Happy Kids? Is it our job?

Is raising happy kids the goal?

How often do we hear the words – “I just want them to be happy?”

What happens when we continually are trying to make our children happy?

Is this the right goal in parenting?  Don’t we all want to raise happy kids?

Any moment our children are distressed, and we feel the intense need to exit them out of that state and back into happiness, we are short circuiting the lessons of resilience that are inherent to living. When our children are young, they need to experience the rainbow of emotions and learn to move through feelings of disappointment, failure, shame, guilt, jealousy, not being the best. These feelings are life’s teachers. They humble the human spirit and temper the ego. Most importantly I think they build resilience. The ability to overcome struggle. On the other side of the struggle is the development of capability.

You don’t need to be the architect of their happiness – that is their job!

Why are young children who should be happy – anxious?

I have friends who I taught with over 30 years ago who are stunned at how many young children are anxious. It was rarely a thing in my early teaching career.

Young children who are well loved, with survival needs met, have no reason to be anxious.

The work of childhood is play, discovery, curiosity and problem solving – anxiety is a modern phenomenon.

It is through our desire to make our children happy and avoid stress, that we can take away moments of learning to overcome life’s challenges. Maybe we do too much for them, we don’t like to hear them cry, or have a desire to keep the peace – whatever the intention, we can be robbing them of moments of struggle.

It is in the struggle that they develop capability, resources and experiences in learning how to cope. Without this – life can feel very overwhelming, causing the child to feel anxious. Too much protection and a lack of capability is being cultivated in the child.

How does this happen?

If our babies are distressed, we have an inbuilt mechanism within our brains to respond to the needs of the baby straight away. This is an important survival system because our babies are born so reliant on us.

Overtime, as the baby turns into a toddler, this system needs to be tempered with a healthy pause to instant gratification and immediate need to stop them from crying or having that significant melt down. These are the building blocks to managing life, and overcoming adversity. The stakes are really low, and the learning is fast. Letting them experience the fullness of life, the good, bad and everything in between is the goal of parenting. Helping them to resource themselves in times of stress and know that they can survive this.

Capability – the super power – and path to happiness

When I look at my happiest friends, they are highly capable people. They have suffered the struggles of life and have been able to overcome hardship, without blaming others and have taken their own personal happiness squarely into their own hands. In fact, the bigger the struggle, the more capable they have become and they tend to live in gratitude for being on the other side of those hard times, know that they might revisit struggle again. After all – life is like that, you never know what is around the corner.

How do we help our children become capable?

We let them struggle.

My husband was always so much better at this than me. I was quick to want to save them from their struggles (warning mums – remember we are wired to do this)

We allow them to experience those hard feelings without needing to fix!

We might say;

“I can see that was hard for you.”

“I can see that you didn’t want that to happen.”

“I can feel that was frustrating for you.”

We allow them to adjust – adapt – accommodate – accept by going through the whole experience of struggle. Then we reflect back to them how they were able to overcome it.

We give them the space to figure it out.

We learn to tolerate our own feelings of discomfort when we, or our children struggle.

Our kids can’t learn to tolerate feelings if we can’t tolerate those feelings ourselves!

I have decided the goal of parenting is in supporting our children to build capability.

Then we know we have prepared them well for this crazy, unpredictable world – and the irony? They are more likely to be happy!

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