Parenting Is an Addiction — Surprise?
At the end of a long day, after a rotten commute filled with road rage and little accomplished at work, with chores piled up at home and the weekend nowhere in sight, my 4-year-old daughter clambered onto the sofa next to me, cuddled into my arms, and planted a moist, unasked-for kiss on my cheek.
And just like that, the day was redeemed.
There is something suspiciously like addiction in the way this works. The researchers have a name for the underlying machinery — the oxytocin released by touch, the dopamine reward circuits that light up when parents look at their own children, the evolutionary wiring that makes a small human's smile the most potent reinforcement known to nature. Parenting is biochemically designed to keep us coming back, the way a slot machine is designed to keep us pulling the lever: intermittent rewards, unpredictable timing, enormous payoffs.
Which is convenient, because the job is objectively terrible by most metrics. The hours are endless. The pay is nonexistent. The working conditions involve bodily fluids. The feedback is delayed by decades. No one in their right mind would sign up for it on the terms alone. We sign up — and keep showing up — because of moments like the one on the sofa, which arrive just often enough to make the whole enterprise feel like the best deal anyone ever made.
There is a darker reading, of course. Addiction language implies compulsion, and plenty of parents will recognize the feeling: the inability to stop worrying, the obsessive replaying of the day's failures, the cravings for one more minute of sleep that never quite arrive. But addiction to what? To a person. To the smallest, most demanding, most unexpectedly generous person in the house.
The cheek kiss was unasked-for. That is the whole point. The best things about children are the ones they do when nobody told them to — the hug from behind while you're cooking, the drawing pressed into your hand, the whispered confidence at bedtime. You cannot schedule them, purchase them, or earn them. You can only be present when they happen, and let them redeem the day.
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