Top 37 Jennifer Senior Quotes
#1. ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict.
Jennifer Senior
#2. 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
#3. 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.
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#4. George Washington became an official surveyor for Culpepper County at seventeen and a commissioned major in the militia at twenty;
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#5. Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive.
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#6. Indeed, many adults don't consider having children at all until they've deemed themselves good and ready: in 2008, 72 percent of college-educated women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine had not yet had children.
Jennifer Senior
#8. Becoming a parent is one of the most sudden and dramatic changes in adult life.
Jennifer Senior
#9. 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.
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#10. This is what parents do
what all of us do, in fact, when we're at our unrivaled best. We bind ourselves to those who need us most, and through caring for them, grow to love them, grow to delight in them, grow to marvel at who they are. Gift-love at its purest.
Jennifer Senior
#11. Alas, that's what adulthood is supposed to be about: "an overcoming" or (better yet) "a disciplining of a developmentally appropriate insanity.
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#12. We enshrine things in memory very differently from how we experience them in real time.
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#13. Having worked so hard to have children, parents may feel it's only natural to expect happiness from the experience. And they'll find happiness of course, but not necessarily continuously, and not always in the forms they might expect.
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#15. One of the most difficult things about being a parent is that you have to bear the fact that you have to frustrate your child.
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#16. The 20th century, the author observes, fostered the idea that fulfillment is possible on Earth.
Jennifer Senior
#17. Everyone is moving at the same speed toward the future. But your children are moving at that same speed with their eyes closed. So you're the ones who've got to steer.
Jennifer Senior
#18. Adults," Phillips writes, "are not less excessive in their behavior than adolescents. Concentration camps were not run by adolescents; adolescents are not mostly alcoholics or millionaires.
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#19. Couples with children may argue more, the author suggests, because children are a reminder of just how crucial our choices are.
Jennifer Senior
#20. There is a certain part of all of us," Milan Kundera writes, "that lives outside of time.
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#21. The phrase "having it all" has little to do with having what we want.
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#22. 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
#23. What makes a mother? Looking at your child and identifying emotion
Jennifer Senior
#24. Americans have come to define liberty negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one's wealth or time.
Jennifer Senior
#25. No matter how perfect our circumstances, most of us, as Adam Phillips observed, "learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like." The hard part is to make peace with that misty zone and to recognize that no life - no life worth living anyway - is free of constraints.
Jennifer Senior
#26. 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.
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#27. thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward," Krishna tells his student Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita.)
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#28. SOME OF THE HARDEST parts of parenting never change - like sleep deprivation, which, according to researchers at Queen's University in Ontario, can in some respects impair our judgment as much as being legally drunk. (There's something wonderfully vindicating about this analogy.)
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#29. 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.
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#30. One could simply say it's a legitimate fear-response, a reasonable and deeply internalized reaction to a shrinking economic pie.
Jennifer Senior
#31. Because so many of us are now avid volunteers for a project in which we were all once dutiful conscripts, we have heightened expectations of what children will do for us, regarding them as sources of existential fulfillment rather than as ordinary parts of our lives.
Jennifer Senior
#32. This is another thing that quantitative studies of American time use cannot show you: for the majority of mothers, time is fractured and subdivided, as if streaming through a prism; for the majority of fathers, it moves in an unbent line.
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#33. Your children are going through life with their eyes closed, so YOU'RE the one who has to steer.
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#34. In addition, Steinberg has found that adolescence is especially rough on parents who don't have an outside interest, whether it be work or a hobby, to absorb their interests as their child is pulling away.
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#35. If that's what joy is - connection - then to fully experience it requires something terrifying as well as exalting: opening oneself up to the possibility of loss.
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#36. He just has to step away from the moment to see it. Which isn't surprising. Lots of parents will tell you that when they aren't fighting with their teenagers about homework or scraping up raisins their toddlers have expertly ground into the kitchen floor, they're quite happy, upon reflection.
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#37. 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
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