All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior Read Free Book Online

terrible.”
    Parents attempting to work out of their homes brought up this topic the most. Jessie talked at length about her divided attention—how difficult she found it, both emotionally and intellectually, to toggle between her portrait business and her children’s needs. She knew she wanted to stay at home. Her own mother had died just two years before Bella came along, and the black abruptness of it crystallized, in her mind, the importance of being around as a parent. But she also came from a long line of female breadwinners, “women with master’s degrees and women who ran companies.” Anyway, she liked her work. It gave her a sense of independence and pride. But she couldn’t figure out how to manage the rhythms and demands of both her family and her work at the same time, especially after William, her third, was born. “I think back to yesterday,” she told her class, “and I knew what the good parent should do. I knew I should stop. ” She’d been editing a photo shoot, just as she is doing today, and William had started to cry. “I knew that if I gave him the bottle and I held him and I kissed him, it would be all right,” she continued. “But I had this deadline over my head, and for some reason I couldn’t let it go. So I’m emailing the parent, and I’m trying to work . . . all while feeling bad about myself and this choice. I’m not even sure why I made it. No one benefited in the end.” You could see the confusion in her face.
    Neurologically speaking, though, there are reasons we develop a confused sense of priorities when we’re in front of our computer screens. For one thing, email comes at unpredictable intervals, which, as B. F. Skinner famously showed with rats seeking pellets, is the most seductive and habit-forming reward pattern to the mammalian brain. (Think about it: would slot machines be half as thrilling if you knew when, and how often, you were going to get three cherries?) Jessie would later say as much to me when I asked her why she was “obsessed”—her word—with her email: “It’s like fishing. You just never know what you’re going to get.”
    More to the point, our nervous systems can become dysregulated when we sit in front of a screen. This, at least, is the theory of Linda Stone, formerly a researcher and senior executive at Microsoft Corporation. She notes that we often hold our breath or breathe shallowly when we’re working at our computers. She calls this phenomenon “email apnea” or “screen apnea.” “The result,” writes Stone in an email, “is a stress response. We become more agitated and impulsive than we’d ordinarily be.”
    One could still make the case that smart phones and living room WiFi have been a boon to today’s middle-class parents, because they allow mothers and fathers the flexibility to work from home. The difficulty, in the words of Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, is that they allow “many professionals with children to work from home all the time. ” The result, he writes in his book Elsewhere USA, is that “work becomes the engine and the person the caboose, despite all this so-called freedom and efficiency.” A wired home lulls us into the belief that maintaining our old work habits while caring for our children is still possible.
    The problems with this arrangement are obvious. As Jessie observed, trying to do two things at once doesn’t work so well. Humans may pride themselves on their ability to swing from one task to another and then back again, but task-switching isn’t really a specialty of our species, as reams of studies have shown. According to Mary Czerwinski, another attention expert at Microsoft Corporation, we don’t process information as thoroughly when we task-switch, which means that information doesn’t sink into our long-term memories as deeply or spur us toward our most intelligent choices and associations. We also lose time whenever we switch tasks, because it takes a while to