K.J. Dell’Antonia - How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

Id been a parent for close to twelve years by the time it occurred to me to ask myself if the whole thing had to suck quite as much as it seemed to most days.

I have four children. Four amazing, glorious, delightful, stubborn, challenging, bickering other human beings live in my house, plus one equally wonderful, but mostly not all the other things, husband. I expect to spend twenty-some years in the thick of family life, driving, hugging, negotiating, laughing, cooking, playing, cleaning, reading, and all the rest of it. Thats a big piece of my expected life-span. Whats more, its a piece I looked forward to. We planned this, my partner and I. We chose this life. This is what we wanted.

I dont want to spend that time in a haze of resigned exhaustion, longing to be or do something else. I want to raise my family, have my life, and love almost every minute of it. I am lucky to have all this, the house and the SUV and the washer-dryer and the healthy, loving kids. I want to like it.

But up until recently, it wasnt working out that way. The workload was overwhelming, from the laundry to the dishes to the cooking. The children were sometimes cute, but too often actively unpleasant: they fought with one another and with me; they refused to do the simplest of chores; they started from a baseline of entitlement and seemed to go downhill from there. Far too many days were what I called get your skates on days, when my husband and I both got up at dawn, drove children all over creation in the name of education or sports, worked a full day, drove more children to still more places, fed them, tended them, cleaned up after them, devoted an hour to inking in the next days continuing insanity, and then collapsed into bed after bickering weakly with each other about whose day blew more chunks. We were always running, often late, and rarely without a child making us all suffer in the name of hating transitions.

There was nothing really wrongfar from it. On the surface, we had everything we ever wanted, and below that surface, we had even more. We had good health, loving children, and enough money to do and have the things we really needed and many things we only wanted. We had had a stillborn child, a tragedy, but that was years ago. Wed come through it. There was nothing to complain about, but complain we did. It was just not as great I thought it would be.

I could say that about a lot of thingszip lines, for example, or sitting in the copilot seat of a commuter jet, or nearly every flume ride Ive ever been onbut in this case, Im talking about a whole lot more than a ride. This was a lifetime commitment. If it wasnt turning out like Id hoped, I needed to find a way to turn it around.

The one thing I knew, as I began to contemplate the question of why I wasnt more satisfied with my life as a parent, was that I wasnt alone. During the course of those early years I began to write about family, first for a variety of print magazines, later for Slate, and then for the New York Times, where I ran the Motherlode blog and later became part of its Well Family page. I interviewed hundreds of parents over the course of that decade. Most found happiness more elusive than theyd hoped.

At the same time, research was revealing a dismaying level of stress and dissatisfaction among my parenting peers, even those who are secure in the basics (food, shelter, health) and without any immediately obvious bonus challenges at any given moment. We tell researchers wed rather do laundry than spend time with our children. We give up our own hobbies and pleasures in pursuit of our childrens betterment. We answer surveys about our satisfaction with our lives and families in ways that lead to headlines like How Having Children Robs Parents of Their Happiness and books like All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, and then we devour the results as vindication of our overwhelming sense of being caught up in a race we cant win. Parenting, writes Judith Warner in her book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, has become poisoned through a cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret.

Whats up with that, and how can we make it stop? Sure, some moments, and even some days or weeks, are truly terrible. Death, illness, job loss, accidentsthose things stalk us all, but most days feature only the ordinary ups and downs of mornings, homework struggles, stuffed in-boxes, and dirty dishes. Why do we have such a collective sense of distress around these fates that we have chosen?

When things are steady, we could be finding satisfaction in our lovely modern lives, so filled with convenience and possibility and abundance. And when the worst happens, those ordinary moments with the families weve built should be a comfort and a refuge, not an additional source of anxiety. But I didnt feel like that was the life I was creating, and I saw the parents around me struggling in the same ways.

So I set out to discover how parents could find the way to our own personal version of happily ever after. How could we bring more joy, pleasure, and even fun to those ordinary days that make up the measure of our lives? What was contributing to our individual and collective unhappiness, and more importantly, what could we do about it?

I turned first to the community of parents and educators Ive built up over the years. What makes you unhappy? I asked. When do you feel like youre not where you want to be, or doing what you want to be doing?