Joy in Parenting

If joy were a sound, what would it be?

The sound that came up is the popping of a champagne cork. Like the sound of. Really, what I wanted to say was the sound of bubbles, but it's really hard to know what the sound of bubbles is like. It's the sound of effervescence. Right. It's the sound of bubbling up. To me, that is the quintessence of Jo.

That's Ingrid Fatelli, the designer and author.

Of the book Joyful, which is all about the power of ordinary things to create joy. Together, we're going to talk about how.

To find joy in parenting and how to create joyful spaces for our families.

More after this. I'm Dr. Becky, and this is good inside. I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm a mom of three, and I'm on a mission to rethink the way we raise our children.

So, yes, we're gonna talk all about joy, which is a word that rarely comes up next to parenting. So I think it's gonna be a really important conversation. But before we get into joy in parenting, I think it's fun to get a little context on anyone who's on this podcast, and in maybe a way that isn't the usual context we get. So tell me a little bit about what you were like as a kid.

I was. That's a. That's a great question. I was a pretty serious kid, I think. Pretty curious kid. I was the kid who was always asking why I spent a lot of time reading, a lot of time exploring, climbing trees. I had like one of those sort of semi free range childhoods that I feel like doesn't exist anymore, where I had a pretty sort of safe neighborhood and I could just kind of wander across the street to my neighbor's house. I had sort of an area I could bike and wander through. I had a swamp I could sort of muck around in. And I was very lucky to have all of that.

Yeah. And what about joy in childhood? Joyful memory, joyful moment that you think about?

I mean, there were lots of small joys. I was very lucky to have a dad who encouraged play and encouraged me to do the things that I love to do. So, for example, climbing trees. You know, one of the stories my dad loves to tell is about how his mother was visiting and I was going up this tree in the backyard and I was getting higher and higher and higher, and she was like, aren't you going to tell her to come down? Aren't you going to tell her to come down? Now it seems Like a good idea to tell her to come down. And my dad was like, nope, I'm just going to trust that she knows what she's doing. And I found a lot of joy in those kinds of things and being allowed to just kind of test my limits in that way.

What that sparks for me is I always think about control and trust as opposites. And that memory and even the emergence of joy there really goes hand in hand with what you were saying about a really free range, not control oriented childhood.

And, you know, one of the aesthetics or the values that I talk about in my book is freedom. And this idea that the ability to run around in a field and stretch your arms out wide and spin around until you're dizzy and go up to the top of a tree and get that view. Those are all experiences, experiences of freedom that we associate with childhood. And a lot of us don't get as many of those as we get older. And so being able to make sure that we have the memory of that, the imprint of that as children, I think is really formative. Like, we bring that with us as we get older.

Okay, so this word joy, simple word, three letters, what does joy mean to you? And how is joy different from happiness?

Yeah, we use those words interchangeably a lot.

Right.

And they just kind of get tangled up in our culture. But from a scientific perspective, there are different things. So happiness is a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time. It has to do with a range of different factors. Whether we feel like we have a sense of meaning and purpose in life, how connected we feel to other people, how we feel about our health. All of that goes into this kind of complex equation that we call happiness. And so in a given moment, it can sometimes be hard to know how happy we are. Right. Some part of your life is going great, you're kicking butt at work, and then at home, things are kind of a little bit in transition or up in the air, and you're like, am I happy? I don't know. How could I put, like a number to that? So happiness can often feel kind of vague. Joy is much simpler and more immediate. When psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion. And we can measure that through physical expressions like smiling and laughter and a feeling of wanting to jump up and down. So if happiness is how good we feel over time, joy is how good we feel right now in the moment. And I think that that distinction is so helpful because there are times in our lives we're not Going to be happy. We're going through something really, really hard. We've all been through it the past few years. Right. Or we're new parents and we're transitioning to all of the challenges that come with that. And yet there are still these sparks, these little moments of joy that we can find, that we can hang on to that kind of provide a light in those more difficult times. So I always find that distinction really helpful in thinking about my own well being.

Well, I do too, because prior to your saying that, I would have felt like joy was like a very intimidating feeling. Like, joy. Do I feel joy? I don't know. It's like really extreme. But now that I'm thinking about your definitions, joy actually feels like something I could cultivate or experience, like, more easily because it's short term rather than happiness. And as you were saying, we're in these stages and sometimes I think, just like parenting is a stage, and we're in the parenting stage a really long time, especially if we have more than one kid, it's a minimum of, I don't know, 18 years. When your kids are in your house, it's long. So. So cultivating happiness. Yeah, it is complex and there are so many factors, but moments of joy, all of a sudden I feel hopeful, like, oh, maybe, especially after this conversation with you, I feel like maybe I can find that.

Yes, let's take the pressure off. We don't have to constantly be creating, like every day as a magical experience. What is one moment of joy that we can find in our day? And what is one moment of joy that we can find with our kids in a day? If I take that attitude, like, even if I'm having a really terrible day, I can go out and play blocks with my kid for five minutes. And I am quite sure that somewhere in there we will find one little moment of joy. So if I'm looking for that, I don't need everything else to be great. I can kind of let everything else go a little bit and say, okay, it's okay that this day kind of sucked. But when you look back, you will have those little moments. Because you didn't kind of write off the whole day. You said, okay, I'm still gonna be aware of the possibility that joy can happen today.

It's attainable. Okay, so I know something about you, that your background is in design and you wrote this amazing book about joy, and you wrote that book before you became a parent, correct? Okay, true. Then life changed, you know, gave a little shift. I'm curious what You've learned about joy since becoming a parent. Or, like, has becoming a parent changed the way you think about joy?

Well, I think everyone says that you'll never see joy the same way after you're a parent. Everyone said that to me, you know, when I wrote this book, and they're like, oh, you're going to have a kid. Oh, it'll totally change the way you see joy. And I think that's true, and it's not true. I think that parenting opens up new ways of experiencing joy, and you certainly have a more firsthand experience of getting to witness what it's like for someone to discover the world and the wonder that they feel. And I think if you allow yourself to be led by your child, like me, allowing myself to watch what my child finds joy in is a very powerful conduit to joy. I think joy is so diverse and so accessible to us in so many different ways. I think the highs and lows of parenting certainly put in perspective some of the things that we're talking about, about being able to hang on to those little moments, especially for me, as someone who became a parent in the middle of the pandemic for the first time and spent my first year without childcare and without really any close family for support. You know, there were days when I was crying into a pile of laundry, and I would still say, it's not all lost. You say all the time, two things are true, right? Two things are true. I am really unhappy with the situation that I'm in. And also, I found an intense moment of joy today, and I'm not going to look back at this time as just a hard struggle. I'm going to be able to hold both.

I think that's really usable because I know there's so many people listening who feel like parenting is so joyless, and when they reflect on their own childhoods, they feel like their parents never experienced joy with them. Right. Joy and play. And that effervescence was totally absent. And one of the things I hear you saying is this version of two things are true. Like, someone can hold. I feel like I'm drowning. I feel like I am drowning. Or I feel like I am drinking from a fire hose. And I can find a moment of joy today. And both are equally true. One does not negate the other.

Exactly. And I think our culture is so used to seeing emotions as the average. It's like the average of everything you experience in a day, and that's your day. And I think it's about understanding that you're not taking the average. You're taking like, let's take the best and the worst. Right. And we'll say that, let's hold that. And it's like, oh, my day sucked because of this. But also, you're not going to believe what I saw. Or there was one pure moment where I got outside for five minutes and I breathed in the fresh air and I felt free. And yeah, it was only five minutes, but I can take that feeling with me. I can build on that.

Yeah.

I can build on this one small moment.

Yeah. And so I think there is an action item for anybody listening to this to start by actually validating how hard something feels. That part of us, the one that's saying, joyless, joyless, drowning, difficult, exhausted, depleted. That part needs a magnet. Like the other side of the magnet. It needs to hear, yes, yes, I'm depleted, yes, I'm exhausted, yes, I'm frustrated, yes, this feels so challenging. Yes, I feel alone. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And maybe even just together we can like say that, say those yeses and then use that other powerful three letter word. And, and I can do something joyful today. I can. And in a way, you're building up a different part of you. Right. I guess you'd say there's always a part of us that can experience joy. It probably, you know, is pushed underneath, especially when we're a parent. The parts of us that have logistics and feel frustrated and feel overwhelmed. Right. But that part's there. And if I think about my own body, like bringing her out, like once a day, you know, cumulatively matters. So for me, I don't know, it might be like putting on a Whitney Houston song and dancing in front of a mirror, like, just by myself, like that might be a moment for myself.

And I think that what's important to say here is what you point out about it having a cumulative effect. The research suggests that that's true, that when we experience these little moments of joy, certain things start to happen. So, for example, sharing small moments of joy with a partner deepens the sense of trust, intimacy and connection in the relationship. So when we bring someone else into those little moments, that's powerful. When we experience little moments of joy, we are more likely to make better decisions. When team leaders express more joy, their teams complete their work with less effort and in a more coordinated way. So what does that suggest about what might happen in our families as well if we bring a little bit of a spirit of joy into it? There's also research to show that those moments of joy help reset our body's cardiovascular responses to stress and make us more resilient over the long haul. So reset cortisol levels, blood pressure, heart rate. So if one little moment of joy helps to reset our stress responses, make us a little bit more effective in what we're doing, bring a little bit more energy to what we're doing, that does start to have a cumulative effect. It sort of shifts the dynamic and allows us to go into the next thing with maybe a slightly different perspective.

I love that. And. And the last thing I want to say on that before shifting to something a little bit different is if you're listening and you're thinking, that's gonna be really hard for me to start, like, I don't wanna do something silly when I'm making dinner, you're going to have that resistance. Because that loudest part of us, especially when we're a parent, is the one that's saying, this is so hard. This takes energy. And what I know. I guess I'll just speak from my own experience, is I often don't wanna start the thing that might bring me joy. I don't. And that's just part of my arc. I can't wait to have a moment where I'm gonna say, yes, Becky. I'm so excited to dance in front of the mirror. So I know to have the resistance, I always like to say hi to it. Oh, hi. I know you're gonna start by saying, this is stupid. Don't do it. And then inevitably, every single time, after 10 seconds or after 30 seconds, like, I'm there. I'm at that joy part. And so I think it's powerful to think about pushing through the resistance and welcoming that the resistance is part of your arc, to reach joy, rather than thinking we're going to have a moment where it's absent.

I love that you brought up that idea of the resistance to joy because. And I think it's important to recognize where that comes from for a lot of us, because, as you point out, a lot of us didn't necessarily have joyful childhoods or we were judged for our expressions of joy. Maybe we were judged for the way that we laugh or the way that we dance or the way that we sing. And so a lot of us put those things away. And we have a culture that judges joy as childish and as superficial and frivolous. As we get older, we're supposed to put play aside. We're supposed to stop being silly. We're supposed to be serious. And that gets reinforced over and over again. And so we often end up in a place where, as parents, it's hard to access. It's actually really hard to find that. And I think being able to access it for ourselves, like, actually recognizing that there's going to be some resistance and that joy can actually feel quite vulnerable if we're not used to it.

Now, one of the other things that you have such expertise in, that I love hearing you talk about, is this other way of thinking about joy. I think about this a lot in my parenting life. Like, in my apartment. All right, maybe someone else lives in a home, and there's stuff everywhere, and everywhere I look is, like, triggering in and of itself. There's like, oh, my God, every single tiny Lego piece is, like, all over my table. Or everything's cluttered. And so can you explain a little bit about the aesthetics of joy and how joy relates to design and space?

Sure. So I started out as a designer. I actually never set out to study joy. I was in my first year of grad school at Pratt Institute, and I was at a review, and I was studying industrial design. So how we make products, tangible things. And a professor said, your work gives me a feeling of joy. And I thought, well, that is weird, because I had always thought of joy as this very ephemeral, fleeting, intangible thing. So how does that relate to a cup or a lamp or a chair? What does that have to do with joy? And these professors couldn't answer the question. That's really what started me on this arc of work to try to understand how do our surroundings, our physical surroundings, influence our emotions? And in particular, how can our surroundings cultivate the feeling of joy? When I started out this work, I just started asking people about things and places that brought them joy. And what I noticed was that there were certain patterns, There were certain things that came up as I talked to people over and over again. And these things seem to cut across lines of age and gender and ethnicity. So they're not joyful for just a few people. They're joyful all over the world. And they're things like color, pops of bright color. We see that in celebrations all over the world. We even see it in children's drawings. Studies of children's drawings show that when children represent joyful or happy topics, they use bright colors. When they represent sad or angry feelings, they use dark colors. So we see that that's a universal association. Another one is round shapes. Round shapes signify joy. And if you look at childhood, all of childhood is round, right? You have hula hoops and balls and bubbles and balloons and Ferris wheels and merry go rounds and even kids are round. Like they are literally rounder versions of adults. Their faces are round, their proportions are rounder, their eyes are bigger and rounder. And that's actually part of a biological device that makes us find them cute. Cute things are rounder, right? There's a sense of order or rhythm, visual order or rhythm. So a sense of repetition. Repeating patterns are very joyful. We find joy in balance and symmetry. So altogether I identified 10 of these different elements and I started calling them the aesthetics of joy. Aesthetics comes from the Greek word ascetime, which means I feel, I sense, I perceive. So the aesthetics of joy are just sensations that bring about the feeling of joy. And so for me, this is a very different way. I mean, first of all, it's a different way of looking at joy, which is this thing that we're just supposed to happen upon, right? It's supposed to, we're supposed to luck into it. If we recognize that our surroundings and our senses can be a conduit to joy and a meaningful one, it's not a trivial thing, it's a meaningful way to cultivate joy, then it gives us a lot more agency and power over our environment.

So if someone's listening to this and including me, and I'm thinking, okay, that actually makes so much sense. Like, yeah, I think about cultivating joy. Maybe it's, yeah, I need to dance in front of a mirror, do something that's silly. But there's other factors at play besides what I do. Like if I'm a sensing being, then I take in the surroundings of my environment. And those surroundings and how I perceive them will also influence how accessible joy is. That makes so much sense. And it's not something I ever thought about honestly before I talked to you. So you have a parent. I don't know, they're listening. They are like, I have a 2 year old and a 4 year old. Or you know, I have a baby and a 2 year old and 4 year old and a 6 year old and 8 year old and 10 year old, right? They just have all the kids in the world and we know like there's a million things, right? So what are some things parents could do if I know that they're resonating with what you're saying and they want to put some of this into action. Like how do you create joyful space spaces while meeting the demands of your kids?

Well, I think one of the first things that you can do is start to see your home as a series of moments. I think that the way that we're trained by consumer culture to look at our spaces is rooms full of stuff. So I'm going to decorate my home, and I need a sofa, and I need a chair and a table and a lamp and a rug. I need stuff. Right. If instead, you approach your home and you say, this is a potential series of moments, when I walk into my living room, what do I want to happen here? When I look back at this time in my life, 10 years later, and the kids are gone from the house, what do I want to remember about our time in this space? That, to me, is a radical shift, because now you're not thinking, oh, my sofa's shabby, I wanna replace it, or, oh, it's so much clutter, it's so much stuff. Instead, you can think, how do I create a space where the things that I want to have happen actually do happen? So if I want game night to happen, what am I going to do? Can I make my living room a magnet for my family? Maybe that means I need to bring a little bit more color into the space. So it's like people are just drawn there. They just wanna space, spend time in that space. I need to make the games accessible. I need to put them in a basket right next to the coffee table so that it's right there for us. So there are functional things you can do to make play accessible, to make joy close to the surface. But there are also things you can do aesthetically to say, like add color or add round shapes is another one that often makes a space feel very playful and accessible. Right. There's a neuroscientific explanation for this, which actually is interesting to know that when neuroscientists put people into FMRI machines and they show them pictures of angular objects and round ones, what they find is that when we look at angular shapes, a part of the brain called the amygdala lights up the parts associated with fear and anxiety. And we look at round shapes, that part of the brain stays silent. It's not just that round shapes are playful. Round shapes actually calm, a part of an unconscious anxiety. When we have round shapes around, makes sense. If you're walking around a living room that has all sorts of sharp angles, you're going to be more cautious. There's a part of the brain that's on alert. So if you have round shapes around, it just sort of softens the lines. It makes everything feel a little bit more relaxed. So I love, like, a Round coffee table for that reason, or round edges on furniture. I mean, you're always baby proofing. If you have young kids, you're always baby proofing anyway. Get things that are naturally baby proof. And so I think those are things you can do in a space that make it feel easily more playful and more accessible.

And I love that difference. Like, when I walk into a room, how do I want to feel? What do I want to experience? Like, what would serve me instead of what? What items do I need in my living room? What type of experience would serve me? Do I want to have a pop of joy? Okay, so if I have to get something on my wall, maybe I get these, like, yellow, round, you know, yellow and orange and bright round circles are kind of these prints, you know, and that actually would give me an experience walking into that room that is very different than if I only asked myself, what do I need to put up on my wall?

Exactly. It's about recognizing that your environment can trigger this feeling of joy. And if you can embed some of those triggers into your space, you are creating opportunities for joy to happen more often. And you're doing it for yourself, and you're doing it for your family. And I think it takes, again, some of the pressure, pressure off. Like, my home has to be perfectly ordered, and it has to look great all the time. I think recognizing your home is a canvas for joy. It is the setting for these joyful moments to happen. And so what I think about in my living room, I don't like my floors. I would love to redo my floors. But one of the great things about our house is that we can roll cars down the floors, and we have lots of space to do that. And so I can see these features in the designer way that I'm like, I want it to look a certain way, but actually, I don't feel precious putting tape on the floors so that we can make little racetracks for the cars, and we can actually have a much more relaxed experience. And that's what I'm gonna remember, like, in 10 years, I'm not gonna remember that I hated these floors. I'm gonna remember that we wheeled cars down them and that we made tape roads. And that is the memory I'm gonna have.

And I find that really grounding in my own house, like, when I come into a room and it's just like a mess with toys. And, you know, part of me is like, oh, this is such a mess. I think it's that control and, oh, what's wrong with me? And what's wrong with my kids? And that whole narrative. And then, you know, you get triggered and end up yelling something you don't wanna yell. And it's interesting to say this space cultivated joy for my kids today. I am prioritizing joy right now. We all remember, right? Who said this? Maya Angelou, Right? We don't remember what people said or what people did. We remember how people make us feel, and probably we remember how spaces make us feel. And I think that's really empowering for everyone here. I know so many parents who find mess very triggering, and I'm part of that club too. So to reframe things as the cultivation of joy, as allowing for fun, as we're a family who really allows for play, my kids will remember that. It doesn't mean we can't then talk to our kids about how they can clean up their toys. But you go to talk to your kids about that from a place of appreciating joy, it's gonna come out in a much more grounded, connected, and therefore effective way than if you go in from that place of, you know, rage and how could you do this to me? Which just makes us all and is completely ineffective.

And it's not to say that you don't want to cultivate order, too, and that you don't want to have a place to put those toys, but you can, I think, also think about that from a joyful perspective and say, okay, let me put three bins side by side and put a little pop of color on these so that it's something joyful to look at. You know, there's joy that's part of the tidying up experience as well. It's not like everything gets put away and then the home doesn't feel full fun to the kid anymore because all the toys are tucked out of sight. Or that it's this tug of war between adult and child where you feel like to have an adult space means you have to hide all of the kids stuff. Everyone should have ownership over the home and an experience that they really live there. And I think sometimes that gets out of balance where parents feel like the kids run the place, and sometimes it runs the other way, where parents have this minimalist home that is gray and beige and all the toys have to be either made of wood or tucked out of sight. And I think that, you know, we can find a balance between the two, where it feels like a home that everyone lives in.

I love that. So maybe last question. Is anything that we didn't talk about related to joy that you feel like is important to kind of get in.

I think the only thing, and it was sparked by some of the things that you've been talking about lately, I think around self care and the notion that we have a parenting model that I think idealizes self sacrifice. I feel like what isn't said is that we do a disservice to our kids when we don't let them see us joyful. Because kids who don't see models of a joyful adult think that they grow up and joy goes away. And I think we're seeing so many kids in middle school. Like, that seems to be the age when anxiety really starts to hit. And I think it's not a coincidence that that's the age when there starts to be more homework, more pressure, less freedom to sort of feel joy. Parents often ask, how do I cultivate joy? I don't think it's so much about cultivating joy as modeling it and allowing your kids to see. See you playing with them joyful, but also doing things that you love that have nothing to do with them, that you find joy in letting them see you that way. I think that's something that parents can give themselves that often feels like they're taking away from their kids. I would love to reframe that and help people understand that that's actually a gift you're giving to your child to help them understand what joy will look like for them when they get older.

I love that. That's also an amazing place to end. So, Ingrid, thank you for being here. Thank you for your really important work and tell people where they can find you after this.

Yes, aestheticsofjoy.com and you can find me at ingridfatel on Instagram.

Okay. And I just wanna ask one more question about that because I find the word aesthetics really hard to spell. So can you. Can you just spell out. I mean, I. I know how to spell of joy. That would be O, F, J, O, Y. Okay. But the aesthetics of joy. Like how do you spell aesthetics? Just for asking for a friend.

A, E, S, T, H, E, T, I, T, T, I, C, S. So.

Either go to aesthetics of joy or aesthetics of joy. I recommend the latter. I don't know what you're gonna find at the former. It might be interesting. All of the listeners can let us know. Thank you, Ingrid. This is my moment of joy with you right now.

Thank you for that.

Thanks for listening. To share a story or ask me a question, go to goodinside.com podcast. You could also write me@podcastoodinside.com Parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world and parents deserve resources and support so they feel empowered, confident and connected. I'm so excited to share Good Inside Membership, the first platform that brings together content and experts you trust with a global community of like valued parents. It's totally game changing. Good inside with Dr. Becky is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom at Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhey, Julia Natt, and Kristen Muller. I would also like to thank Erica Belsky, Mary Panico, Ashley Valenzuela, and the rest of the Good Inside team. And one last thing before I let you go. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves. Even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time on the.

Outside.

I remain Good Inside.