The Joy of ‘Leave Me Alone’

“Raising children is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said, “she” being a late-30-something mom who thinks there is something about young human beings that causes their upbringing to be arduous beyond compare. Her children are strong-willed, she says. Du-uh! Going back to the beginning of human culture, all children have been and are and forever will be strong-willed. As your great-grandmother was fond of saying, “Every child has a mind of its own.”

But great-grandmother raised ten children to adulthood and the idea that doing so was the “hardest thing” she had ever done never entered her mind. When most of them were still with us, I used to ask women of my mother’s generation (the Greatest) if raising children back in the day was stressful, agonizing, frustrating, unusually demanding, and the like.

“No, John,” they would say, all of them. “It was just something one did, just another part of one’s life.”

Never did one of the Greatest ever tell me it was stressful, agonizing, and so on. It was a responsibility – a big one, in fact – but not difficult.

One may reasonably conclude there is nothing about children that is causing so many of today’s mothers (and some fathers) to say childrearing is the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Why, then?