time with their children, and enjoy parenting more. It’s an important reminder to MAKE TIME FOR YOU.
Senior describes today’s parenting as “concerted cultivation” – we’re constantly stimulating and engaging our children, from Mommy-and-Me classes to violin lessons and Kumon courses and ice-skating … and we rarely give our kids, or ourselves, a break. I don’t think I can stress enough how important self-care is for parents. And not just because it will make you a better parent. IT’S OKAY FOR IT TO BE COMPLETELY ABOUT YOU because you are a human being and deserve nurturing.
Know what’s in your self-care toolkit {going for a walk, reading a book, going out to a coffee shop, going to the gym, taking a nap} and make time for YOU.
As Brene Brown writes in Daring Greatly, “It’s a terrible myth to believe that once we have children, our journey ends and theirs begins.”
“The person obsessed with gathering flowers, insatiable for sense pleasures, is under the sway of death.” -Buddha
4. Give children time for free play. Without You.
Our high-tech, high-stress, over-scheduled lives can often feel like obsessive flower gathering, constantly pursuing the next activity, the next experience, the next thing. We’re so busy with all the activities of parenting, making our kids busy with our busy-ness. I was shocked to learn from Senior’s book that “parenting” wasn’t even a verb until the 1970s – parents raised kids and worked and made meals, but they didn’t “parent.”
Our kids have become almost entirely dependent on us for stimulation and engagement, which they obviously need, but, like all things, they need it in moderation. They need to learn to tolerate boredom. They need to be able to be with themselves, without an iDevice, and be content. They need time to create, read, imagine, run, and play, without adult involvement.
“The root of suffering is attachment.” -Buddha
5. Don’t attach to outcomes. And it’s okay if parenting feels like a chore sometimes.
This time, it’s Senior quoting the ancients. She references the Bhagavad Gita, in which Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna, “Set thy heart upon thy work, but never its reward.” Many times, Senior cites researcher Alison Gopnik’s phrase, “We love them because we care for them.” Not the other way around. Our children don’t exist to make us happy.
There are many parts of parenting that are unpleasant. And once we admit that something is unpleasant, it often takes away its power to make us miserable.
Psychiatrist George Vaillant told Senior about the frustration of helping his autistic son button his coat and tie his shoes, long after other children had learned how to do it by themselves. “And that was a chore,” he said. “But so is, when the grass is long, pushing a lawn mower. And how else are you going to have a lawn?”
*****
The final line of Voltaire’s Candide implores us to drop fruitless speculation and simply “cultivate our garden.”
While I’m certain Voltaire was not thinking of parenthood, I think the metaphor can work for us. We need a change from “concerted cultivation.” Parenting will indeed involve a lot of weeding as we tend to our own nurseries. Instead of obsessing over gathering the flowers, or worrying about what the neighbor’s plantings look like, we do the work {sometimes pleasant, sometimes dirty} in the present moment, simply because it needs to be done.
And fields don’t need to constantly be tilled – we can take time to nourish ourselves, too. Happiness is ultimately the by-product of our actions, not the goal. The flowers may not bloom as depicted in the advertisements, but they will still bring bursts of color and unexpected joys. As Senior states, “we bind ourselves to those who need us most, and through caring for them, grow to love them, grow to delight in them, grow to marvel at who they are.”
That is an approach to parenting worth cultivating.
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