“If you’ve spent most of your adult life in the company of other adults . . . it requires some adjusting to spend so much time in the company of people who feel more than think,” she writes. Children upstage all the other components of their parents’ lives, and good parenting involves both helicoptering and disengagement. One woman Senior interviewed drew the distinction between her mother’s status as a housewife and her own as a stay-at-home mom; the change in nomenclature suggests new societal priorities, as women are under less pressure about running the household and more pressure about motherhood. That reflects and occasions the evolution of childhood.

Image Credit... João Fazenda

Children alter the adult relationships into which they obtrude. Indeed, Senior says, they provoke a couple’s most frequent arguments — “more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, sex.” Mothers are frequently overwhelmed by their attempts to excel both at their paid jobs and at child care. In 1965, when most American women didn’t work outside the home, mothers nonetheless spent almost four fewer hours a week than today’s mothers do providing child care. Fathers, on the other hand, spend three times as many hours with their children now as they did then, but do better at keeping some downtime reserved for themselves; they do not judge themselves the way mothers do, and experience few of the pressures that make women feel so guilty about being away from home during the workday.

Taking care of — and indeed loving — one’s children changes as they reach adolescence. Senior notes that parents often do homework with their children; “homework,” she writes aphoristically, “is the new family dinner.” It is the locus around which affection is played out. Parents struggle through their children’s teenage years both because of their changed relationship with their children and because of their changed relationship to themselves. It is not easy to have much of your purpose shattered by your child’s independence. This loss can throw parents back on their own inner lives, and self-examination can be painful. “The mere presence of adolescents in the house, still brimming with potential, their futures still an unclaimed colony . . . sets off a fantastical reverie of what-ifs,” Senior writes.

If there is a downside to this excellent book, it is that Senior’s tone is sometimes too breezy and often rushed, which can make “All Joy and No Fun” feel like a succession of smart magazine articles. Its episodes seem self-contained, not always in full discourse with one another, and some cry out to be expanded. Her lightness belies the seriousness of the questions her book asks. But her substantive insights redeem that briskness over and over again.

Raising modern, indulged children for their own sake can be challenging. In the end, Senior writes, “Mothering and fathering aren’t just things we do. Being a mother or being a father is who we are.” Her most striking observations reveal this existential complexity. “How it feels to be a parent and how it feels to do the quotidian and often arduous task of parenting are two very separate things. ‘Being a parent’ is much more difficult for social science to anatomize.” Social science is especially inadequate to describe the nature of this particular joy, but Senior deploys a novelist’s sensibility in giving evidence of that privileged euphoria, insisting that it is not merely coincident with all the tedious things parents must do, but actually an outgrowth of them. “Freedom in our culture has evolved to mean freedom from obligations,” she observes. “But what on earth does that freedom even mean if we don’t have something to give it up for?”