The Psychology of Optimal Parenting with Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D.

Welcome to Mama Goddess. I'm your host, Alexandra J. Johnson. This podcast is all about rocking your goddess life, creating vibrant health, and celebrating motherhood and family life. It's about living an authentically awesome life. Let's have some fun.

Hello, I'm Alexandra J. Johnson, and today's guest is the brilliant Heidi Grant Halvorson. Heidi is a motivational psychologist, a speaker, author of How We Can Reach Our Goals, a blogger for Huffington Post, hbr, Fast Company, Forbes, Smart Brief, and Psych Today. Welcome, Heidi.

Thank you so much.

So excited for all of your wisdom and all of your research to bring that to parenting and how we become an awesome parent. So thank you for being here.

It's a terrific topic. I mean, it's hard to think of something that's more important or something that's sort of more challenging, really. There's so much advice out there about it, and we all really want to be the best parents that we can possibly be. And so definitely, it's a wonderful road. I have two children myself. It's a. It's a wonderful journey, but it is a difficult one. And to the extent that we are able to give people some guidance that we know works, my background comes from science, so I like to try to bring into it the things that we know, sort of strategies that have been tested that really help people to not only be better parents, but to sort of navigate that time well for themselves so that they get the most out of that and can enjoy life while they're also kind of trying to do the best for their kids. Yeah.

Awesome.

I love it.

From all of your study and your research on success and becoming happier and healthier and all of that, what advice would you give to someone who may be listening to this, who is either currently pregnant or wanting to start a family? What advice would you give for them to kind of start preparing this wild adventure?

You know, it's funny when. So when psychologists are like doctors, you know, like when doctors are. You catch a doctor smoking and you think, like, you really should know better than to do that. Every once in a while, psychologists kind of get in the same trap and we don't use our own advice. And I remember something like that happening with me with my first daughter. I. I had done. I was very excited to be pregnant. I was. As a psychologist, I'm someone who. I've had a lot of training in the developmental area, so I know a lot about child psychology. I read. I'm a ravenous reader. I bought every book out there. What to Expect when youn're expecting and all the Dr. Sears books and everything. And I just read them ravenously to try to master. I kind of tackled being pregnant and my approaching motherhood with the same sort of attitude that I tackled doing research. And I was just going to find out everything. And then I walked into it sort of thinking, I am going to be a rock star at this. Like I am going to be the best mom ever. Because, I mean, I am so well prepared. Right, Right. And then what happened was. That's not what happened. What happened was. And my daughter, by the way, is delightful. She's almost six and she's absolutely wonderful. But she was what, what a lot of people call a high need baby. Now, we used to call them fussy, but the technical term I think is high need. She cried from like the moment she was born until she was about one and a half and only stopped to eat and sleep. And the sleeping was like, not nearly as often as I wanted it to be. So she was a very, very difficult baby. And I, having gone into this with this attitude that I was going to just sort of nail it right out of the gate and I was going to be this fantastic mother and I was going to do all the right things because I had learned about all the right things, it really crippled me. I felt like a failure. I mean, I felt terrible. I felt so depressed and anxious all the time. I was constantly second guessing myself, wondering how much of it was my fault, was I doing the wrong things. And I had this moment. I actually write about this in my book Succeed. This moment where I was sort of sitting in the fetal position on my bathroom floor while my daughter was crying and my husband was trying to get her to sleep and just sort of rocking back and forth and thinking, I'm a horrible mother, I'm not good at this at all. And then I had a light bulb went on and I thought, hang on, you know better than this because you know that what happens when one of the things I study about sort of the way people approach their goals, they tend to approach them either thinking in terms of what I call being good, right? This idea that I'm doing something in order to show how good I am at it, to validate myself, to prove myself. But the other way you can think about the same kinds of goals is to think of them as about getting better, about developing and growing and improving, and sort of not about being perfect right away, but kind of making progress over time. And I thought, I've had. This is my major area of research. There's really no excuse for this. I had been thinking about my own motherhood in this very be good way that I was going to just prove myself. And my whole experience with my daughter was going to be a validation of my great mothering skills. The thing is, I realized in that moment that I was approaching it completely wrong because that's ridiculous. Nobody. You don't. Every child is different. Every child is special and has their own quirks. And every journey for every parent is a little bit different. So you just can't be. You can't anticipate everything it's going to be. There's going to be challenges, you're going to be thrown curve balls. But it's really parenting shouldn't be about. And I guess this is a long story, but getting back to how we can prepare ourselves, I think when we're pregnant or when thinking about becoming pregnant to really develop that kind of get better mindset with respect to being a parent and to even to being pregnant. You have ideas about what I mean. Heidi Klum used to just kill me during her pregnancies because she was just so thin and had this perfect little bulge. And she said, I feel fabulous all the time. And she was just one of these high energy pregnant women that seemed to look flawless. And I was bloated. I mean, I gained water weight like it was going out of style. And I felt I had horrible mood swings. And I mean, you know, these things happen. So again, I sort of felt like, okay, I'm failing at pregnancy because I'm not doing it the chipper Heidi Klum way. And then I went into being a mom and I thought, well, I'm failing at this too, because my baby, I've seen the pictures and the movies. The baby's sleeping and being happy and my baby cries a lot and so what am I doing wrong? So to go into it, it really helped me when I kind of in that moment on the bathroom floor, switched gears and said, from now on, I'm going to stop trying to prove that I'm the world's best mom. And I'm going to just focus on getting better, on how I can try to be and learn every day how to be the best mother I can to my child. And it really, it was like a huge weight lifted off me. I felt much more relaxed. I felt far less depressed. I was able to interact with my daughter in a much more positive way and really kind of tune into her in a way. It wasn't about me proving myself anymore. It really was just about kind of how can I get better at this, what works, what doesn't. And I got to be. My husband said I got to be a lot more fun to be around. So I think the mindset that we approach pregnancy and motherhood and parenthood with is really important that we not be looking to prove ourselves or to be the best, you know, the very best we can be. You know, it's going to be a journey. You need to kind of expect it to be a journey that will have surprises and to not, you know, every time there's a setback, something that's difficult to not kind of use that as a way to judge yourself, but rather to think of it as part of the learning process because really that's what it is. I think we're really hard on ourselves. Many, many, many new mothers and fathers are very, very hard on themselves and they have expectations of themselves that I just don't think they're fair. You know, you have to. It's a totally. It changes your life in every way and you have to cut yourself a little bit of slack, you know.

That's awesome. Amazing. Thank you for sharing your personal story too because we get to connect to it and were not alone.

Oh, it was very easy. Yeah. Even so called experts can sometimes have children that drive them up a wall and we don't know and it really. But it's also just so that nobody gets too terrified by that story. It did work out. My daughter is actually an unbelievably pleasant child now and is very, very even tempered and easy. So sometimes things happen in those early months that really have nothing to do with what they're going to be like in a few short years. But until they start kind of being able to communicate, all kinds of things can happen. Right. I love that.

I'm very similar of reading everything and buying everything. And then I think a lot of women are, and especially women that are listening to this and even fathers. So as you're saying, preparing to get or to be better, not to be perfect. I know I definitely have a perfect tendency, which I think a lot of us do, that we want to do pregnancy perfect and birth perfect and parenting perfect. So how do we set goals and maybe set expectations so that we're still focusing on becoming better but not perfect and not being too hard on ourselves.

Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. I think that what I encourage people to do sometimes is to actually write out their goals and as a part of this to shift them. And so if you say I want to be a terrific mom, Or I want to have the healthiest possible, the best possible birth experience. And then you can say, okay, how can I change that into sort of this get better language? So it said, I want to learn to be a terrific moment over time, or I want to try to find out as much as I can about the birth experience so that I can have the best one possible. So you're kind of changing the language. They're gentle shifts in thinking, really, that just sort of take the pressure off of. Instead of being like, I'm going to do this perfectly, saying, I'm going to do this as well as I can and try to learn as much as I can. And so you're really kind of taking it off. There's no failure then. Do you know what I mean? Because we're all. You can't fail to try to do your best. You can't fail if you haven't set for yourself a really kind of firm goal. And a lot of times these firm goals are just not very realistic. I'm going to do everything perfectly. What does that even mean? So we want to. It's not about setting the bar. And I. This is really important that. What I'm not encouraging people to do is sort of say, oh, whatever, it doesn't really matter. You're not setting the bar lower. But what you're doing is sort of. If you're still saying, I want to be a great mom, I want to have a great birthing experience, I want to have the healthiest possible pregnancy, you're still setting those goals for yourself, but you're tackling it in a way that sort of says, but that's something. I might not get it all right, like, right away, and I might make some mistakes. And that's okay, because it's not about being perfect. It's just about getting better. Am I a better mom today than I was a year ago? You know, am I doing better with my pregnancy today than I was in terms of treating myself well and healthy than I did a week ago? You want to kind of just kind of keep it sort of the frame of comparison. One way to think about how to make this shift is to make the comparison yourself rather than other people. I think a lot of times we're sort of. We are kind of. I mean, it's like me with Heidi Klum, right? I mean, I have no business comparing myself to Heidi Kloop, even though we have the same name, first name. But it's like by thinking about how my pregnancy is going relative to hers, I'm really setting myself up for judging myself. Whereas what's much better is to say, compared to myself, how am I eating this week compared to how I ate last week, how am I moving and how is my energy this week compared to last week? And am I doing all the things this week that I'm supposed to be doing for my health and for the baby's health? And how is that compared to last week? Have I made improvements? And the same thing with parenting. It's like, don't compare yourself to these often fictional, by the way, people we see on TV we think are these perfect parents. Don't compare yourself to other people who as parents, compare yourself to yourself but a month ago or a year ago and say, how have I grown in that time? And I think when we make our. Rather it's about, like I said, progress over time rather than being sort of perfect right out of the box and being better than other people. You want to just stay away mentally from comparing yourself to other people because it's almost always a bad idea. It either ends up making you feel. I mean, there's two things that happen. It either makes you feel awful because you think that they're better than you are, or it makes you sort of feel kind of like you gloat a little bit. Well, at least I'm not doing that. Well, that's fine, but you're not really learning anything from that either. It's so much better to think about what we do in terms of just how we are growing over time and leave other people out of it. It's good to solicit advice from people. People will give you advice regardless of whether or not you solicit it. But getting advice, seeking expert guidance, seeking knowledge, these are all really good things. But when it comes to comparing yourself, don't compare yourself to other people. I think it's just really almost entirely harmful psychologically. And it does create this mindset of I've got to do everything right, I've got to have the perfect children and I'm to be the perfect mom. And that kind of thinking, really the irony is when you and we know this from lots of studies in many different kinds of contexts, when people allow themselves to make mistakes, they kind of go into something saying, I'm going to screw up because this is hard or it's new to me or there's going to be obstacles that I can't anticipate, and so I'm going to screw up. And that's just going to have to be how it is. They Actually make fewer mistakes than people who go into situations saying, I'm going to nail this. I'm going to do everything perfectly. They are actually far more likely to screw up because the. Because the number one reason why people make mistakes is fear. They get panicky, they get anxious, and so they don't. And anxiety really kind of shuts down your brain. You suddenly don't have access to all the knowledge that you have because your mind is so filled with fear and nervousness. And so if you can kind of take yourself off the hook, you'll probably handle difficulty a lot better. We find that when people are really kind of saying, I'm going to do everything perfectly, I'm going to do everything perfectly, then as soon as something gets hard, they become so anxious about the fact that there's. Oh, God, what does this mean? Does it mean that I'm not perfect? That they actually do a worse job? And I found that to be true with my daughter very much, that I had been missing cues that I could have used to settle her down or to. To give her what she wanted because I was so anxious every time she would start screaming. It's like my powers of observation were sort of dulled by the fact that I was just filled with anxiety and depression over it. And when I kind of got that out of the way and sort of gave myself a break and said, okay, I'm not going to do everything perfectly, but I can try to get better, then suddenly I found I was noticing things. Noticing things that were triggers for her or things that could soothe her a little bit better. So I actually got to be a better because I wasn't being so hard on myself. And so I think it's a really powerful. Definitely learn everything. You can buy all the books. But that mental image we have of ourselves, of I'm going to be kind of Mrs. Cleaver and always look clean and neat and do everything perfectly. Get that out of your head, because it's going to be messy and you're going to be great. That's.

Yeah, I love that, too. And I know you talk about this in your books and your work, too, that having the growth mindset, like, I just feel relaxed in my body when I think of, like, oh, what can I learn from this? Rather than, like, trying to protect or hide that I might be messing up in some way or there's a mistake, you know, I mean, it just gives me so much more freedom.

And it really, you know, and it also really helps, by the way, with the unsolicited Advice, because when you're, when you are in that mindset, because this is just something every pregnant woman who has not had a child yet needs to know. People are going to be telling you like a million things that you need to do whether you want to hear it or not. And it's very hard to stomach all of that well intentioned advice, particularly when they're telling you you're doing something wrong, which they will do. And I think it's really hard to stomach that advice when you're in that be good mindset where you're sort of, you so are wrapped up in thinking I have to be the perfect mom. That every time somebody tries to give you a piece of advice, it feels like a criticism. And I definitely found that to be true for me. And then when I again sort of shifted into thinking, okay, it's more about growth and learning, I could actually hear people giving me advice in a totally different way. I could actually, I mean, I didn't necessarily take all the advice I was given, but I could hear it and I could hear it for what it was intended to be, which is not criticism, but it was meant to be helpful. And I was sort of open to learning things from other people in a way that I hadn't been when all I could think about was, I'm the perfect mom. And so if I'm the perfect mom, I don't need all of this advice. You do need advice. It's great to turn to. I'm a strong believer in turning to groups of other moms, whether it's in real life, so to speak, or online for support for talking through those things that come up that you're like, is this normal? Is this a problem? Should I be dealing with this? And that kind of thing is just incredibly helpful because it's just the single. It's the most wonderful and most challenging thing anybody ever does is bring a baby into the world. And it's got lots of ups and downs and it's awesome, but we need a lot of support. And people shouldn't shy away from reaching out for that support. But they tend to. Again, we know a lot of research showing that when people are trying to do things perfectly and focusing on being good, they're very loathe to seek out help or accept it because they feel like needing help means I'm not good, I must not be a good mom if I need all this help. And nothing is further from the truth. The best moms, the best, best people at anything, whatever they do, are the ones that are smart enough to recognize they need some expertise, they need some guidance. They know when to ask for help and how to listen. So again, that sort of get better mindset really kind of frees you up to hear that advice and to benefit from it, I think.

Yeah. Fantastic. So you've talked a little bit about fears and kind of anxieties.

And I know that. That's.

I've heard and I've read and I've personally experienced that when you get pregnant, you start the whole thing that there's fears and anxieties on a whole new level. How do you recommend that we work with our fears? Like fears about our child's health, about being a great mother, fears about our family and support and all of that.

All those fears. I mean, it's certainly easier said than done. Certainly it's a big challenge. We're. When you're pregnant, your biology just kicks you into fear mode. And I think that's a big struggle for a lot of women. I think a couple of things I think it's good to try to talk through. If you have someone, either a partner or a friend that you can kind of talk through some of the fears with, sometimes it's very helpful to kind of articulate them out loud because one of the things we do when we're afraid is we sometimes kind of latch onto this fearful idea and don't really kind of take it all the way to its logical conclusion, which is like, oh, well, I guess if that happened, it wouldn't actually be so bad. So sometimes we get kind of caught up in something being sort of worse than it actually would be. So sometimes it's helpful to talk to other people and kind of get some perspective on that. I think another thing is to kind of differentiate between things that are fearful or fear inducing that you can do something about and things that you can't. And in the world of parenting, there are a lot of things that are very, very scary that you kind of just have to put out of your head because you can't. It's either too soon to do anything about it. I remember when Annika, my daughter, was at and I started obsessing over whether or not she would be kidnapped walking to school when she was. Because I saw something about a child who was. By the way, the news is terrifying when you're pregnant. It's just an awful thing to watch. And I'm thinking, okay, hang on. Not that I can't do anything about to keep my child safe when she walks to school. There are a lot of things I can do about that. But that's five years minimum down the road. I need to live sort of in the present and deal with the things that are. So when you find yourself either going down a road of fearful thinking that's either about something way in the future, so it's too soon to do anything about, or something you just simply can't do anything about, then it's time to kind of try to use a little bit of mind control and kind of push away those thoughts as gently as possible and just say, you know, I'm not going to think about that because all I'm doing is causing myself pain. There are the other set of fearful thoughts when you actually can do something about it. You think about, oh, what would happen if the baby got into the cupboard where the Drano is kept? Well, I can do something about that. I can baby proof the house. I was an insane baby proofer. You would just not believe the amount of baby proofing things in my house. And my husband thought I overdid it and I probably did, but at least that was something that I could do something about. So for me, that's what you feel. Then I think if your fear is in an area where you can take action, then you have a way of dealing with that. Fear is about things you can't control or won't be able to control for years. You need to kind of just push that away because like I said, all it's doing nothing good is coming from it. It's all just causing pain. And one of the things that turns out to be really effective, incidentally for pushing out fearful thoughts, is that I talk about if then planning a lot. So if then planning is this kind of planning where you decide basically exactly what you're going to do in a particular situation. So if I'm in this situation, then I'm going to do X. And it turns out, and it's really good for lots of things. It's great for helping people reach their goals. It's great for helping people resist temptation. And it actually turns out to be very effective for helping people to get rid of unwanted thoughts. And the way it works is you come up with a replacement thought that you're going to have. So if your mind is going down some dark road and you're really staring yourself and you know that there's really no point in thinking about it, then what you can do is say, okay, well when I start thinking about whether or not my child is going to have some terrible thing happen to them down the road, then I'm going to instead think this other thought, this other happy thought, that something that is positive and pleasant for you and it can be anything you want. And so you say, okay, if I think this thought, then I'm going to replace it with this other one. Replacement turns out to be actually very effective. We find that when people just try to push thoughts out of their head and say, okay, if I think I'm just not going to think about that. That's not effective because there's a sort of a long answer. But there's a process called ironic monitoring. It's something that has to do with the way our brains are wired. So when you tell your brain I don't want to think about white bears, then what happens is there's a level in your brain which is constantly searching for the thought white bear to come up so that it can suppress it. Well, the problem is that part of your brain that's constantly thinking white bears keeps the idea of white bears active. So in other words, the now all you can think about is white bears. It's kind of this horrible ironic. Well, that's why they call it an ironic process. So in general, when we try to just sort of not think X, that doesn't work. Replacement, however, works beautifully. So I would say this is a really good tool. It is very. I mean, I remember laying in my bed with my daughter and having these, you know, when she was like four months old and thinking, oh, my God, if something ever happened to her, could I live without her? These thoughts just happen to you when you're a new mother. You don't have to be like, you do not have to be crazy or anything. I'm not a particularly morbid person. But it was just the thought pops in your head, oh, my God, how could I go on? And your brain, you kind of want to start going down that road mentally and thinking, how would I? And you have to stop. I mean, you just have to stop yourself because all you're doing is, is really causing yourself pain. And so I got in the habit of like, okay, when I think about that, then I'm going to think about how cute she looks when she eats her oatmeal in the morning and just push it out with another thought. And that works really, really well. So it's nice to have that kind of in your pocket as a strategy for when the crazy thoughts come. And they will.

Yeah, I think it's so great because like you said, you want to go down that. Because I've definitely had like, what if something happens to me? What if something's wrong with the baby? What if something happens to my husband? And it's like, can I, Will I make it? And I'm like, okay, I'm going to make it. I'm strong enough. And then not think about it, right?

And beyond that, it's like, okay, now I've thought about it enough and now I'm done. And it really, if you're having those kinds of. They're very normal. I mean, this is the stuff that I think you don't really often see in books about what to expect when you're pregnant is like the crazy thoughts, the ones that are really bizarre and obsessive. And if you try to share them with your partner who's not pregnant, they look at you like, why are you thinking about that? And you say, I don't know. I don't know why I'm thinking about it, but I am. And having a replacement thought is really just one of the single most effective strategies we found for, for getting those thoughts out of the way. And really, like I said, if you can't honestly say to yourself, this is something I can do something about, then it's really not something you should think about. That is brilliant. Thank you.

You totally helped me and I know.

You'Re going to help so many other people with that. Oh, it happened to me, believe me. Still does, actually. It doesn't really quite go away. It gets better. Still sticks around.

You got the tools. The tools to work on.

That's right. So I'm curious.

It seems like we as parents are demonstration for our children in many ways. Like what practices, what would you recommend parents to do? To work on their relationship to happiness and goals and succeeding in their own life so that they actually are role models for their children?

I think one of the most. It's a great question. I think one of the most important things you can do is really, again, convey this idea that people aren't born good at things. I hear people say, grown women my age will say, oh, I don't do the bills because I'm not a math person. And every time I hear someone say that in front of their kids, I think, oh, I really wish you didn't just say that because there's no such thing as a math person. I mean, if what you mean by a math person is somebody who's capable of doing math, there's no such thing as we're all math people, then. And so we tend to think of. There's so much, especially Americans do this. Americans, more than anyone else, actually, we tend to think about what makes people good and bad at things as being really kind of a function of all of their ability. And by ability, we mean kind of like you won the DNA lottery or you didn't. So you know you're good at math because you got the math gene. Well, there's no math gene. You know, you're really smart because you got the smart gene. You're really creative because you got the creative gene. It turns out that abilities don't work that way. It's not that we don't have something that we get in our genes. We have temperaments. We are perhaps drawn to certain kinds of things or people who are drawn to math and people who aren't, people who are drawn to art and others who aren't. But even people who are very, very good at math work very hard to be good at math. And people who are great artists work very hard to be great artists. So it's a lot more ability, at the end of the day, is really about a lot more about effort and experience than we often realize. And so one of the things I encourage parents to do is to talk about with their children, to talk about what they're doing in terms of their own challenges. So it's good to share with your children stories of how something was very difficult for you, but then you mastered it. That it's good to talk about the value of persistence and to show them that not everything comes easily, but you work hard, and that's how you develop mastery of something. And I think it's really important. This is a particularly difficult one. When we praise our children, we want to make sure that we're praising them for the effort and for the persistence and for the strategies they use, rather than just saying, oh, you're so smart or you're so clever, oh, you're so creative. When we praise children that way, it sends a message that basically, oh, I did well at this because I'm smart. When in most cases, children do well or don't do well at something, not just because they're smart, but because they actually tried, they worked hard at it or they didn't. And working hard at something is actually bigger. And persisting when things get difficult is a much better predictor of performance than anything like iq. So I think it's important to kind of just like I'm talking about with the kind of be good, get better mindset. We want our kids to have a get better mindset with respect to the things they do and not just because you enjoy life more, which you do when you have a get better mindset, you enjoy things more, you find them more interesting. Not just because it sort of feels better to think that way, but actually, in fact, the top performers at the end of the day are the people who actually see their goals in terms of improvement over time. They are the ones who kind of hang in there. They are the ones who persist when the going gets tough. So we want our kids to have that kind of mindset. And the best way to do that is to kind of, when you talk both about them and yourself, to use that kind of get better language to talk about how the kids, especially when they're little, they look up to mom and dad and just think it's miraculous the things that they can do. And I think it's important to say, yeah, maybe I wasn't always good at this. I had to work very hard to do it and to emphasize that things take time. And, you know, it's funny, I felt very successful the other day as a parent. I was playing a video game, and I kept. I don't usually play video games. I'm just not very into them. But my husband and I were playing video games, and I kept. My character kept blowing up. On this one level, I could not, you know, I got really frustrated and I said, oh, I'm just. Oh, God, I'm terrible at this. And my daughter, who's five, came up behind me and she said, no, mom, you just have to keep trying and then you'll get it. And I thought, oh, that's great. That's exactly what I want you to think. And I said, you're absolutely right. If I keep trying, I will get it. And so we want to, wherever possible, sort of put that message in kind of everything that we do that persistence is really the key. And applaud praising effort and persistence in the same way that we tend to praise ability. So kids get to feel good about being a kid who's, you know, got some grit and hangs in there. That's a great thing to have.

That's so awesome. I love that. The focus on hard work and work and persistence. Yeah, a lot of our children are. Maybe not all the children, but it just seems like there's, like an entitlement in, like, I should be having this. And I don't know, it's just an interesting thing. And, like, they don't want to work hard for anything anymore.

You know, I think there's a. I think that that's one of these really unfortunate things that's come from the best intentions. A lot of in the 50s and 60s parents were. In the early 60s parents were very. The culture was much more sort of authoritarian and you kind of did what your parents said and parents weren't necessarily very responsive to their kids. That was sort of more of the norm. And I think there was a reaction to that where parents wanted to be a little bit more responsive to their kids and praise them more and kind of build up self esteem. And as a culture we got really concerned with self esteem. The problem is that the way. And again, I think this is just not totally unintentional. I think with the best intentions parents do this, but unfortunately it doesn't work. In fact, it backfires that they get so concerned with self esteem protection that they protect their children from having any kinds of real challenging experiences. So this is where you get. I was a college professor for a number of years and I would get parents who would call me up when their child got a C or a D on the exam because they never came to class and they didn't study and tell me that wouldn't I please just give them a B. They've been going through a lot and I get a lot of these phone calls and I said, well no, I'm not going to do that because that wouldn't be fair to the other kids. And there have to be consequences. When you don't come to class and you don't study, there are consequences for that. And that idea of sort of there are consequences for your actions and that sometimes things are going to be hard and you're going to have to work through them. We've kind of coddled I think a generation of children so much that the irony is we haven't protected their self esteem, we've made them completely insecure. These are kids that come into my office and they are absolutely beside themselves with terror over dealing with real kind of fairly mundane things because they've never really had to stand on their own two feet before. And there's actually interesting research that shows that in terms of well being, sort of looking at people who've had significant negative experiences in their lives, whether it's a death of a loved one, experiencing poverty, illness, losing a job really, or just sort of any kind of really upsetting stressors. Major stressors. And they looked at the relationship between how many of these sort of major stressors you've dealt with in your life and your well being and your happiness. And what they find is some of it's Quite surprising. So the non surprising part is that if you've had a lot of them, you have lower well being and happiness. I mean, if you're someone who's just dealt with tremendous amounts of terrible things, you have lower well being. But actually people who have dealt with a few, like say three or four kind of rough things in their lives have greater well being and happiness than people who've dealt with none of them or one. And what they find is that the reason for that is because experiencing something difficult and then coming out on the other side of it, having gotten through it on your own two feet, is actually incredibly powerful as a self esteem builder. See, real self esteem does not come from never experiencing difficulty. Real self esteem comes from experiencing difficulty and then realizing you can handle it. That's where real confidence comes from. So I feel very sad when I think about this sort of generation of kids who in an effort to protect their self esteem and bolster their self esteem and tell them how great they are at everything and never have them have to deal with anything really challenging or difficult and have all that taken care of for them. We've built a generation of kids who don't have genuine self efficacy. Don't have genuine self efficacy because they don't trust themselves. It's one of these. Another irony that when parents say, oh, I'll deal with this for you, they think they're being nice. But the message you're kind of sending implicitly to the child is you can't handle this, so I'll have to handle it for you. And the kid is getting that message. And that's why they're coming in their freshman year and falling apart in my office of all places. And I'm just there to sign off on which courses they're taking. And they're just saying, I can't handle this, I can't handle this. And I think, well, yes you can, but you have no idea that you can because you've never had to do it. So I think talking about effort and talking about persistence is also important because it does send a message that is in your. It's a very powerful message. I think it's empowering to hear. My life is about if I work hard, if I set goals for myself, if I hang in there when the going gets tough, I can make things happen for me. I've got the skills to do that. And if I don't have the skills to do it now, I can get the skills because I can learn and I can improve and I can grow. I Think that's wonderful. I mean, it doesn't sound like I always tell people. I wish I could say that if you just sort of visualize the life you want, it will magically show up. Because that sounds awesome and I really wish it were true, but it's not. And I know that my version of it sounds like it's a little bit more hard work, but the great thing is my version works. If you do these things, you actually will succeed. You actually will reach your goals. You actually will have greater well being and happiness and you really will feel empowered and have genuine self confidence. This based on knowledge that when someone throws you a curve ball, you can handle it. I think this is something really important to give our kids. It's important to be honest with them and to not coddle them so much that they never get that feeling of. Yeah, you know, I mean, if you think about the things you're most proud of in your life, they're always the things that were hard. They're always the things where you, you know, I mean, we don't, we don't psyched about the time somebody gave you an A, even though you didn't deserve it. That's not a source of pride. I mean, you might be happy at the moment, but it's not like you carry that memory with you. It's the things that we really, where we climbed a mountain that we weren't sure we could climb and we pulled it off. That's what really kind of sustains you. And we can't rob people, we can't rob our children of those experiences. And that means sometimes kind of letting them fall a little bit, letting them struggle with something until they find their way. But you know, if you stay on message with effort and persistence, then you're going to, you give them the confidence to keep trying.

Yeah, that's such a beautiful lesson for us as adults.

Right. We need to have those reminders of.

Persistence and that we can handle it.

It's so funny that I wrote a piece a long time ago for Huffington Post called the Trouble with Bright Girls that was about sort of this idea that ironically, very bright young girls. We have research showing that very bright young girls are often at risk for being the most helpless in the face of difficulty because they're the most likely to think that they're good at things because they were sort of born that way. Right. And so when something becomes difficult, they say, oh, I must not be good at this. And they quit. And I was trying to show in the piece how as parents we can kind of get around that by teaching, especially our girls. Bright boys, too. This happens with bright boys, too. It's just that it happens a little bit more with girls. But talking to them about how success isn't just about ability, that there are lots of very smart people out there who aren't successful because it's about ability needs to be expressed through hard work and persistence and using the right strategies and planning and kind of being really strategic about how we reach our goals. So I got all of these wonderful emails back from parents saying that this really helped them understand their daughter. But I got way more emails back from other grown women like me saying, oh, this is me. And wow, I've been doing this my whole life. My God. And I say, it's not too late. It really isn't. And you're completely right that. That there's so many of us adults, all the ones walking around saying, I'm not a math person. No, stop doing that to yourself. Stop closing doors. You don't know that you couldn't be great at math if you tried. And we do close doors for ourselves all the time because we get into this kind of thinking. So in the course of trying to send your kids the right message, it'd be good to take the message yourself to heart and not close off doors for yourself, too.

Yeah, definitely. So I'm very interested in how do we around all of this and kind of supporting our children to become better and hard work and persistence. How do we start to give feedback to our children and support them, and when do we start practicing giving them feedback?

Well, you know, I think you can kind of start from the beginning, you know, when there's limited language, a lot of these things require linguistics. They kind of have to understand what trying really hard means, but they get that pretty early. And I think every time we say, good job, you're such a good boy or such a good girl, you want to say, and you kept going and you finally got it, and I'm so proud of you. So it's about these sort of trying to insert language when you talk to your child that kind of. I mean, I have this happen to me all the time. My daughter will come back, and she's from school and she's done something great. And I say, annika, you're so smart. And then immediately say, and you worked so hard at this. I can tell you really, really tried, and that's great, and I'm so proud of you for that. So it's okay to say that they're Smart and good and those things. But you just want to always make sure that that message is coupled with something about acknowledging the process, that it wasn't just that they have this amazing brain, but that they used it and they used it and they paid attention and they tried really hard and they stayed motivated. And I think so it's just about kind of peppering your language with these kinds of words. Improvement, hard work, persistence, you hung in there. And as long as we throw some of those words in every time we're giving our kids feedback about something, or when you're playing a new game with them and they're having a hard time with it and you just remind them this takes time. A lot of times my daughter would sort of say, well, you and daddy can do this. I'm never going to be able to do this. And I say, well, Daddy and I have been doing this for 30 years. We've got a lot of practice. So you're going to get better. You get better and better. So a lot of times taking those opportunities, when they present themselves to talk about everything as being about growth and improvement, it comes up all the time. And so whenever you can kind of throw that into your conversation with your kids at sort of whatever the age appropriate level is, the more they'll walk away thinking, oh yeah, my abilities are things that grow. And it really is a tremendous gift to give a child because we know from just hundreds and hundreds of of studies that that kind of thinking, that growth, mindset, believing that my abilities are something that can grow and grow, predicts happiness and well being and success in basically every domain of life. Whether it comes from how they do at work and their relationships, how they deal with their aggressive feelings, what the kinds of leaders they become. I mean, it's just one of these. There are very few distinctions in psychology where you can say one thing is pretty much all good and the other is all bad. This turns out to be one of them. The kind of get better growth mindset has no downside. And time and time again we just find that it predicts resilience and happiness and enjoyment and all the kinds of things you want as a parent to give your child. And it really isn't that hard to create in a child. It's just about sort of using that language and emphasizing over and over again whenever it's relevant. That performance is about improvement over time and learning. And kids will absorb that and they will use that to their advantage throughout their whole lives.

So amazing. That's so great. It's so empowering it's so empowering for us adults too.

It is raising children. Yeah. It's not too late if you're 50 and you've spent your whole life thinking your abilities were fixed. It is not too late to toss that bad theory out the window and see what you're good at, you know, reopen the doors that you closed for yourself. It's never too late to get rid of a bad mindset and you're not stuck with it. You know, we really. And people can and do change their mindsets and so you're kind of just taking off one hat and putting on another. And it's amazing what happens when you make that change.

Yeah, definitely. And this is such a beautiful advice to really instill this in our children at a young age. I mean, it's such a gift. It is, but I'm just like, wow.

Yeah, it really is. It's something that's going to make a lot of things easier for them and more enjoyable, including dealing with peer issues in school. We find that kids who believe have more of the growth mindset, they just tend to handle the sort of interpersonal issues of school age kids far better. It's hard to find an area of life where people don't sort of live happier and more successfully if they approach it with this idea that they can grow and change and develop and that it's all to about hanging in there. It's an incredibly powerful tool. And yes, we should all as adults be thinking this way too. And maybe for people who kind of have a hard time changing their ways, if they can start giving that message to their kids, eventually they'll kind of start believing it themselves and then everybody is a little bit better off.

That's so great. So I'm curious about, you know, all of us want our children to be happy and for most of us, we want to instill values in them. And how do we go about kind of like instilling values and having these values be important without being controlling or dominating and really allowing them to have their own experiences and opinions as well?

Well, that's a great question. I think the best way to do that is to kind of preserve that sense of autonomy. I think when we. There are certainly many times where you're going to have to just tell your child this is what you have to do and that's the way it is and you don't have a choice. Parenting involves a lot of just top down decisions, especially in the beginning. But what you can always do, even when it is a top down decision that you are making on their behalf is explain why it's one of the single most powerful things you can do is to avoid, because I said so, and try to take that moment to explain why this is a good thing to do. Why is it valuable? One of the best predictors of what you're talking about, when you see sort of values kind of like becoming their own, right, what we call introjection, you're kind of absorbing the value and make it their own. One of the best predictors of that really is just the explanation when we assign goals. And this is true, by the way, in kind of every area of life. When you give somebody a goal and you tell them this is something you should value, this is something you should do, but you don't explain why in their language in a way that they can understand, then they might do it, but they're not going to adopt the goal as their own. So that's one very powerful strategy, is just taking that time. I know it's exhausting, by the way, when your kids are constantly doing things and you're constantly having to explain, and you're going to have to explain more than once, but it's really worth it. It's really, really worth it if you want those values to sort of be absorbed. So explaining and showing why it's valuable is important. Another thing you can do to really increase the extent to which a child feels autonomy is kind of give them some choices that are related to the goal you've kind of assigned them. So, for example, if you want to tell your child that it's important to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, that it's really important to have a healthy diet, and that fruits and vegetables are things that our bodies need and they have all of these wonderful, wonderful properties. And they say, okay, but you're kind of saying you really have to eat them, especially vegetables, because kids don't want to eat those. So you say you have to eat these. But then what you can do is introduce some choice and say, well, you have to eat vegetables. But you know what? You can choose which vegetables you'll eat a couple of nights of the week. You can pick the vegetable, provided it's not always peas, because they'll always pick peas. You can kind of give them these little choices. And there are a lot of studies that show that even having these sort of tiny choices related to the goal give people the sense of autonomy that they had, as if they adopted the goal themselves. Or if you want your child to clean their room and understand that it's important to be clean and it's important to take care of your things and maintain them so that they last. Then you can say, well, you're going to have to clean your room once a week, but we'll put a schedule up on the refrigerator and you can decide which days you're going to do the room cleaning on. So you're kind of giving them a little bit of a choice with respect to the goal. And again, that just turns out to be a really powerful way to kind of get kids to absorb the goal themselves. There was a great study showing they had set of 10 year olds and they gave them this math video game that taught them, I think long division or something. But it was some kind of relatively complex math they had to do for their age. And you played it as a video game where you were sort of the spaceship captain and there were aliens and you were sort of. Somehow the math was sort of integrated with kind of battling these aliens. And so they had one version where you just sat down and you were assigned a name and a ship and an alien and you played the game. They had another version, exactly the same game, except they allowed you to choose the name of your captain. They allowed you to choose from among five different starships you could have. Instead of just having it assigned to you, they allowed you to choose the name of the alien and what his ship looked like. And then you played exactly the same game. And they found that when the kids got to make those minor choices on their own, when they were done playing the game, they got a choice. They could either go out to the playground and play. They had all these different things they could play with. The kids who had gotten some choices overwhelmingly chose to keep playing the math game. And they performed better on the math game and they said they enjoyed it more. So it's like there are so many subtle ways that parents can take something that they're basically telling a kid they have to do. You have to brush your teeth, you have to do your homework, you have to do X, Y and Z. But I can give you, you can choose. You choose your toothbrush, you choose your schedule for your cleaning, you choose the vegetable, you choose this. And it is amazing how much more kids will willingly then adopt the goal for themselves if you kind of give them that feeling that they participated in some way in choosing that. This is again a really simple strategy, but it turns out to be really powerful and a great way to get kids on board with whatever you want them to do. Give them small choices they may seem irrelevant and trivial to you, but the feeling for the kid will be a feeling of autonomy that they otherwise wouldn't have had. And that really can be powerful for helping to set goals and kind of absorb values.

Wow, I love that. And like you said, it's a simple thing, but I can totally feel the power of actually doing that. The child feels heard and respected and.

Participates in their own future. They feel like an agent in their own lives. And I think that you can harness that feeling in very simple ways that don't at all have to conflict with the big picture of what you want them to do. It's just really powerful. I've been trying this with vegetables with my kids, and it's been working really well. They don't give me some treat. That's so great.

Is this one of the ways that we can practice motivating our children, giving them choices? I know that your motivation is a huge thing. Is there other things that we can do to kind of motivate our children to. Do you think that are great for them?

Yeah, I mean, I think another thing is to understand that children and young people in general are what we call promotion focused. So they're focused on. They kind of tend to see their goals and their lives in terms of potential gains, like potential positives. Parents are often a little bit more what we call prevention focused, which is they kind of see things more in terms of avoiding potential losses. And the problem is, when you're trying to motivate a child to do something that's really kind of about their safety or security, they just don't get engaged with that because you're trying to tell them, oh, if you don't complete your college applications on time, then you're not going to get into any schools. That kind of language, that sort of like, you have to do this or this bad thing will happen, actually turns out to be not very motivating for a child because they think more in terms of being motivated by the good things that will happen. So if you instead say, you know, if you get all these college applications done, you're going to have so many choices to choose from, you know, and wouldn't it be great to be able to kind of pick and choose which place you want to go? Right. So you're sending. You're telling them to do the same thing, but you're speaking kind of their language about it, which is the language of positives. What could I gain by doing this? And when you want. So that, I think, is something that a lot of times we spend, especially when our kids get to these teenage age, we're focused a lot on keeping them safe. And if we want them to buy into doing something that will keep them safe, then we need to talk about that as in a way that kind of makes it a gain for them. All the things you'll get, all the wonderful things that will happen if you do this thing. So that's another thing. I think it's important to kind of realize that the language of sort of scaring people and oh no, this terrible thing will happen if you don't do X. It doesn't work as well on kids as it does on adults. And we want to try to use their language as much as possible. These are all the great things that will happen if you. That's kind of what they want to hear.

Fascinating. You have so much information. One more question that I just want to ask and then we'll wrap up. Do you think it's important for us to tell our children that they can do anything they want? And how do we guide them, help them to live their biggest dreams and also teach them intrinsic extrinsic goals? How do we actually navigate.

You know, I think conversation is really that it's good to talk about, you know, like we've been talking about, you know, to talk directly about these things and also to model them yourself to stay focused on, you know, that we know that the kinds of goals that people really kind of have lasting happiness are things like feeling connected with other people, feeling autonomous, that you're sort of making choices that reflect who, who you are, your values and interests and feeling competent, learning and growing and developing. And those sorts of goals give people lasting happiness. Whereas extrinsic goals like money, for the sake of money, power, validation from other people, fame, they kind of feel good for like a second when you reach one of those goals, but then the happiness is very fleeting and you have to keep pursuing more and more to kind of. Which is why unfortunately, so many successful people look so miserable because they have. That they don't have. They're not pursuing goals that kind of feed their basic human needs. I think it's important for us to try to model that as much with our kids, to talk about the importance of doing things that feel right, that feel gratifying to you in a deep way because they give you that sense of well being. I think it is very important to encourage your kids to believe that they can do anything they want to do and to set the bar high for themselves. They can absolutely make their dreams A reality. I think part of what is also your job as a parent, beyond just sort of saying, yes, you can absolutely make your dreams come true and you can be anything and you can be President of the United States or cure cancer and you can do all these amazing things if that's your dream. But I think it's also important to be then to teach them how to be realistic about how to make that happen. The dreaming isn't enough. What we need. So if it is your goal to one day be President of the United States, let's think about what we need to. What you're going to need to do in order to make that happen. And let's think about then teach them skills like planning and not underestimate. I mean, one of the things that drives me, drives me crazy that people often do, and they mean well by it, is say, yes, you can do that and it's going to be a breeze for you. Don't tell a child that something is going to be a breeze for them because if it's really a meaningful goal, it probably won't be. And we shouldn't tell people that things are going to come easily because it actually turns out to be very demotivating because they don't expect to have to work hard. And then when they do have to work hard, they think, oh, I'm not good at this. And then they become helpless. So what you really want, the message, I think as a parent that you want to send is absolutely, you can do anything. It will take hard work, it will take persistence. There will be challenges, but I believe that you can conquer those challenges. There is nothing you can't do, but you are going to have to make this success happen. And that is really the message. You can dream big, but then the next step is turn those dreams into reality. And you have the power to do that. And I think when we give kids both of those messages, both the sort of like, dream big, but remember that you have to make success happen. So what are you going to do next? That's really the kind of one, two punch that you're looking for as a parent to motivate kids and to give them the whole picture of what it's going to take. I think it's a very positive picture. You know, it doesn't have to be. You're going to have to. It's not ominous. You're going to have to work really hard. It's really just, you know, yeah, it's going to take hard work, but isn't it going to be awesome. Because hard work doesn't have to be horrible. I think if you're doing something you love and you're pursuing a dream, working hard can be very enjoyable. Again, if you're sort of focused on getting better and thinking of your goal that way. So I think it's important to be a realist with your kids about the amount of work it'll take to reach their goal, but an absolute optimist in terms of whether or not they can reach it and always be believing and encouraging them that they can.

Such great advice.

I love it. Thank you. Amazing.

So where can people find more about you and your work and get tapped in?

Oh, sure. Well, I teach with the Academy. I've taught a couple different courses. One of them Making It Happen, which is still, I think, available by download. You can download podcast to that and also a new class that I'm teaching starting next month or at the end of this month. Is it April already? The end of this month, called the Scientific Secrets of Happiness, where we're going to talk more about those sort of issues having to do with what kinds of goals make us happy and what kinds of goals should we be pursuing if we really want to have happiness with a capital H? You can also find out more. I'm a blogger and you can read all of my blog posts on my website, which is heidi grant halvorson.com and of course there is my book, which is called How We Can Reach Our Goals. And I have a shorter ebook called 9 Things Successful People Do Differently. And those are both available, as they say, wherever books are sold. So yes, you can find out more about me in any of those places.

Okay, well, wonderful. Thank you so much. Your wisdom is amazing and fantastic.

I know. I learned. I learned a lot.

And everyone is going to be thanking you for all of these tips.

So thank you.

Thank you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Mama Goddess, sending you lots of love and blessings. If you'd like to connect more, go to mamagoddess.com until next time, keep rocking it and have an awesome day.