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  3. It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cov

It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cov

游客2023-12-28  19
问题     It’s no surprise that Jennifer Senior’s insightful, provocative magazine cover story, "I Love My Children, I Hate My Life," is arousing much chatter—nothing gets people talking like the suggestion that child rearing is anything less than a completely fulfilling, life-enriching experience. Rather than concluding that children make parents either happy or miserable, Senior suggests we need to redefine happiness: instead of thinking of it as something that can be measured by moment-to-moment joy, we should consider being happy as a past-tense condition. Even though the day-to-day experience of raising kids can be soul-crushingly hard, Senior writes that " the very things that in the moment dampen our moods can later be sources of intense gratification and de-light. "
    The magazine cover showing an attractive mother holding a cute baby is hardly the only Madonna-and-child image on newsstands this week. There are also stories about newly adoptive—and newly single-mom Sandra Bullock, as well as the usual "Jennifer Aniston is pregnant" news. Practically every week features at least one celebrity mom, or mom-to-be, smiling on the newsstands.
    In a society that so persistently celebrates procreation, is it any wonder that admitting you regret having children is equivalent to admitting you support kitten-killing? It doesn’t seem quite fair, then, to compare the regrets of parents to the regrets of the children. Unhappy parents rarely are provoked to wonder if they shouldn’t have had kids, but unhappy childless folks are bothered with the message that children are the single most important thing in the world; obviously their misery must be a direct result of the gaping baby -size holes in their lives.
    Of course, the image of parenthood that celebrity magazines like Us Weekly and People present is hugely unrealistic, especially when the parents are single mothers like Bullock. According to several studies concluding that parents are less happy than childless couples, single parents are the least happy of all. No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their " own"(read: with round-the-clock help)is a piece of cake.
    It’s hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angelina make it look so glamorous: most adults understand that a baby is not a haircut. But it’s interesting to wonder if the images we see every week of stress -free, happiness -enhancing parenthood aren’t in some small, subconscious way contributing to our own dissatisfactions with the actual experience, in the same way that a small part of us hoped getting "the Rachel" might make us look just a little bit like Jennifer Aniston.
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答案     毫无疑问，Jennifer Senior在有深刻见解的、煽动性的杂志封面故事中表达了她的想法“我爱我的孩子，我讨厌我的生活”，此想法引来很多议论。谈到养孩子，人们就会觉得是件完全令人高兴、生活充实的事情。Jennifer Senior没有指出抚养孩子会使父母快乐还是痛苦，而是建议我们需要重新定义幸福：我们不应该认为幸福是可以衡量的瞬间快乐的组合，而应该把它看成一种过去的状态。尽管每天抚养孩子的经历是那么难熬，但Jennifer Senior在故事中说，“正是那些使我们心情沮丧的时刻，日后却成了快乐的源泉”。
    杂志的封面是一位怀抱可爱婴儿的魅力母亲(麦当娜和婴儿)，此封面在这周的杂志上不可能成为唯一的“圣母和圣子”的形象。杂志上还有好多关于最近刚收养孩子的母亲，刚变成单身的母亲，如桑德拉?布洛克，以及常见的“詹妮弗?安尼斯顿怀孕了”的故事。实际上，每周至少有一位名人母亲或准妈妈微笑地出现在杂志上。
    在一个一直庆祝生育的社会，承认后悔生孩子就像承认支持杀小猫一样，这难道不值得反思吗?把父母和孩子的后悔作比较，这看上去并不公平。没人会让不想抚养孩子的父母去反思自己是否不该养孩子，但那些不幸福的没孩子的人却为这样的事情所困扰：“孩子是世上唯一最重要的东西”，很显然，他们的痛苦必须通过生儿育女才能解除。
    当然，像《美国周刊》与《人物》这样的名人杂志展示的父母形象是非常不现实的，特别是当父母是单亲妈妈时更是如此，就像布洛克。根据多项研究结果，有孩子的父母不如没孩子的夫妇快乐，单亲父母是最不快乐的。不要对此感到震惊，想一想，没有人依靠，自己抚养一个孩子需要做多少工作啊!但是，听听桑德拉和布兰妮说的话，“自己养孩子，简直小菜一碟!”(她们当然认为容易了，因为她们周围有_群人帮忙。)
    很难想象，许多人很愚蠢地想生孩子，只是因为Reese和Angelina使这种事情变得看起来很光彩，其实大多数成年人了解养孩子可不像剪头发那么容易。但是，反思一下：我们每周看到的没压力、幸福地为人父母的例子会不会潜意识里加剧我们对实际生活的不满。这就好像：我们有一种想成为“瑞秋”(《老友记》中的单身妈妈)的想法，这种想法使我们看上去有点像瑞秋的扮演者詹妮弗?安尼斯顿。
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