Cherish Every Moment…Or Not
3 Reasons Why Parenting a Small Child Is So Hard
How is it only 9:30 am?
I have had this thought every day since the pandemic began (and the days of sending my daughter to preschool came to an end). By 9:30 am, I have already cycled through five different means of toddler entertainment — several sing-along YouTube songs, an episode of “Bubble Guppies,” drawing with face paint crayons leftover from Halloween, using stickers as Band-aids and playing doctor, and “baking” Play-doh “cookies” in a toy microwave. At this point, I. Am. Exhausted. I look at my watch, thinking we must be close to lunchtime by now. And it’s only 9:30.
I ask my daughter if she can put me down for a nap with her dolls and she agrees. She throws a dish towel over me as a blanket and I close my eyes, thinking I am brilliant. I have done the impossible thing — I have found a way to rest while playing. Just as I attempt to reach around to pat myself on the back, my daughter screams, “WAKE UP!”
I am not accustomed to spending all day with a toddler for weeks on end. In my BC (Before COVID) life, I went to work five days a week and my daughter went to preschool. On the weekends, we busied ourselves with various outings — trips to the grocery store, playdates, visits with family and friends, meals at restaurants, all the things that so many of us took for granted. Then the pandemic hit.
They say it takes a village to raise children, and now we have no village. My husband and I have each other. We are attempting to work full-time (from home) at demanding jobs, while parenting a demanding toddler (I realize “demanding toddler” is a redundant phrase). We attempt to impose some order and structure on our days, and it’s those attempts that zap all our energy. As Jennifer Senior writes in her book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, “Most of life with young children does not have a script, and if a parent attempts to write one, children may not be inclined to follow it.”
My husband and I have a shift system — he focuses on his job, I take care of our daughter; I focus on my job, he takes care of our daughter. The caretaking shift is, by far, the most exhausting. At first, this exhaustion puzzled me. I’d look at the step counter of my watch thinking I felt like I’d run a marathon so maybe that translated to steps. But, no. Most days, I travel less than 1,000 steps during my caretaking shift, but I am spent.
After reading Senior’s book, I’ve realized there are 3 reasons for this.
1. Boredom is mentally tiring. And spending time with small children can be very boring.
Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician who doled out comforting wisdom to parents during the second half of the 20th century laid it out for us: “Setting aside a chunk of time to be devoted exclusively to companionship with children is a somewhat boring prospect to a lot of good parents.” In Senior’s book, one dad is quoted as saying, “That was the most negative emotion I experienced as a father. Boredom. Throwing the ball back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The endless repetition, the can-you-do-it-again, the can-you-read-the-same-story-one-more-time. There were times I thought, Give me a gun.”
2. The demands of small children are like Chinese water torture.
Senior writes that American parents “spend a staggering amount of time each day trying to get their toddlers and preschoolers to do the right thing — as often as twenty-four times an hour, according to some studies,” all while the toddlers and preschoolers “spend a staggering amount of time resisting these efforts.”
A few facts:
· According to a 1980 paper titled “Mothers: The Unacknowledged Victims,” during the preschool phase, moms are hit with an “aversive event” (think: whining) as frequently as once every 3 minutes
· A 1971 Harvard study found that mothers had to correct or redirect their toddlers every 3 minutes (and their toddlers were only listening to these corrections and redirections 60% of the time)
· A 2009 paper said that mothers and toddlers average a conflict every two-and-a-half minutes
All of this means that every few minutes, a mother is feeling a little bit like she’s going to lose it. These little threats to sanity take a toll.
3. The role of The Entertainer is exhausting.
Most days, I feel like a juggling clown and a musician — And for my next trick, let us make this Amazon box into a doll crib! Our daughter is an only child. We are her only entertainment right now. In the BC era, we created a full life for her — preschool, swim class, “playcare” at my yoga studio. She was always doing something. As Senior says, when children rarely experience boredom, “they don’t really know how to tolerate boredom, which means they look to their parents to help alleviate it.” In my attempts to infuse her life with fun and excitement, I have, essentially, created a (wonderfully adorable, loving, sweet, funny) monster.
Many parents I know feel pressure to fulfill this Entertainer role, doing and being everything for our child. We don’t realize that it wasn’t that long ago when children were not viewed as requiring so much doting. In fact, as Senior notes, it wasn’t until the early 19th century that adults began to think of children as “precious.” That’s when the highchair first made its appearance, “literally signifying children’s newfound, elevated role.” Sometimes, when I need a break from being The Entertainer, I remind myself of this. It’s not too late for my daughter to learn to tolerate a little boredom. She is precious, but so is my mental health.
The weird thing about parenthood
As exhausted as I am, I know I’ll look back on these strange quarantine days with some fondness. This is the weird thing about parenthood — we often feel at the end of our proverbial ropes, but then we look back at photos of those “end of rope” days and smile.
Senior explains this phenomenon in her book:
“Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes — or napping, or shopping, or answering emails — to spending time with our kids…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.”
This quarantine time will become one of my family’s most memorable life-tales. I’m already wistful when I think about this time coming to an end.
There are all kinds of paradoxes to parenthood. As they say, the days are long, but the years are short. One moment, you’re longing for time to pass faster, the next you want it to slow down (or reverse). On the hard days, the “I-want-to-stab-myself-in-the-eye-with-my-daughter’s-sparkly-pen” days, it helps to think of my Future Self and yet another cliché phrase — “one day you’ll look back on this and laugh.”
