Jennifer Senior Quotes

The author observes the shift now that children are not a source of labor for the family, that they have gone from employees of the parents to the bosses of the parents.

~ Jennifer Senior

More than almost anything else, the experience of parenthood exposes the gulf between our experiencing and remembering selves. Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes -- or napping, or shopping, or answering emails -- to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman's study of 909 Texas women.) 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.

~ Jennifer Senior

Even when our children are still young and defenseless, we feel intimations of their departure. We find ourselves staring at them with nostalgia, wistful for the person they're about to no longer be.

~ Jennifer Senior

We enshrine things to memory very differently than we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the experiencing self versus the remembering self.

~ Jennifer Senior

Drawing from 1.7 million Gallup surveys collected between 2008 and 2012, researchers Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone found that parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more lows, than those without children... And when researchers bother to ask questions of a more existential nature, they find that parents report greater feelings of meaning and reward -- which to many parents is what the entire shebang is about.

~ Jennifer Senior

The author says that one of the difficulties of modern parenting is the uncertainty of what parents are preparing children for. In traditional societies this was clear, as parents prepared children for a society and for roles much like their own. She writes, There is no folk wisdom.

~ Jennifer Senior

What makes a mother? Looking at your child and identifying emotion

~ Jennifer Senior

During childhood, it’s about trying to help develop who your kid’s going to be. During adolescence, it’s about responding to who your kid wants to be.

~ Jennifer Senior

As parents, we sometimes mistakenly assume that things were always this way. They weren't. The modern family is just that - modern - and all of our places in it are quite new. Unless we keep in mind how new our lives as parents are, and how unusual and ahistorical, we won't see that world we live in, as mothers and fathers, is still under construction. Modern childhood was invented less than seventy years ago - the length of a catnap, in historical terms.

~ Jennifer Senior

That women bring home the bacon, fry it up, serve it for breakfast, and use its greasy remains to make candles for their children's science projects is hardly news. Yet how parenting responsibilities get sorted out under these conditions remains unresolved.

~ Jennifer Senior

Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive.

~ Jennifer Senior

The 20th century, the author observes, fostered the idea that fulfillment is possible on Earth.

~ Jennifer Senior

The phrase having it all has little to do with having what we want.

~ Jennifer Senior

Parenthood is harder than conventional work, the author suggests, because our jobs develop a somewhat predictable flow and offer relatively short-term feedback. This leads to internal comparisons to the improvisational nature of parenting

~ Jennifer Senior

The author describes the critic within us as adults as the selves who live too much in their heads rather than their bodies, who are burdened with too much knowledge about how the world works rather than excited about how it could work or should, who are afraid of being judged and not being loved. Most adults do not live in a world of forgiveness and unconditional love, unless, that is, they have small children.

~ Jennifer Senior

Your children are going through life with their eyes closed, so YOU'RE the one who has to steer.

~ Jennifer Senior

Children live life as a controlled experiment.

~ Jennifer Senior

Couples with children may argue more, the author suggests, because children are a reminder of just how crucial our choices are.

~ Jennifer Senior

The author says this socially respectable option NOT to parent has actually made parenthood more stressful. The knowledge that parents have chosen that role allows for unrealistic buildup of expectations and unavoidable second-guessing.

~ Jennifer Senior

But the truth is, there's little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years.

~ Jennifer Senior