Greater Good

Happy summer! I hope all of your families are settling into a summer routine that is more lazy than crazy. Personally, I find it really difficult not to super-schedule my kids into a different camp each week now that school is out (so that I can get a little work done!). If you are like me and need a little reminding that unscheduled time to play is critical for our kids' health and happiness, check out the last issue of Greater Good magazine, which has several articles about the benefits of old-fashioned play.

I'll be back in late August with more information and some new videos about how and why we should resist over-scheduling our kids once school starts again. We'll be working on the blog all summer, so please post your suggestions for improvements and future topics. If you have a burning question about raising happy kids and want to know what the research says, now is the time to raise it!

If you are new to the blog—or a busy parent who missed a few weeks—I hope you'll check out some of the posts below. Or watch a video!

Changing Bad Habits Into Good Ones
Happiness Habits How-to, Part I
Habits How-to, Part II
Habits How-to, Part III
Habits How-to, Part IV

Family Meals
Making Dinnertime Worth the Effort
What Kids Learn During Dinner

Fathering
Are Dads as Essential as Moms?
How Do We Get Dads to be More Involved?
Is a Divorced Dad as Important as Other Dads?

Forgiveness
Forgive and…Feel Happier

Gratitude
Teaching Gratitude
How Not to Raise an Ungrateful Brat

Grown-up Relationships
Your Love Life, Your Child's Happiness
How to Fight
5 hours to a Better Relationship
Your Paltry Sex Life

Happiness is a Skill
Introduction: Emotional Literacy & Raising Happy Kids

Mothering
Confessions of a Selfish Mother
How to be a Happy Mom

Optimism
The Benefits of Optimism
Raising Optimistic Kids

Success
The Psychology of Success
Achievement Doesn't Matter
The Right Way to Praise Kids
Let Your Kids Fail

Did you catch my blogversation series with Kelly Corrigan?

Introduction: Emotional Literacy & Raising Happy Kids
The Psychology of Success
Achievement Doesn't Matter
The Right Way to Praise Your Kids
Let Your Kids Fail
How Not to Raise an Ungrateful Brat
Materialism v. Altruism During the Holidays
Family Meals are Hugely Important
How to Get the Most Out of Family Dinners

Photo credits: Christina Koci Hernandez for the SF Chronicle

Christine Carter, Ph.D., is a mother of two and the executive director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Find more tips for raising happy kids at greatergoodparents.org.

Join the Campaign for 100,000 Happier Parents by signing this simple pledge.

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Do I Have to Live with my Kids for Them to Reap the Benefits?
Last week I heard from dads across the spectrum. One emailed me saying my last posting was "BS," because I was just "feeding into the same old stereotypes of the 1960s" by reporting on research that shows that dads do only 30% of the housework and childcare. My colleague at the Greater Good Science Center Jeremy Adam Smith wrote here about the amazing biological changes which can take place in men when they become fathers. And a divorced dad (I'll call him D.D.) worried that his kids wouldn't reap the same benefits of his involvement because he doesn't live with them. He and their mother have decided that their kids should live in one house—their mother's—instead of going back and forth between houses, so while D.D. sounds pretty involved to me, I understand his concern that his influence is limited.

When I look at the research, I don't think D.D. need worry. Fathers who don't live with their children can have just as big an impact on the well-being and success of their children as residential fathers—if they maintain strong ties with their kids. Unless the relationship between parents is marked by extremely high conflict, kids consistently do better following a divorce when they are able to maintain meaningful relationships with both parents.

D.D. gets along well with his kids' mother, whom he considers his parenting partner—this is key. The best predictor of the quality of a father's relationship with his kids is the quality of his relationship with their mother. When parents who live apart can cooperate effectively, father-child contact tends to increase, which in turn predicts better parenting and stronger ties between non-residential fathers and their children.

It also matters a lot HOW dads parent. Children do better across the board when their fathers are involved in a way that is not too permissive and not too strict. These "authoritative" fathers are engaged in:

• Setting and enforcing rules and providing consistent discipline
• Monitoring and supervising their kids
• Helping with homework
• Providing advice and emotional support
• Praising children's accomplishments.

On the other hand, participating in "leisure activities"—like going out to dinner, buying kids things, or seeing movies together—does not tend to influence children's well-being. D.D. will do well to stay involved with the nitty-gritty of fathering instead of becoming someone who just takes the kids on weekend outings.

Last but certainly not least, one of the most important ways that non-residential fathers contribute to their children's development and well-being is to pay child support. The amount of child support received influences a child's:

• School success and cognitive test scores
• Social skills
• Emotional well-being
• Behavior problems
• Health and nutrition

The amount of child support paid by a non-residential father impacts children hugely, even after the influences of maternal income, frequency of contact between the father and child, and conflict between parents are taken into consideration.

What exactly is a "positively engaged father"?
A couple of weeks ago I summarized all the great benefits of having a "positively engaged father". What exactly does that mean? Researchers assess father engagement in a wide variety of ways, usually as a function of how much time a father spends doing things with his children. Father involvement also tends to be measured by assessing the quality of the father-child relationship. Can the relationship between a father and child be described as "sensitive, warm, close, friendly, supportive, intimate, nurturing, affectionate, encouraging, comforting, and accepting"? (Allen and Daly, 2007).

A broader conceptualization of fatherhood (Palkovitz, 1997) includes several different dimensions that dads can be positively involved (below). Good dads will draw from many of these different dimensions, though which ones dominate are likely to change over time as the developmental needs of his children change. Dads who want to become more positively involved with their children should try some of the following activities:

1. Talking with them and practicing being a good listener
2. Teaching them (role modeling, encouraging activities and interests)
3. Monitoring them (when they are with friends, doing homework)
4. Running errands with them
5. Participating in basic caregiving (feeding, bathing)
6. Engaging in shared interests (reading together, throwing a baseball, playing)
7. Simple being available to talk, drive, help
8. Planning with them (activities, birthdays)
9. Showing affection and love
10. Providing emotional support and encouraging them

Given this multitude of ways that a dad can be positively involved—none of which is contingent on co-residence—I think that D.D.'s positive influence is likely to be great!

Christine Carter, Ph.D., is a mother of two and the executive director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Find more tips for raising happy kids at greatergoodparents.org.

Join the Campaign for 100,000 Happier Parents by signing this simple pledge.

Become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook.

Follow Christine Carter on Twitter

Subscribe to the Happiness Matters Podcast on iTunes.

Sign up for the Raising Happiness CLASS!

I'm surrounded by super-involved dads. Dacher Keltner, founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, is one of the most admirably hands-on dads I know. My dad was considered involved back in the day because he coached softball once and took me to Indian Princesses. Dads today do more than just the fun stuff. My own dad has done more work—changing diapers, picking up prescriptions, cleaning up dog barf—in my household with his grandchildren than he ever did when my brother and I were kids. Dacher coaches soccer AND ferries his children to and from school. My friend Gary, a creative director at an ad agency, does lots of traditional dad things fixing stuff around the house AND he plans their family's meals, does all the grocery shopping, and most of the cooking. Andrew, a patent lawyer with a PhD, is home by 5:00 every day to help out with dinner and bed time. And I've never been to a school meeting or event that Andrew missed.

All the griping from the moms around me gives me the sense that these men are

outliers. Perhaps their privileged economic status affords them more time with their kids. But then again, they have traditionally long-hours jobs. "Seriously," one mom recently said to me after the Father's Day posting, "HOW do we get dads to be more involved?" Family sociologists often conclude that despite all the gains that women have made in the work force, they are still facing a stalled gender revolution at home: men aren't typically doing their fair share of housework or childcare. The good news is that amount of time men spend doing housework has doubled over the past three decades. The bad news is that women are still doing 70% of that work.

Change takes time; at this rate, if we keep working on it, our most of our grandchildren will have dads who do half the housework and childcare, and they'll be better off for it [link to last posting]. Research shows that there are three things that make men likely to be involved dads:

1) A mother's support.

• Men are more likely to be involved dads when mothers expect and believe parenting is a joint venture. When a child's mom believes the role of fathers is very important, his or her dad tends to place greater importance on his own role—which in turn leads to greater involvement on the dad's part.
• Mothers sometimes serve as "gatekeepers" to father involvement. Women who are ambivalent about the competency of a dad or who don't want to lose control over the parenting domain tend to block greater father involvement (whether or not they are conscious that they are doing it). On the other hand, support from mothers can improve the quality of a father's parenting.
• Differing standards for housework and childcare can be a common barrier to greater father involvement. The more moms support and provide encouragement—rather than complain about how a job was done—the more involved a father is likely to be.

2) A good co-parenting relationship.

• The best predictor a dad's involvement is the quality of his relationship with his children's mother (whether or not they are married).
• If a marriage or a co-parenting relationship is fraught with conflict, fathers tend to have a very difficult time being involved with their children, which of course weakens the father-child relationship.
• Good fathering can also strengthen a marriage! Fathers who are positively involved in their children's lives are significantly more likely to have successful marriages.

3) Reasonable work-hours.

• Fathers report that long work hours are the most important reason for low levels of paternal employment.
• Dads who work long hours tend to be less accepting of—and empathetic towards—their teenagers.
• Organizations that want to improve the health and well-being of employees' children need to find ways to reduce the work loads of fathers working long hours.

I think that the benefits of being an involved father have got to be pretty darn motivating to dads. Are you an involved dad, or do you know one? What motivates you to be involved? What do you get from it? Know a dad that is involved now, but didn't used to be? How do you account for the change? We'd love to read your comments.

Join the Campaign for 100,000 Happier Parents by signing this simple pledge.

Become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook.

Follow Christine Carter on Twitter

Subscribe to the Happiness Matters Podcast on iTunes.

Sign up for the Raising Happiness CLASS!