What do you want for your kids? Most people say “I just want them to be happy”
Today I want to challenge this, talk about what it really means to be happy and how to get your kids there.
What I see parents doing in clinic, way too often, is trying to make their kids happy in the moment. And yes, there is joy in getting a piece of candy or making a trip to Disney. But it’s not this hedonistic definition of happiness that we’re after.
For any person, child or adult, if they have constant fun and happy experiences, they aren’t happy. There are all those studies of people who win the lottery – and the end result is they aren’t happy.
So What do we really mean? Happiness is an emotion, and you can’t really wish an emotion on a person – so when parents say they want their kids to be happy – what they really mean is they want their kids to have more long-term happiness that comes from life satisfaction and well-being. So how do you help your kids grow up to find this?
As a parent, you’re already the family cook, fashion consultant, driver, schedule manager, activity consultant, and you are also now your family’s wellness coach. On today’s show I’ll tell you the 7 tips for raising a happy kid.
Should you really care if you raise a happy kid? Maybe you should focus more on raising a smart kid or a kind kid or one who will be financially successful and host you on their yacht when you retire.
The answer is Yes – absolutely you should want to raise a happy kid. I mean It feels good to be happy. But also, happiness is linked to improved health, living longer, more job satisfaction, and a good marriage. There are tons of studies that show that happier people are healthier in every aspect of life.
Most psychologists believe happiness is something that needs to be worked at. Of course they think this – their livelihood depends on people believing they need to put effort into being happy – but I think its true that we need to work at it. Just like you have to exercise your muscles to keep them strong, you need to work at happiness. You can’t just go to the gym once and expect to have physical fitness. And Social Fitness works the same way. And I’ll get to that in a bit.
What makes a person happy? Think about this for just a second. What makes you happy? Friendships, feeling like you make a difference in the world? Hobbies? Your kids and family?
Whatever things you just thought of that help you to be happy – keep those in mind because those are the things you want to cultivate in your kids. You can’t keep giving them a lollipop every 15 minutes and think you can keep them happy forever. Just like you taught your kids to sleep through the night (I hope you have done that!) Or taught them skills like riding a bike. You do teach your kids to be happy.
But here’s the crazy part.
What percent of your own happiness do you create?
At least 30-40% of your happiness is genetically decided. Some studies put the effects of genes on happiness as high as 50%.
The first studies of happiness were twin studies; researchers found that identical twins with identical genes who are raised apart in different homes were more similar in their happiness than fraternal twins who were raised together.
This was the first evidence that genes plays a role in happiness.
Once there were many studies of twins that were done, reviews of all of these studies put together had similar findings – that about 50% of happiness is determined by genetics. If that seems like a lot, compare that to IQ which is thought to be about 80% genetic.
We don’t know which genes exactly, but you can imagine that things like effects of sunlight on an individual or how happy a person’s face naturally look have an effect on their happiness. And there are studies that show promotor regions of genes that increase certain neurotransmitters are related to happiness.
Basically, there is an inherited component of happiness and one way to think about it is that genes are the architecture of a person’s personality. It’s the architecture because 10% of happiness is built by life circumstances and the other 40% is under your control.
Just because your sense of well being is in your genes doesn’t mean if your child wasn’t born with the happy genes, they’re going to be unhappy.
There are factors that are under your child’s control that you can foster in them.
The most important determinant of happiness is probably our connection to others, and I’ll talk about how to foster that, as well as developing rituals, mind tricks and foods that increase happiness at all ages.
One thing to keep in mind is that happiness in a baby is very different from happiness in an older child or a teen. You need different skills as a parent at each of these stages.
In a baby things like surprise – or literally your face make a child happy – they can be happy just through having their basic needs met. If you have poop on your bottom – how much joy can you derive from the poop being gone? A lot! And what about a nice nap – naps are joy-inducing at most ages. Especially those ones when you wake up and you were drooling.
To cultivate happiness in a teenager on the other hand – this may still be achieved by meeting their basic needs – their needs are no longer to be held, or be fed. Actually it might be related to food – so be sure to have lots of snacks around. Their needs are to be understood, listened to and supported.
These tips to raise a healthy kid work at just about every age. Including your own.
Much of what is known about happiness comes from the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This study recruited a group of teenagers back in 1938 and followed them through their life and is still following their children. It’s know as the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. The study is directed by Dr. Robert Waldinger who is the 4th director of the program. The study has outlived three career spans already. The study has revealed many understandings of health factors across a person’s lifetime because it followed it’s subjects for so long. But one of the most interesting findings started to reveal itself in the 1980s and that was that our connection to other people is highly related to happiness. And it doesn’t have to be a life partner.
Tip #1: Cultivate Connection
Close friendships are important, but even connecting with the same check-out person at the grocery store, having a connection with a favorite barista and even chatting with a stranger on a train have been shown in various related studies to enhance well-being.
Look for ways you can help your kids connect – this is easy when they are young and make friends on the playground with every new kid. If you have a child who is more shy, find activities they can do where they interact with other kids. I worry about older kids who are in organized sports – they are pushed and doing drills and it’s all so serious. They need unstructured time to goof off, screw around, and just hang out. They need to have experiences together that aren’t dictated by an adult in order to really connect, and develop long term friendships. It starts with playdates with young kids, but don’t lose the play dates as kids get older. Take a group out to go bowling, or hiking. Set up craft or art time at your house, encourage your kids to do baking projects with a few close friends. Make time and space to develop relationships.
Who do you have in your life that you connect to? Ask yourself this: If you were sick or scared at 2am, who could you call to help you? Ask your child this question to see what they say. If you only have 1 person you can call, that great. But if you only have 1 person you could call, maybe its time to reach out and connect with someone you haven’t been in touch with.
We need our community. Not just when things are hard, but to keep things great.
When something bad happens, you go into fight or flight mode, right? Kids do too. And we know this means a surge of stress hormones. And we know that when we have a person we can go to, they can calm that surge. Make it a point to help your kids see the importance of reaching out to others when things are tough. Let them see you do this too.
Think of the most difficult things you have faced in your life. Maybe it was bringing home your babies – were those times easier because you had someone to support you?
Share this with your kids, – this idea that other people are important for supporting us.
In the Harvard study, the healthiest people in their 80s were those who had meaningful, healthy relationships when they were 50. And they cultivated those friendships – so put effort into creating and maintaining friendships when you are raising your kids – and let your kids see you make plans to take a walk with a friend, share with them when you went to dinner with a friend.
Or take cookies to a neighbor. Make connections part of your family culture.
One of my fitness instructors taught me to think of our friends like surge protectors – when things get tough, who do you plug into to make thing smoother? Who are your surge protectors? Who are your kids’ surge protectors? Who helps buffer life for them when it gets tough?
At the same time, it’s ok to share with your kids when you have a tough time with a relationship. Your kids will learn very young that friendships aren’t always easy. But like anything else, this is a muscle you strengthen through practice. Tell your kids about when you had a difficult situation with a friend or colleague and talk about how you repaired it.
A good life is not free from challenges – that’s part of what makes a good life.
Tip #2: Be Curious
The second tip is to model being curious about another’s state of mind. It makes people feel really good when you show genuine interest in them and this is a good habit to develop in your children.
It’s an interesting thing to work on as parents. When our kids are babies, we watch intently when our babies smile and we are so engaged when our toddlers reach new milestones – but we pay much less attention as kids get older. A middle school kids’ brain develops more rapidly than at any other age other than age 0-3 but we don’t pay as much attention to our 6th graders melt downs. Continue to be curious about your child’s behaviors, even in the teen years. And teach your kids to be curious. Here’s how. If your 7th grader comes home and talks about a kid being mean at school, listen to the story and then ask questions from a curious mindset. Ask things like: “Why do you think he did that? What else do you think might be going on with him? How do you think he feels after he did that?” Encouraging curiosity like this helps your child to start thinking that way in the moment when they witness something difficult. So that if a child directly says something mean to your child they are trained not to think “poor me, I’m a victim” but instead says “why would Sam call me a loser?” It takes time to develop this. I can’t even do it.
Tip #3: Let your kids fall
The third tip is to let your kids meet challenges with your support, not with your intervention. What I mean by this is don’t fix things for them. And try to catch yourself when you are intervening in a situation to avoid them have something difficult happen. If they don’t get on the sports team they were hoping for, let them deal with it, but be there with a sympathetic ear and ask what things they could do when faced with a challenge. And ask them “what else could you do?” To help them start to develop creative solutions to problems. That way they feel self-reliance and powerful to help themself and that breeds well-being. Think of it like this; life is full of waves, and you can’t stop them, but you can learn to surf. We want our kids to surf.
Tip #4: Create rituals and Routines
Research into happiness shows that among the happiest people, they have in common that they have strong family connections. Even teenagers who are trying to disconnect from the family still want to be connected. There’s a book that summarizes this concept. – I love the title of this book its’ called “Get out of my life, but first could you drive me and Cheryl to the mall?”
Check it out if that speaks to you too.
They may want you gone away from them, but they also want to connect with their family.
And the best way to do that is through rituals and routines. We know that regular family dinners correlate with higher grade point average, greater self confidence, and lower rates of substance use and depression in teens. Its normal for teens to resist routines, like your rituals surrounding holidays, or going to church; but routines create a structure that helps them get through tougher times. You don’t have to be rigid and force attendance at every meal. In our home we have aperitivo every Friday night, sometimes its at 8:30pm because that’s when everyone is available. But it’s a ritual and nobody in our family skips it. They know it’s happening every week, and we don’t have any screens on, we just sit around the cocktail table with a fancy drink and lots of appetizers and re-connect.
Tip #5: Volunteer
The 5th tip for happiness is to volunteer or be charitable. Doing something for others takes the focus off yourself. Initial studies looking at volunteering and happiness were criticized for not accounting for the fact that maybe happier people were volunteering more than unhappy people and they weren’t measuring whether the act of volunteering actually increases happiness. But recent studies have accounted for this. And yes, it is true, volunteering in your community increases happiness, as does charitable giving.
Besides that, it has the added benefit that kids need to figure out what they hate doing and what they love doing so that someday they might find a career. There’s no better way to get free exposure with limited commitment than to volunteer.
Just do an internet search for volunteer opportunities, kids and the name of your city. And if you can’t do that, bake cookies for your neighbors and deliver them together. Or buy cheap flower bouquets, rearrange them and decorate them yourself with ribbons and bring them to a retirement home or to your neighbors. It doesn’t have to be a formal volunteer experience. But it does have more benefit if your child does the volunteering willingly, as opposed to say court-ordered or just volunteering with their school group because the school organizes the activity and they just show up.
I’m sure you can attest to the feeling of satisfaction that comes from giving to others – and its thought to be because your brain releases feel-good chemicals like dopamine and endorphins. Dopamine is the reward neurotransmitter that is associated with pleasure and motivation. And endorphins are natural pain-killers. They reduce stress and anxiety. Not only does volunteering trigger these chemicals and enhance happiness, and boost mood, volunteering has been shown in research to lower blood pressure, enhance immune function and it expands your social connections, which you already know enhances happiness.
Volunteering is a shortcut to happiness. You will always get more than you give.
Tip #6: Eat a vegetarian diet
There is another way to boost your mood through the action of neurotransmitters and that is by our food choices. And that’s tip #6 What you eat determines what bacteria you have in our intestines. Gut bacteria produce by-products from their own metabolism and those by-products affect what is absorbed in your intestines, and they regulate neurotransmitters in the gut that have a direct effect on the brain, it’s called the gut-brain connection. You can increase the feel good neurotransmitters, serotonin and dopamine with food.
It has been observed that vegetarians have a lower rate of depression, so scientists compared a group of 39 meat eaters and divided them into 3 experimental diets. One group was vegetarian, one was pescatarian and one ate no meat or fish. The moods of the group who ate meat didn’t change during the study, but the mood scores of the vegetarians improved after just 2 weeks. The researchers were surprised that the fish only group didn’t change, but it was a small study, so who knows. The reason they think meat affects mood is because meat has a fatty acid called arachidonic acid which is known to change the brain in a way that can disturb mood. There are 2 fats that oppose the effects of arachidonic acid, those are eicosapentaenoic acid and docosehexanoic acid (EPA and DHA), that’s why the scientists expected fish to improve mood. There’s more to come on this, but reducing meat intake might help with your mood.
We also know that eating more fruit and veggies improves mood – in studies, fruit tended to help more than veggies. This information comes from a study of 25k people, so this is a pretty solid bet. People in the study who at the least fruit and veggies were 80% more likely to have depressive symptoms. That means that teaching your kids to like fruits and veggies and include them in their diet when they aren’t with you as they grow older helps to protect against depression.
There are a few other diet-mood studies that are compelling and I’ll put the links in the show notes. Overall they show that a vegan or vegetarian diet is protective and diets with high-sugar, high fat and processed foods are associated with inflammation and a higher risk of depression.
My favorite study shows that a high polyphenol diet improves well-being. And what has polyphenols? Red wine, tea, coffee, and dark chocolate! Also fruits, nuts, and seeds, but lets focus on the red wine, tea and dark chocolate. This study snowed that people who ate 6 portions of fruit and vegetables that included some berries and had some dark chocolate every day for 8 weeks had better general mental health and less depressive symptoms. I bet you have a better sense of well-being just hearing this.
Tip #7 Loving Kindness Meditation
And speaking of hearing good things. That’s the last tip. Tip #7 is what we tell ourselves. Yeah yeah – if you’re like me you know meditation is supposed to be good for mindfulness or whatever. But to be honest I cannot meditate, I just don’t have time, I can’t commit to the time it will take to be okay at it. Anyway, Here’s the shortcut. There is a specific technique called Loving Kindness meditation or LKM and research has shown that it activates the brain areas involved in emotional processing and empathy and it boosts a sense of positivity. More importantly to me, it’s easy to make this part of your child’s bedtime and it’s very concrete. I need a checklist or specific directions to do something like this. I can’t just like meditate.
All you do is take less than a minute to send kind wishes to yourself or another person. It’s easy, you just repeat 3 or 4 positive, reassuring phrases: most people say “May I be happy, may I feel safe and loved, may I be healthy, and strong.” And that’s it. Your child can say it to themself by saying their name specifically, or they can say it to a friend. And eventually, and more powerfully, they can say it to someone they don’t like.
If your child is having a tough time with another kid, be sure to explain that kids who aren’t kind act that way because they have someone in their life that isn’t kind to them.
I’ve read a number of cases when a child has a bully – say it’s a kid named Viktor and he calls your child ugly, a troll, says his hair is ugly and that he can’t play with him.
After your child has some experience with LKM, they can send good vibes to Viktor. “May Viktor be happy, may Viktor feel safe and loved”, and so on.
This helps to recognize that other people have the same needs that you do, that kindness is stronger than anger and you associate positive feelings with the bully.
One other tip to help include this in your bedtime routine is to check out the book “May all People and Pigs Be Happy” and read it before you guide your child through a quick LKM practice before bed. And if you already incorporate prayer before bed, this may already be part of your routine and you didn’t know what a great thing you were doing to enhance happiness.
I have a hard time with mindfulness. I don’t really get it. And it made me feel better to find this one area of happiness research. There are studies that show that thinking positive thoughts does nothing to make you happier. You can’t bully your brain into being happy. However, focusing and thinking about the present moment does increase happiness.
Humans did not evolve to be happy – people who survived to have babies were the ones who were anxious, vigilant and avoided being eaten by a lion. Humans are wired for survival, evolutionary pressure did not select for happy humans.
In fact we have a negativity bias: our brains scan around for what might get in the way of our survival. And when something scary happens, like being bullied, or falling on the playground, a structure called the amygdala in our brain takes all the blood and oxygen and your automatic defenses take over. This is why we have to train our kids’ brains to react in ways that calm that biologic reaction.
And we can do that through cultivating connections, curiosity, practicing meeting challenges, having rituals, volunteering, eating well, and practicing mindfulness.
I just told you a bunch of stuff to do to pursue happiness. But at the same time, don’t chase happiness because chasing happiness can have the inadvertent effect of chasing it away.
Several studies of people intending to be happy and working on happiness have shown that their pursuit has the opposite effect. Researchers think this is because of expectation – our expectations are just too high.
What about checking in on how happy our child is? You need to be careful with asking your child if they are happy. It implies that happiness is very important. When people check in on how happy they are, they commonly find they aren’t as happy as they hoped to be. The warning here is maybe don’t ask your child if they are happy.
There are tons of other tips for cultivating happiness. Like letting go of being perfect, getting physical exercise and spending time in nature. These all help to boost happiness.
The other reminder I embrace is that your mood affects the room you are in. We all have nervous system structures called mirror neurons – we absorb the energy around us. And when you enter a room with a happy disposition, everyone feels it. And when you complain and are a negative Nelly, everyone feels that too. It’s the same reason that you can’t help but smile back when someone smiles at you. Try it – look at someone and tell them to try not to smile and then look at them and smile and laugh with joy – I bet they can’t help but smile back.