The Only Way Out for Top Performers

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 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 delight."

毫无疑问，珍妮佛的深刻见解，激进的杂志封面故事,"我爱我的孩子，我讨厌我的生活，"正引起喋喋不休-没有什么比抚养孩子不完全是一种充实的，丰富人生阅历更能引起人们的讨论了。与其得出孩子让父母要么幸福要么悲痛的结论，珍妮佛建议我们需要重新定义幸福：不要把它看作是可以用每时每刻的快乐来衡量的东西，我们更应该把幸福当做是一种过去式的状态。尽管日复一日的抚养孩子会让人精神崩溃，但珍妮弗写道:"当下压抑我们情绪的事情，日后可能会成为强烈的满足和喜悦的源泉。"

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.Practiacally every week features at least one celebrity mom,or mom-to-be,smiling on the newsstands.

杂志封面上展示着一位迷人的母亲抱着一个可爱的婴儿，这并不是本周报摊上唯一一张麦当娜和孩子的照片。还有关于刚领养孩子和刚成为单身妈妈的桑德拉·布洛克的故事，以及常见的“詹妮弗·安妮斯顿怀孕了”的新闻。实际上，每周至少有一位名人母亲或者准妈妈面露微笑的照片刊登在报摊上。

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 direct result of the gaping baby-size holes in their lives

在一个不断赞扬剩余的社会里，承认你后悔生育等同于承认你支持杀死小猫，这有什么奇怪的吗？去对比父母和孩子的后悔，这似乎不是非常公平的。不幸福的父母几乎不会被刺激考虑他们是否不应该有孩子，但是不幸福没有孩子的人们被孩子是世界上唯一最重要的事情所困扰:很显然他们的痛苦一定就是他们生活中如婴儿般大小的裂缝的直接结果。

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.

当然，像《美国周刊》和《人物》这样的名人杂志所呈现的为人父母的形象是非常不现实的，尤其父母亲是像布洛克这样的单身母亲的时候。根据几项研究所得出的结论，有孩子的父母比没有孩子的父母更不幸福，而单身父母是所有人中最不幸福的。这并不奇怪，考虑到没有另一半的依赖而独自抚养一个孩子将需要付出多大的努力;然而,听桑德拉和布兰妮所说的，靠他们"自己"(注:全天候有人帮忙)抚养一个孩子是小菜一碟。

it's hard to imagine that many people are dumb enough to want children just because Reese and Angilina 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 stree-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 Jenifer Aniston

很难想象那么多人愚蠢到想要小孩正是因为瑞思和安吉丽娜使这件事情看起来如此有魅力:大多数成年人都明白，生孩子不是剪头发。但有趣的是，想知道我们每周所看到的毫无压力、增进幸福感的的父母形象是不是来自一些小地方，潜意识的方式导致我们本身对于真实经历的不满意，同样的方式，我们中的一小部分人希望成为像"瑞秋"那样会使我们看起来有那么一点点像珍妮弗·安妮斯顿。