A parent's job isn't to keep kids happy but to build their emotional resilience. Shielding children from difficult feelings actually increases anxiety and weakens their ability to handle hard emotions as adults.
Our job is not to make our kid happy. That is so important and so countercultural. Why is our job not to make our kids happy? Because when we focus on making our kids happy, we actually start to make them fearful and less tolerant of all of the other emotions that will inevitably be part of their life into adulthood. And so when our kid says, I'm gonna make this up, like, I'm the only one in my class who can't read. Okay, it's like the most painful moment is apparent now. Oh, I feel my kid's pain, right? And maybe let's just say it's true. They really might be. We have the urge to say, everyone reads at their own pace, or, But you're amazing at soccer, but you're so good at math. I want to, Make them happy. All that does for my kid, because during childhood, kids are not just learning about a situation with a parent. They're taking interactions and they're making generalizations, not for one moment, but patterns about what emotions are safe, what emotions can I deal with, what can I tolerate, and what emotions, as soon as I feel them, do I need to, like, turn off right away? And so when a kid says, I'm the only one who can't read, the truth is when our kid is an adult, they probably won't say that, but they'll probably say, I'm the only one who, whatever it is, didn't get a job yet. I'm the only one of my friends who didn't buy their own house, right? Whatever it is, we're always gonna feel that way. And so when we make our kid happy, what we actually say to them is, I am just as scared of this emotion you're feeling as you are. Wow. And so then what they do- I don't want to deal with this emotion. I'm terrified. I want to run away from it. I want to do anything but this. And so what a kid's circuit is, I feel, let's say it's this, I feel less than. Or it could be, I feel jealous. I feel sad. I feel disappointed. And what gets layered next to that in the circuit is my parents' fear, my parents' avoidance. Those things get put together. The irony is when you make happiness a goal of childhood, You actually set a kid up for an adulthood of anxiety because they have a range of emotions that they've encoded as wrong and fearful. And to me, anxiety actually isn't a feeling. It's the experience of wanting to run away from a feeling. And if--: Avoiding it. It is. And you can't really run away from a feeling inside your body. That's what anxiety is. You're like, wait, this is not gonna win. And so to me, the idea of we wanna help kids become resilient, resilience over happiness. and resilience comes from being able to tolerate and sit with the widest range of emotions, not constrict ourselves.
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