Phoney Quality Time

In which your humble narrator reflects on the plugged-in parents at the playground.

The New York Times ran a story this week about parent using smart phones and ignoring their children. The descriptions of typical interactions largely mirrored the sort of thing I've observed on the playground. Harried parents bring their offspring to the park for some quality time, and spend the entire time on their phones. On a recent morning outing, we arrived at the park to find a mother and a little girl. The mother was on her phone when we arrived, and on her phone when we left 45 minutes later. The little girl was apparently only allowed to play within a 15 foot radius of the mother. One begins to wonder: what is the point? Surely she could ignore her child at home.

Regular readers might expect a full-throttle vitriolic screed at this point. But with an uncharacteristic spirit of charity I have to admit that I understand the impulse. I don't have a fancy phone, but I do stay home with the kids most days while simultaneously trying to "work." Sometimes all I want to do is to have the kids leave me alone for five minutes so I can keep my email inbox down to a manageable size. When classes are in session I make it a point to respond to student emails within 24 hours. This can obviously take up some time during regular childcare hours.

I think part of the issue is that, as parents, we're supposed to be in a state of filial bliss at all times. Certainly the child-centric culture of the past twenty years blares its expectations of personal fulfillment through "parenting."* If your precious little wunderkinds aren't making you happy, well then there must be something wrong with you.

Or not.


Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard, who studies happiness says that children don't really bring us happiness. An article in the APS Observer quotes Gilbert:

"The more children you have, the less likely you are to say you are satisfied with your life," Gilbert said. Studies that monitored how much satisfaction people got from their everyday activities showed that women were less happy when interacting with their children than when doing almost any other activity. The pleasure of being with their children was actually comparable to that of doing housework.

Duh. Children (at least very young ones) bring great moments of happiness and a lot of drudgery. For every 1 beatific baby smile of real recognition of Mama or Daddy, there are about 345 poopy diapers, 22 disgusting spit-ups, 1 projectile vomiting episode, 1 fever, and 36 hours of incessant fussing for no discernible reason. I certainly wouldn't trade that smile for less of the yuck, but that's because I've cultivated both a healthy sense of delusion and an acceptance that caring for my children day-in and day-out just isn't going to result in me being some sort of self-actualized, Nietzschean Uber-Dad. I think it's best to decouple the decision to have children from expectations of happiness. I love being able to stay home most of the time with my kids because it's worthwhile, not because it's fun.

Child #2's favorite game (of her own invention) at the moment is to sit on our bed and systematically remove all the pillows and throw them on the floor while I sit on the floor next to the bed and periodically throw the pillows back at her. She screeches with laughter when I throw a pillow back at her, and very industriously shoves it back off of the bed again. It's fun. For about 5 minutes. She, on the other hand, will happily play this game for up to a half hour. And it's a good game. It's got lots of physical movement, social interaction and basic logical processing.

But I'm not going to be begging her to keep playing this game when she's 14.

*I hate the word "parenting." That's why I always synergize my children's core competencies and proactively integrate their brand identities for maximum customer focus.