Jennifer Senior Quotes & Sayings

No matter how perfect our circumstances, most of us, as Adam Phillips observed, "learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like." The hard part is to make peace with that misty zone and to recognize that no life - no life worth living anyway - is free of constraints. — Jennifer Senior

If that's what joy is - connection - then to fully experience it requires something terrifying as well as exalting: opening oneself up to the possibility of loss. — Jennifer Senior

The author says this socially respectable option NOT to parent has actually made parenthood more stressful. The knowledge that parents have chosen that role allows for unrealistic buildup of expectations and unavoidable second-guessing. — Jennifer Senior

One could simply say it's a legitimate fear-response, a reasonable and deeply internalized reaction to a shrinking economic pie. — Jennifer Senior

He just has to step away from the moment to see it. Which isn't surprising. Lots of parents will tell you that when they aren't fighting with their teenagers about homework or scraping up raisins their toddlers have expertly ground into the kitchen floor, they're quite happy, upon reflection. — Jennifer Senior

More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes
or napping, or shopping, or answering emails
to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman's study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one
and nothing
provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it's the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales. — Jennifer Senior

Even when our children are still young and defenseless, we feel intimations of their departure. We find ourselves staring at them with nostalgia, wistful for the person they're about to no longer be. — Jennifer Senior

Parenthood is harder than conventional work, the author suggests, because our jobs develop a somewhat predictable flow and offer relatively short-term feedback. This leads to internal comparisons to the improvisational nature of parenting — Jennifer Senior

One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child. — Jennifer Senior

The 20th century, the author observes, fostered the idea that fulfillment is possible on Earth. — Jennifer Senior

Becoming a parent is one of the most sudden and dramatic changes in adult life. — Jennifer Senior

During childhood, it's about trying to help develop who your kid's going to be. During adolescence, it's about responding to who your kid wants to be. — Jennifer Senior

Over time, researchers who look at the adolescent brain have therefore alighted on a variety of metaphors and analogies to describe their excesses. Casey prefers Star Trek: "Teenagers are more Kirk than Spock." Steinberg likens teenagers to cars with powerful accelerators and weak brakes. "And then parents are going to get into tussles with their teenagers," says Steinberg, "because they're going to try to be the brakes. — Jennifer Senior

What makes a mother? Looking at your child and identifying emotion — Jennifer Senior

Your children are going through life with their eyes closed, so YOU'RE the one who has to steer. — Jennifer Senior

They also create wormholes in time, transporting their mothers and fathers back to feelings and sensations they haven't had since they themselves were young. The dirty secret about adulthood is the sameness of it, its tireless adherence to routines and customs and norms. Small children may intensify this sense of repetition and rigidity by virtue of the new routines they establish. But they liberate their parents from their ruts too. — Jennifer Senior

If it's of any comfort, B. J. Casey and her colleagues speculate that there's an evolutionary reason why Kirk rather than Spock so often emerges the victor in the quest for control over an adolescent's mind. Human beings need incentives to leave the family nest. Leaving home is dangerous; leaving home is hard. It requires courage and learning lessons of independence. It may even require a purposeful recklessness. — Jennifer Senior

We enshrine things in memory very differently from how we experience them in real time. — Jennifer Senior

Researchers have discovered that adolescents do not walk around with a defect that prevents them from properly assessing risk. B. J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, notes that it's just the opposite: adolescents overestimate risk, at least when it comes to situations involving their own mortality. The real problem is that they assign a greater value to the reward they will get from taking that risk than adults do. It turns out that dopamine, the hormone that signals pleasure, is never so explosively active in human beings as it is during puberty. Never over the course of our lives will we feel anything quite so intensely, or quite so exultantly, again. — Jennifer Senior

Our stories may not always be pleasant as they're being lived. They can in fact be just the opposite, acquiring a warm hue only in retrospect. "I think this boils down to a philosophical question rather than a psychological one," Tom Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell, tells me. "Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?" He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. — Jennifer Senior

It is unrealistic, I think - and by "unrealistic" I mean it is a demand that cannot be met - to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn't make you happy; but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children, I think, suffer - in a way that adults don't always realize - under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy, which is the pressure not to make their parents unhappy, or more unhappy than they already are. — Jennifer Senior

This is what parents do
what all of us do, in fact, when we're at our unrivaled best. 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. Gift-love at its purest. — Jennifer Senior

THE SENTIMENTALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD has produced a great many paradoxes. The most curious, however, may be that children have acquired more and more stuff the more useless they have become. Until the late nineteenth century, when kids were still making vital contributions to the family economy, they didn't have toys as we know them. They played with found and household objects (sticks, pots, brooms). In his book Children at Play, the scholar Howard Chudacoff writes, Some historians even maintain that before the modern era, the most common form of children's play occurred not with toys but with other children - siblings, cousins, and peers. — Jennifer Senior

In 1971, for instance, a trio from Harvard observed ninety mother-toddler pairs for five hours and found that on average, mothers gave a command, told their child no, or fielded a request (often "unreasonable" or "in a whining tone") every three minutes. Their children, in turn, obeyed on average only 60 percent of the time. This is not exactly a formula for perfect mental health. — Jennifer Senior

Couples with children may argue more, the author suggests, because children are a reminder of just how crucial our choices are. — Jennifer Senior

Americans have come to define liberty negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one's wealth or time. — Jennifer Senior

Back in the fifties, women were told to master the differences between oven cleaners and floor wax and special sprays for wood; today they're told to master the differences between toys that hone problem-solving skills and those that encourage imaginative play. This subtle shift in language suggests that playing with one's child is not really play but a job, just as keeping house once was. Buy Buy Baby is today's equivalent of the 1950s supermarket product aisle, and those shelves of child-rearing guides at the bookstore are today's equivalent of Good Housekeeping, offering women the possibility of earning a doctorate in mothering. — Jennifer Senior

Alas, that's what adulthood is supposed to be about: "an overcoming" or (better yet) "a disciplining of a developmentally appropriate insanity. — Jennifer Senior

This is another thing that quantitative studies of American time use cannot show you: for the majority of mothers, time is fractured and subdivided, as if streaming through a prism; for the majority of fathers, it moves in an unbent line. — Jennifer Senior

Complicating matters, adolescent brains are more susceptible to substance abuse and dependence than adult brains, because they're making so many new synaptic connections and sloshing around with so much dopamine. Pretty much all quasi-vices to which human beings turn for relief and escape - drinking, drugs, video games, porn - have longer-lasting and more intense effects in teenagers. It makes acting out especially tempting to them, and it makes their habits especially hard to break. — Jennifer Senior

As parents, we sometimes mistakenly assume that things were always this way. They weren't. The modern family is just that - modern - and all of our places in it are quite new. Unless we keep in mind how new our lives as parents are, and how unusual and ahistorical, we won't see that world we live in, as mothers and fathers, is still under construction. Modern childhood was invented less than seventy years ago - the length of a catnap, in historical terms. — Jennifer Senior

"Having it all" is the phrase of a culture that, as Adam Phillips implies in 'Missing Out', is tyranized by the idea of its own potential. A few generations ago, most people didn't wake up in the morning and fret about whether or not they were living their lives to the fullest. Freedom has always been built into the American experiment, of course, but the freedom to take off and go rock-climbing for the afternoon, or to study engineering, or even to sneak in ten minutes for ourselves in the morning to read the paper- these kinds of freedoms were not, until very recently, built into our private universes of anticipation. It's important to remember that. — Jennifer Senior

SOME OF THE HARDEST parts of parenting never change - like sleep deprivation, which, according to researchers at Queen's University in Ontario, can in some respects impair our judgment as much as being legally drunk. (There's something wonderfully vindicating about this analogy.) — Jennifer Senior

But these gains in freedom for both men and women often seem like a triumph of subtraction rather than addition. Over time, writes Coontz, Americans have come to define liberty "negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one's wealth or time." If this is how you conceive of liberty - as freedom from obligation - then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all. — Jennifer Senior

In addition, Steinberg has found that adolescence is especially rough on parents who don't have an outside interest, whether it be work or a hobby, to absorb their interests as their child is pulling away. — Jennifer Senior

That women bring home the bacon, fry it up, serve it for breakfast, and use its greasy remains to make candles for their children's science projects is hardly news. Yet how parenting responsibilities get sorted out under these conditions remains unresolved. Neither government nor private business has adapted to this reality, throwing the burden back onto individual families to cope. And while today's fathers are more engaged with their children than fathers in any previous generation, they're charting a blind course, navigating by trial and, just as critically, error. Many women can't tell whether they're supposed to be grateful for the help they're getting or enraged by the help they're failing to receive; many men, meanwhile, are struggling to adjust to the same work-life rope-a-dope as their wives, now that they too are expected to show up for Gymboree. — Jennifer Senior

We long for experiences "of profound connection with others," he writes, "of deep understanding of natural phenomena, of love, of being profoundly moved by music or tragedy, or doing something new and innovative." Just as important, we long for esteem and pride, "a self that happiness is a fitting response to." Implicit in Nozick's experiment is the idea that happiness should be a by-product, not a goal. Many of the ancient Greeks believed the same. To Aristotle, eudaimonia (roughly translated as "flourishing") meant doing something productive. Happiness could only be achieved through exploiting our strengths and our potential. To be happy, one must do, not just feel. — Jennifer Senior

In 1975, another landmark paper showed that mothers presiding over an empty nest were not despairing, as conventional wisdom had always assumed, but happier than mothers who still had children at home; during the eighties, as women began their great rush into the workforce, sociologists generally concluded that while work was good for women's well-being, children tended to negate its positive effects. — Jennifer Senior

Indeed, many adults don't consider having children at all until they've deemed themselves good and ready: in 2008, 72 percent of college-educated women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine had not yet had children. — Jennifer Senior

And women, it turns out, pay a steep economic price for being mothers: according to Shelley Correll, a Stanford sociologist who looks at gender inequities in the labor force, the wage gap between mothers and childless women who are otherwise equally qualified is now greater than the wage gap between women and men generally. — Jennifer Senior

And how long an activity lasts seems to have little influence on our recollections at all - two weeks of vacation, Kahneman noted in a 2010 TED lecture, won't be recalled with much more fondness or intensity than one week, because that extra week probably won't add much new material to the original memory. (Never mind that the experiencing self might really enjoy that extra week of vacation.) — Jennifer Senior

Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive. — Jennifer Senior

If one takes meaning into consideration, happiness might best be described as "a zest for life in all its complexity," as Sissela Bok writes in her book. To achieve it means to "attach our lives to something larger than ourselves." To be happy, one must do. It could be something as simple as teaching Sunday school or as grand as leading nonviolent protests. It could be as cerebral as seeking the cure for cancer or as physical as climbing mountains. It could be creating art. And it could be raising a child - my "best piece of poetrie," as Ben Jonson said in his elegy for his seven-year-old son. — Jennifer Senior

The author says that one of the difficulties of modern parenting is the uncertainty of what parents are preparing children for. In traditional societies this was clear, as parents prepared children for a society and for roles much like their own. She writes, There is no folk wisdom. — Jennifer Senior

The author observes the shift now that children are not a source of labor for the family, that they have gone from employees of the parents to the bosses of the parents. — Jennifer Senior

Homework is the new family dinner. — Jennifer Senior

Drawing from 1.7 million Gallup surveys collected between 2008 and 2012, researchers Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone found that parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more lows, than those without children ... And when researchers bother to ask questions of a more existential nature, they find that parents report greater feelings of meaning and reward
which to many parents is what the entire shebang is about. — Jennifer Senior

thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward," Krishna tells his student Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.) — Jennifer Senior

As Dr. Spock points out, raising happy children is an elusive aim compared to the more concrete aims of parenting in the past: creating competent children in certain kinds of work; and creating morally responsible citizens who fulfill a prescribed set of community obligations. The fact is, those bygone goals are probably more constructive
and achievable. Not all children will grow up to be happy, in spite of their parents' most valiant efforts, and all children are unhappy somewhere along the way. — Jennifer Senior

George Washington became an official surveyor for Culpepper County at seventeen and a commissioned major in the militia at twenty; — Jennifer Senior

Children learn from the world through doing, touching, experiencing; adults on the other hand, tend to take in the world through their heads - reading books, watching television, swiping at touch screens. They're estranged from the world of everyday objects. Yet interacting with the world is fundamental to who we are. — Jennifer Senior

The author describes the critic within us as adults as the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies, who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited about how it could work or should, who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love, unless, that is, they have small children. — Jennifer Senior

We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the "experiencing self" versus the "remembering self. — Jennifer Senior

The phrase "having it all" has little to do with having what we want. — Jennifer Senior

And if that's the case
if we are our remembering selves
then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. "You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings. — Jennifer Senior

Everyone is moving at the same speed toward the future. But your children are moving at that same speed with their eyes closed. So you're the ones who've got to steer. — Jennifer Senior

Children live life as a controlled experiment. — Jennifer Senior

Adults," Phillips writes, "are not less excessive in their behavior than adolescents. Concentration camps were not run by adolescents; adolescents are not mostly alcoholics or millionaires. — Jennifer Senior

Having worked so hard to have children, parents may feel it's only natural to expect happiness from the experience. And they'll find happiness of course, but not necessarily continuously, and not always in the forms they might expect. — Jennifer Senior

But the truth is, there's little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. — Jennifer Senior

ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict. — Jennifer Senior

There is a certain part of all of us," Milan Kundera writes, "that lives outside of time. — Jennifer Senior

Because so many of us are now avid volunteers for a project in which we were all once dutiful conscripts, we have heightened expectations of what children will do for us, regarding them as sources of existential fulfillment rather than as ordinary parts of our lives. — Jennifer Senior