Mimi O’Connor continues her conversation with Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun, in part II of this two part series.
We recently talked to All Joy and No Fun author and New York contributing editor Jennifer Senior about her book examining “the paradox of modern parenthood.” (You can read part one, here) In part two, the journalist and recent Brooklyn transplant shares her thoughts on parenting and income inequality in the borough, her first impressions of Park Slope, and how she herself parents differently since writing her book.
Do you think there are specific challenges to raising a child in Brooklyn even though it’s often depicted as Shangri-La for young families?
[For the] upper middle class, I think you really have to recognize that the biggest advantage your children have is that they are your children. They are born with tons of means. They’re born in a really lovely neighborhood. They’re getting a really good education, whether it’s in one of the public schools in Brownstone Brooklyn or if they’re in private school — they’re all pretty good. And because you are their parents, you read them books and you talk about a lot of challenging, interesting ideas.
You’re probably modeling a good work ethic for them so they understand what grit is and what it takes, and that alone is a much bigger advantage than any amount of extracurricular activities or any brand name college could probably ultimately give them. I would say that sitting on the scale, that stuff all weighs a lot more than being the best person, the best fencer in the borough of New York, or the best chess player.
I think that overall the luckiest thing is to be born into very privileged circumstances. But I think it’s hard to believe that.
That’s true, but if you divide Brownstone Brooklyn, that could mean someone living in a brownstone in Brownstone Brooklyn or someone living in a rent-stabilized, one bedroom apartment in a good school district, terrified that they’re going to lose their apartment.
If you’re talking about those families, I think it’s different…If you’re talking about the totality including the renters, including the people who are moving further away because they can’t afford it, then I would change my answer and say that it’s hard.
I think there’s an increasing sense on the playgrounds that maybe that person over there doesn’t have to worry, but perhaps this person and this person does.
Actually living cheek by jowl with the kind of income disparities is really hard because there are people that have reason to be nervous, and there are people who don’t, actually. So that’s what’s tough. Especially when you’ve got people who don’t have the same reasons to be nervous who are fretting terribly and actually over-compensating. They’re sending their kid to nine [extracurricular activities] and I think that people often feel like they can’t compete with that. That there’s this kind of group of super-children who have had everything handed to them and they are doing a million different things and you are not able to do that. How are you supposed to compete?
Maybe I’m being slightly naïve in thinking that what actually carries you the furthest is working like a dog…I guess there is still some part of me that has faith that one can still work their ass off and that Ivy League degree doesn’t necessarily matter that much. It matters less than the kind of raw determination that my own father had. But the economic reality also suggests that my father came of age at a time with far less income inequality.
But there is so much income inequality [here and] you are living cheek by jowl. In some ways I would say that it’s even more stark than in Manhattan for the reasons you say: that you have your rent controlled apartment that’s right next to a five million dollar brownstone. You’re renting in the garden apartment next door to one of those. Whereas Park Avenue is sort of uniformly nice. Tribeca is uniformly nice.
The more income inequality you are surrounded by, the more economic disparity you see, the more your own personal happiness level is compromised because it awakens so much anxiety about what you don’t have. It immediately makes you aspirational and there has been a lot of great work on this in both the fields of behavioral economics and social psychology. Nothing is a surer recipe for someone’s personal misery than being surrounded by people who have a lot and income disparities.
One of the wonderful things about living in Brooklyn with children is the amount of choices. But many of us know that sometimes having more choices does not lead to greater happiness.
No, it does the opposite. That’s pretty well established. Choices make people apoplectic. When all of our parents look at us and say, “When we raised you it was so much simpler,” it doesn’t mean they were necessarily happier…But when our mothers say that they had it easier they mean that, say, there was Girl Scouts after school. Or, “We put you on a bicycle and told you to come back in after six o’clock. There wasn’t anything such as Kumon. I didn’t help you with your college essays and I didn’t check your homework and there were maybe one or two extracurricular things we could have taken you to after school.” You sent your kid to one camp! One day camp if you had the means. And now, these weekly little things? It’s insane.
It seems like every week in New York, in a magazine or on a web site, there’s a glowing profile of some New York couple and their three beautiful children and a pony in the back yard That’s an extreme example, but we’re bombarded with this stuff. It’s like Facebook on steroids. It can be tempting to think, “Oh, if we just had more money or more space or five nannies things would be better.” Does any of your research support that idea?
OK, there’s two things to say about that. First of all, you said that was an extreme example with the pony. In my experience, all of those profiles are of extreme couples…I think that all of those couples are actually hand-picked and I think that all of them do lead unusually privileged lives. Those are portraits of the luckiest. [The media is] scraping the cream off the top when they do those profiles. And so in some ways they are really unfortunate; they are just the glossy magazine version of Facebook. If Facebook were the September issue of Vogue, that’s what it would look like. It’s not life; it’s not what it actually looks like.
In terms of what the research suggests, Daniel Kahneman’s work says that money can only buy you happiness up to a point and once you make $75,000 or over or whatever the middle class wage is for your particular city, then it’s just a marginal gain. I think that that’s right. I think it’s been replicated…I think in New York, a certain amount of money really does improve your life, it really does.
But at the same time, what Kahneman is finding is also true, which is that the gains are marginal. That in the end, there are other things that take over. That then you become besieged by choices and that those also make people apoplectic. That [money] can’t change who you are constitutionally — and that’s about 40 to 50% of who we are. We can’t budge the needle [on that]. There is a hedonic set point for each of us. We can only be so happy. That [point] can only move so much based on external circumstances and means.
Are there any Brooklyn activities or destinations you and your family enjoy?
I just got there…Here’s what I love: there is this gang of kids on my block that just sort of seems to show up at night starting around seven o’clock. They just ride their Razor Scooters and bikes up and down the streets and have sword fights and I just can’t believe how old-timey it feels…This was a revelation that my kid could just go outside and sit on the stoop and he could vanish into a scrum of other children. We have a kid next door who is in my kid’s class and there is a hole in our fence that I guess Hurricane Sandy blew out that the previous owners never fixed. So the kids just walk through the fences and play with one another. It blows my mind.
What are parents saying to you on your book tour?
It totally depends on where [I am]. If I go to a very wealthy place like Westport, it’s all, “How can we de-escalate? How can we do less than four extra-curricular activities at a time?”…It’s very interesting. It’s all about extra-curricular activities and not feeling comfortable scaling back unless everyone else does it too…I never know what to say because I always feel like I can’t explain to them that they are already in a position of having to worry a lot less.
Whereas if I’m in a much more mixed, genuinely middle class kind of place, then I feel like the economic anxieties that people raise are real and people seem much more anxious about how to make their kids happy. And I tell them what I say in my Ted Talk: I wouldn’t focus so much on being the custodian of your child’s happiness. It’s very, very hard. Making them productive and moral is easy and then they won’t be so hard on themselves.
What everyone wants to know—everywhere—no matter where I go: How do I parent differently? So I always tell them about chapter six of the book.
Which is [when I discuss] Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral economist. He’s actually a psychologist. Won a Nobel Prize. He makes the distinction between our ‘remembering selves’ and our ‘experiencing selves.’ And he notes that in real time we seem to find parenting very stressful. So our experiencing selves—the “people” who do the living for us—seem to experience parenting as very hard.
But our remembering selves, who remember what we do—and who are, in some senses, more profoundly our identity—our remembering selves love parenting. If you ask people what gives them the most joy, they all say their children.
So what I do is optimize my remembering self now. I take way more pictures than I did before writing this book. I used to be very lazy about it. Now I take a ton of them because it’s true. I can then enjoy them later, and I do enjoy them. And it helps shore up my remembering identity.
I write down the funny weird stuff that my kid says because otherwise I won’t remember it. Everybody tells you to do it but then you kind of stop doing it and you really regret it, so I try to remember to do it. Re-reading that stuff is kind of remarkable. It’s so fun to do. Also, you get to climb into bed and tell your spouse about all of the funny stuff because you wrote it down, and then it becomes this good thing you can have with your spouse. And it’s like a triple bonus because your kid will end up finding the stuff they said when they were two years old hilarious. So, that’s like my biggest life hack of all.
Mimi O’Connor writes and occasionally parents in Brooklyn. She will let you know what Bill Murray is up to @themimioconnor.