Author of the week: Jennifer Senior

last updated 8 January 2015

Jennifer Senior has hit a nerve among stressed-out parents, said Kristen Kemp in Parents.com. Her All Joy and No Fun is one of the rare books about parenting that has both charged up the best-seller lists and earned widespread critical acclaim. (One reviewer even compared it to The Feminine Mystique in its importance.) All Joy’s signal contribution is that its journalist author chose to focus on how child-rearing affects parents—many of whom feel thoroughly stressed. “People think they’re supposed to know what they’re doing, when in fact ‘parenting,’ as we know it, is only 70 years old,” she says. “What I’m really hoping is that my research will help people say, ‘Whoa, so I’m not alone?’”

Not that Senior wasn’t made anxious by her research efforts, said Amy Joyce in The Washington Post. She had a young child at home while she was visiting families scattered across the country. “I’d be leaving my 3-year-old and befriending another person’s 3-year-old,” she says. “I was wracked by guilt.” Even so, All Joy and No Fun never counsels against becoming a parent, said Randye Hoder in Time. Senior actually disputes studies that claim childless adults are happier, arguing that parenting’s rewards aren’t captured well by polls. “My kid said something to me six months ago that I walk around with in my heart,” she says. “He said, ‘I wouldn’t want anyone besides you to be my mom.’” The author was struck dumb. “I am not a religious person,” she says, “but raising kids might be as close as you get to those feelings of transcendence.”