All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (17 page)

Did she read Amy Chua’s
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother?

“Only pieces,” says Lan. “It was kind of dramatic. And from my experience, even if moms act like Tiger Moms, they would never
say
they are Tiger Moms.”

One characteristic that Lan does share with Tiger mothers, however, is that she has given up quite a lot for the sake of her child. One wouldn’t have necessarily predicted this trajectory for her: she comes from a family of well-known Chinese artists and intellectuals, and she grew up with a belief in expressing herself. She learned the violin from her father and began publishing poems and articles at just eight years old. After graduating from Beijing Normal University, she became a reporter and editor in China. It was only when the MD Anderson Cancer Center offered her husband, Jiang, a postdoctoral degree that she came to the United States.

Here, she worked at a Chinese-language newspaper for a while. But then she had Ben, and everything changed. She stayed home with him for the first four years, and when he went off to preschool, she decided a reporter’s life wasn’t for her, because it involved too many late evenings. Instead, she took some courses in biology. Now she works at Texas Children’s Hospital, doing research on gene therapy.

Lan finds the work challenging. But it’s not her first love. Writing is. What her job provides is compact hours so that she can be home with Ben at the end of the day. Every morning, she drives him to school. On the weekends, she or her husband drives him to his piano lesson. She drives Ben to the rink on weekends too, and during the weekdays she sometimes takes him to a different rink early in the mornings, before school starts. There’s also his scouting activities on weekends and Tuesday nights.

I mention that she must spend an awful lot of time in the car.

“It’s horrible,” she says. “If we lived in Sugar Land, it’d be much easier, but then it’d be too far to drive to work every day.” She looks thoughtfully at the ice. “What if one day he tells me, ‘I don’t want to skate; I want to play basketball.’ It happened to other kids I know. Kids. Anything can happen.”

It seems unlikely. This summer Ben spent seven weeks in Colorado Springs, training daily at a huge rink from six o’clock in the morning until six at night. He’d then come home from practice and do an online math course, at the insistence of his father. Lan went for five of those weeks, using up two years’ worth of vacation time in order to do it. Ben’s father went for three weeks too. They stayed in an apartment two miles away,

Well, I say, she could tell Ben he
can’t
quit.

“I would never do that,” she says. “I tell him, ‘If you love it, I can spend time, money, and energy to support you; you just have to do your best.’ ”

Yet in some ways these expenditures—time, money, and energy—are the least of it for Lan. What’s scariest, she says, is all the emotional capital she’s invested in her son’s life.

“Parents want their kids perfect,” she says. “But they can’t be. And you see that in skating.” She points. Ben is in the midst of a very graceful program, as best as I can tell. “See, this jump he just did?” I did. It was impossible to miss. “It’s a double axel,” she says, “but he’s still not consistent on this. He’s very happy if he lands it, but if he doesn’t, he’s very sad. And I feel sad too. It’s very hard to keep your emotions under control.”

A woman with a long ponytail starts following Ben around the rink, her wrists clasped behind her back. Lan explains that she’s his trainer, Shannon. We stare for a while. He is truly magnificent. “He has a magic for skating,” says Lan, clearly thinking the same thing. She’s finally allowed herself to relax, and the pleasure, the pride, is legible on her face.
I can’t believe this boy is mine.

“When you have your logic, you think,
Oh, skating is only skating. The kids love it,”
she says. “But before competition, it’s not only about fun. And you can’t stand outside. You become so involved.”

Again, she stares at the ice. “My life has three parts,” she says. “One is job. One is Benjamin. And the other is after ten, when I do my writing and editing. But sometimes I’m too tired.”

And if she had more time to herself, would she pursue her writing?

“Yes,” she says. “There are many books I want to write.” She’s already had two collections of articles published in China. “But I’m supposed to publish three books together. It’s a series. I can’t finish. I don’t have time.”

I ask if Ben has ever read her books. She shakes her head. She’s supposed to know his world, not the other way around. Even if Ben wanted to read her books—and if ever there were a kid who would, it’d be Ben—he couldn’t. Unlike so many other parents in her cohort, Lan never made her son learn to read Chinese.

IN CHAPTER 2, I
talked about how mothers bear the brunt of most child-rearing tasks. This imbalance extends well beyond the toddler years. In 2008, Lareau and her colleague Elliot Weininger analyzed two different data sets, each made up of families with elementary school–age children, and concluded that “women’s lives are much more heavily intertwined with children’s organized activities than are fathers’ lives”—a fact that surprised them, given that such a high volume of kids’ after-school activities tend to be sports. (One reason, they hypothesize, is that “fathers might be involved as coaches with
one
activity, while mothers did the rest.”) Mothers in their samples continued to assume the roles of scheduler, logistics coordinator, and family nag, just as they had in the earlier years. The mothers were also the ones who continued to fret and bear the psychological load:

It was mothers who signed their children up for activities, figured out how to transport children to their practices, reminded them to rehearse their instruments, pressed their clothes for recitals or their uniforms, and found out where the traveling team would be playing the next Sunday.

Perhaps more significantly, Lareau and Weininger’s study suggests that “at least some employed mothers face a tradeoff between time devoted to paid work and time devoted to facilitating their children’s leisure”—which explains why a woman like Lan would give up on a reporting career to find more flexible work in a lab. Organized leisure, unfortunately, is
not
flexible (Scouts meet only on Tuesday evenings), and it’s not always predictable either (“Wait, you won sectionals? So where are we driving this weekend?”). A week speckled with scheduled activities amounts to a week of what the authors call “pressure points,” or non-negotiable and time-sensitive demands that fall disproportionately on mothers. “Their time-use patterns,” they write, “are more frenetic than those of their husbands.”

These time-use patterns are happening at a peculiar inflection point in our culture. On the one hand, the number of men who consider it their duty to be the primary breadwinner has declined considerably: between 1980 and 2000, it fell from 54 percent to 30 percent. On the other hand, the number of Americans who believe a parent should stay home to take care of a child has gone up: between 1989 and 2002, it climbed from 33 to 41 percent.

Our expectations of parents, in other words, seem to have increased as our attitudes toward women in the workplace have liberalized.

On the face of it, these disparate trends seem to contradict one another. But one could also argue that they’re related: as a culture, we may be more ambivalent about women’s ubiquity in the workplace—and the nonfamilial child-care arrangements that result—than we care to admit.

History certainly suggests as much. In the past, at just the moments women had gained some measure of education or independence, the pendulum often took a wild swing backward, with the culture suddenly churning out the unambiguous message that women ought to be seated back at the hearth. A number of books have made this argument over the years, but Sharon Hays’s
The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood,
published in 1996, still ranks among the most cogent to me. In her view, whenever the free market threatens to invade the sanctity of the home, women feel greater pressure to engage in “intensive mothering.” Even the best-intentioned child-care experts have made their female readers feel this way. Hays points to T. Berry Brazelton, a best-selling author of her day, who declares in his book
Working and Caring
(1985) that, “in the workplace, a woman . . . must be efficient. But an efficient woman could be the worst kind of mother for her children. For a home, a woman must be flexible, warm, and concerned.” And this example seems positively quaint today in light of the newfound enthusiasm for attachment parenting, which, while appealing in many ways, requires a formidable time investment on the part of the mother, who theoretically is not allowed to leave her child’s side until that child is three. For a family requiring two incomes, this arrangement is hardly practical, nor is it practical for a woman who has different priorities for how she spends her time.

These are just two recent examples of the enduring link between women’s independence and calls for more attentive mothering. In her 2003 book
Raising America,
Ann Hulbert makes a virtuoso survey of twentieth-century child-rearing practices and finds many examples predating the present day. At the turn of the twentieth century, a time when more and more women were college-bound, child-rearing experts proclaimed that higher education was the perfect preparation for motherhood because children were endlessly interesting subjects of study and therefore infinitely worthy subjects of cultivation. (Thanks to his mother’s college education, wrote a prominent thinker of the day, “no boy of hers will get to that sorrowful age when he feels that he knows a great deal more than his mother.”) In the 1920s, just as women were cropping their hair short and exercising their newly won right to vote, researchers were urging mothers to return home and pay more attention to the new, emerging field of child development. (From a 1925 article in the
New York Times:
“By some strange cosmic alchemy, the same economic and social forces which have broken up the old-fashioned home and sent women into the world of business and pleasure on much the same terms as men, upsetting the manners and morals of the race, have now distilled a new interest in the business of being a parent.”) Even the year the word “parent” first gained popularity as a verb is interesting. It was 1970. At the same watershed moment that women were yanking off their aprons, taking the Pill, and fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, the word “parent” entered common usage as something one could
do
all day long.

But perhaps the starkest example of this backlash phenomenon was the Eisenhower era, which formed the backdrop to Betty Friedan’s landmark manifesto of second-wave feminism,
The Feminine Mystique,
published in 1963. World War II proved to be a time of great flowering for women: they married later, for obvious reasons, and took over domestic jobs long held by men (most famously as defense-industry workers); they also made contributions closer to the front lines as nurses and in the Women’s Army Corps. But there was a retrenchment during the fifties. Though women continued to work, they didn’t enter the job market with the same ambitions as women ten years earlier. The average age of first marriage for women dropped to twenty in 1950, “the youngest in the history of this country,” writes Friedan, “the youngest in any of the countries of the Western world, almost as young as it used to be in the so-called underdeveloped countries.”

Happily, many of the problems Friedan wrote about in
The Feminine Mystique
feel outdated today. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t in the midst of a new backlash against women. It’s just of a different sort.

Back in the fifties, women felt great pressure to keep an impeccable
house.
The words “Occupation: Housewife,” which women wrote on census forms if they didn’t work outside the home, form a leitmotif in Friedan’s book. Women felt pressure to be fine mothers too, of course, but the symbol of it all, and the locus of their efforts, was the home. Dinners had to be splendid and punctual; beds had to be made; floors had to be buffed to a high shine. Never mind that single-minded devotion to these pursuits often left women feeling hollow and unfulfilled, an emptiness Friedan famously called “the problem that has no name.” The upkeep of a fine home was a woman’s work, and if she found it unrewarding, well, she simply had to turn the prism another thirty degrees to see that she’d been mistaken: it
was
an important job, and by no means beneath her. Madison Avenue was in the business of telling her so. One of the most revelatory parts of Friedan’s book was where she quotes from internal research documents she’d secretly obtained from a consultant:

One of the ways that the housewife raises her own prestige as a cleaner of her home is through the use of specialized products for specialized tasks . . . when she uses one product for washing clothes, a second for dishes, a third for walls, a fourth for floors, a fifth for venetian blinds, etc., rather than an all-purpose cleaner, she feels less like an unskilled laborer, more like an engineer, an expert.

This was Madison Avenue’s solution to the problem that had no name. If women felt restless, or like their jobs as housewives were beneath their educational attainments, the answer was to counter that their jobs most certainly did require educated people—women were domestic scientists.

Today women have abandoned this form of domestic science, spending almost half as much time on housework as they did in Friedan’s day (17.5 hours per week, to be precise, versus nearly 32 hours per week in 1965). But they have become domestic scientists in another way: they’re now parenting experts, and they spend more time with their children than their mothers ever did. It was a woman in Minnesota who clarified this shift for me. She pointed out that her mother called herself a
house
wife. She, on the other hand, called herself a stay-at-home
mom.
The change in nomenclature reflects the shift in cultural emphasis: the pressures on women have gone from keeping an immaculate
house
to being an irreproachable
mom.