Greater Good - The Science of a Meaningful Life

Every time I watch this hilarious video of a little girl cheering herself on, I think: Her parents must be pretty happy people.  I don’t know for sure, of course, but my guess is that they model happiness and confidence and gratitude on a daily basis, and she’s simply copying them.

So whenever I see research which shows that parents are, on average, less happy than their childless counterparts, my heart sinks.  Equally devastating to me is the research that reveals how my generation of women is unhappier than previous generations. If we aren’t happy, our children aren’t likely to be happy, either.  And I really don’t want my children’s generation to follow in our unhappy footsteps.

We have cause to worry that they are, though.  Studies on college students have revealed that approximately 53 percent display symptoms of clinical depression. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the third leading cause of death for young people ages 15 to 24, and the second leading cause of death for college students. And these statistics are getting worse.

I think many parents are unhappy, but they assume that their stress and anxiety and even depression are all just part of being a parent today.

This reminds me of research about how we humans often don’t act, even when we know something is wrong. In one study, research subjects were placed in a room to fill out a survey.  Here is how Chip and Dan Heath describe the experiment in Switch:

Some were left alone; others were put in rooms with two other students.  As they filled out their surveys, a “crisis” emerged.  Smoke began to pour into the room through a wall vent.  The smoke continued to flow, in irregular puffs, until eventually the room was filled with haze.  Of the students sitting in a room by themselves, 75 percent got up and found someone to alert about the smoke.  But when three students were placed in the room at the same time, only 38 percent of the groups of three ever reported the smoke. They just sat there, inhaling the smoke, each individual’s inaction signaling to the other two people in the room that this smoke cloud isn’t such a big deal.

More than half of our college students are depressed: This is a big deal.  It is time for us parents to stop sitting around inhaling smoke, looking around and assuming that because everyone else is inhaling the smoke, the stresses of our lives are normal, that everything is okay.  It isn’t okay; modern life is pushing us to the brink, and our kids along with us.

We need to push back. And given the role that our social environments play in our lives, the more of us who try to do something, the greater the chance that others will follow suit. Here is what I’m shooting for:

100,000 Happier Parents by July 1st, 2011

Will you join me?  Being a happier parent isn’t the only way to raise happy kids, but it is the best way. Instead of staring at each other, smelling the fire but not putting it out, here’s the first step you can take to do something:

Sign this pledge (by clicking here)

I understand that improving my own happiness is a way to make the world a better place.  Over the next nine months, I will take steps to increase my happiness.

For today, that’s all you need to do: just sign the pledge! I’ll offer concrete suggestions for change next week (the fact that you’re already reading this blog gives you a head start). But for starters, never underestimate the power of desire and intention.

Producing a sea change in our happiness may seem like a monumental undertaking, but actually, more often than not big changes come from a succession of small steps.

Researchers know a lot about why parents, particularly women, are less happy today than they have been in previous generations, and we have a pretty good idea how to fix it.  The new science of happiness gives us a clear roadmap—a guide to those activities, skills, and beliefs that are highly likely to raise our happiness.

Happiness is a Property of Groups
Although we usually think of happiness as being an individual trait or a function of our personal experience, it isn’t just those things.  It is also a property of our social groups!

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler explain how:

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation.  A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon…And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9 percent.

Emotions spread so rapidly that your happiness can affect not just your children, spouse and close friends, but 258 people in a single day.  According to Christakis and Fowler, every time you feel an emotion—whether it is hope or anger, gratitude or fear—it spreads to six people you know: family and friends, neighbors and coworkers.  Then it spreads AGAIN, to six people each of them know, and AGAIN, to 6 people each of THOSE people know.  By the end of the day?  Your emotion has touched 258 others.

It is going to take a lot for us to gather 100,000 people in our ranks, so please help us by forwarding this to your friends and social networks.  Why not post this on Facebook?  Remember, the happier your friends and your school community are, the happier you and your family are likely to be.

Thank you for being a part of this Happiness Movement: You are making a difference!

© 2010 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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I recently read happiness blogger Gretchen Rubin’s interview with Laura Vanderkam, author of the new book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think.  I was particularly struck by this statement by Vanderkam: “I wish people wouldn’t say ‘I don’t have time to do X, Y or Z.’ Instead, we should say ‘I won’t do X, Y or Z because it’s not a priority.’”

This got me wondering: When I elect to work late, am I sending the message to my kids that they’re less of a priority to me than my job? I won’t spend time with you tonight, honey, because, frankly, my work is more important.

Sometimes our work has to be more important. We don’t want to starve, right?  But other times, well, it’s not so clear—our choices might be guided less by necessity than by a lack of discipline or perhaps, yes, misplaced priorities.

I know the whole quality vs. quantity time thing is a working-parent cliché.  But this debate persists in my mind —is a wee bit of “quality time” good enough?—a decade after it began for me.  How much work is too much?  Is it vain to think that more time with me is better? How much time do my kids really need at home with me—and would some of this time be better spent in a dance class or playing soccer or just running around in the yard while I type away on my laptop?  How does this change as kids get older? I just had lunch with a mom who quit work for the first time since she had children – because she felt her teenagers needed more time with her.  Isn’t that when they are supposed to be more independent?

When I was in graduate school—and had an infant and toddler—I was deeply reassured by Ellen Galinsky’s 1999 book Ask the Children: The Breakthrough Study that Reveals How to Succeed at Work and Parenting.  The vast majority of kids in her study, third through twelfth graders, didn’t wish for more time with their working parents.  Instead, about a third of them wished that their parents, particularly their mothers, would be less tired and stressed by work.

As I reread the study now, several other findings strike me as still-very-useful for parents grappling with how much time to spend with their children, whether or not they are working outside of the home.

(1) Don’t rush kids. Children are far more likely to say their parents make them “feel important and loved” if their time with them is calm and unhurried.  (Dang. This isn’t my strength.)

(2) Quantity matters.  The fact that most kids don’t wish for more time with their parents means that most parents are already getting this right.  But let’s not kid ourselves: “Children who spend more time with their mothers and fathers on workdays and nonworkdays grade their parents higher, feel their parents are more successful at managing work and family responsibilities, and see their parents as putting their families first,” writes Galinsky.

(3) Focus is the most important thing.  I’ll just let Galinsky say it: “When children feel that their mothers and fathers can focus on them, they are much more likely to feel that their parents manage their work and family responsibilities successfully and put their families before their work, and they give their parents much higher marks for all of the parenting skills we examined.  Although very few children believe that their parents have trouble paying attention to them, those who do see their mothers and their fathers in an extremely negative light.”

This focus thing—which I see as being present—is the bull’s eye, the sweet spot of parenting.  Sure, kids need time to just hang around with us while we check our email or cook dinner and they read or do their homework.  But they also need us to focus on them a little bit each day, to be totally present with them.  Dan Siegel, MD and author of Mindsight, explains why:

When parents and children align their focus on each other, there is a neurobiological process…that is activated.  This process, which mediates a sense of well-being, joy and elation, is at the heart of emotional attunement when one person feels “felt” and understood by the other person.  This form of contingent communication is at the heart of developing secure attachments.  It begins in infancy and continues throughout the life span.

This presence, this focus, is what really matters.  It does require a quantity of time to be present.  And this presence makes for very high quality time. 

Easier said than done.  But this is the heart of mindful parenting, and it allows us to stop judging ourselves.  When we parent mindfully, we are simply taking in what is in the here and now, without judgment.  We are aware of our own moods, and those of our children.  We cease our relentless planning and our relentless doing.

This means, for me, that I need to stop multi-tasking with my kids.  I am always doing something; actually, usually I’m both doing AND planning for the next thing.  Which means I’m not focused.  There is the egregious not-present, as when during our family dinner I’m checking something else off my list: I wolf my food down, then bring a stack of mail to open while my slow-eating-children finish. 

There is also the subtle-not-focused: When walking the kids back from the park, I keep telling them to pipe down so that I can hear my own thoughts.  I want the space to worry about whatever I’m working out in my head, without the bickering masses bugging me.  If I were focused and present, I’d use the time for a moment of play, or at the very least, a moment of mindfulness.

This all brings me back to the very important idea of how happiness is related to the “non-instrumental” activities in our lives, those things we do for no reason other than our own enjoyment.  I’ve blogged before  about how a life without “non-instrumental” activities is a life full of anxiety and devoid of joy.  Turns out that parenting is the same: When our parenting is all instrumental—just accomplishing what needs to get done—we risk not just our own but our children’s happiness.

What do you need to do to be able to focus on your children more easily?  What times of the day does this come without effort? (For me, it is bedtime.  I love to read with my children.)  What small, turtle-step towards change can you make toward parenting more mindfully?

Key Reference:

Galinsky, Ellen, 1999.  Ask the Children: The Breakthrough Study That Reveals How to Succeed at Work and Parenting (New York: Quill)

What’s Happening on the Raising Happiness Blog?

Some readers are “appalled” by my admission that I let my kids mix music using ToonsTunes rather than giving them formal music lessons.  Join the discussion here.

The blog is growing!  Thanks to the generous support of Lee Hwang and his Quality of Life Foundation, I am going to be able to post more frequently and make this blog even better.  Here are the features I’m hoping to post to 3 or 4 times per month:

Walking the Talk
Real life parenting informed by the latest research.  Short posts about how I’m trying to integrate what I’ve learned from science into my own family. 

The Main Dish
This is where I take on a bigger topic, and look at several studies that have implications for how parents can raise happy, confident, and resilient children.  I took a break from this feature over the summer, but it’s back!

My New Podcast, Happiness Matters! 
Whoo-hooo!!!  I am SO EXCITED (can you tell?) about this new podcast I’m doing with Rona Renner, long-time parent educator and all-around wonderful human being.  I have long looked for a working-mom mentor, and for me, Rona is it.  The mother of four and grandmother of two, and the founder and host of the radio show Childhood Matters, Rona goes through life with strength, wisdom, and grace.  It is my true honor and pleasure to record these podcasts with her.  Please go subscribe to it through iTunes!

(If you don’t listen to podcasts yet, you might want to try this.  My favorite podcasts make folding laundry something I look forward to. Lifelong learning at its best!)

Remember Friday Photos?  We are bringing them back, with a twist.  This is going to be our community gratitude journal.  Watch for this feature on Fridays, and PLEASE CONTRIBUTE!

As the Raising Happiness blog grows, what else would you like to see here?  What questions do you have about parenting? 

OTHER NEWS
Have You Heard About the Raising Happiness Class?  I hope so.  If you’d like a little more guidance putting all that I write about in this blog and my book into practice, I hope you’ll consider taking my class online (or live if you live in the Bay Area).  Registrants receive a free copy of Raising Happiness, and if you take the class with a friend, I’ll donate money back to your kids’ school.

Speaking Engagements…even if you aren’t taking my live parenting class, I’d still like to meet you!  Check out my speaking engagement schedule here on my personal website or here on the Greater Good Science Center Calendar.

Science of a Meaningful Life Seminars.  The Greater Good Science Center’s event series has an amazing lineup this fall. Our October 22 seminar in Berkeley will be led by Robert Emmons and Rick Hanson, who’ll teach how and why to build gratitude—just in time for Thanksgiving! In November we’re having our first-ever seminar in Seattle, featuring the GGSC’s Dacher Keltner and John Gottman, the nation’s top scientific authority on marriage and parenting. And in December, Dacher will be back in Berkeley, joined by Mary Gordon, founder of the trailblazing Roots of Empathy program, to explore how to teach compassion and empathy to kids (and adults).

Dear readers,

As I write this, I am waiting for the cable guy (or cable person, as the case may be).  I haven’t had regular Internet access since June 17th, not that I’m counting.  So the cable person is coming to install a landline (no mobile phone service here, either), Internet, and, um, possibly cable TV.

I kind of want it. I haven’t had a TV hooked up for years.  Although I do take a smug pleasure in saying, “My kids don’t watch any TV,” I’m sure this is more annoying than inspiring.

People often say to me, “Don’t your kids feel left out that they don’t get to watch the shows that the other kids are watching?”  I honestly don’t think that they do feel left out, though they are only 7 and 9, so this may change.

To me, here are the pros of having television:

1. It would be fun to watch cooking shows with my children; maybe it would inspire them to spend more time in the kitchen with me.
2. If there is a show that all the other kids are watching (American Idol) it’d be fun to watch this together.

Although there is a tiny bit of evidence that some shows are, indeed, educational, clearly time spent reading or in other activities is a zillion times more beneficial developmentally, so I’d put educational shows in a neutral category—not really a “pro” of watching TV, but certainly not a “con,” either.

Here are the cons of television, for my family:

1. TV takes time that kids could be playing, reading, socializing or doing other, more developmentally beneficial activities.
2. My kids always seem really cranky after they’ve been watching TV.
3. Currently my kids are great at entertaining themselves by drawing, playing outside, and by playing with their pet rats (sounds gross, I know, but those pets are a positive thing).  I’m afraid they’ll lose this self-entertaining skill if they can do something that takes less effort, like watch TV.
4. TV may create a new battle-ground: “can I watch TV” begging.  I certainly know how to create limits (my mom only let my brother and I watch a half hour of TV per day) but I think my kids will still ask, beg, and cajole me to make exceptions.  I can also limit this behavior by taking away TV if they do it, but then I will have created a complicated new system ripe for arguments.
5. Even if I’m super-controlling about which shows the kids are allowed to watch, TV can have a pernicious effect on our perceptions of race and ethnicity.  New research shows that watching how black characters are treated on TV tends to affect people’s attitudes about race both consciously and unconsciously, and usually not for the better.  Why would I want to let actors’ and producers’ prejudices influence my kids?
6. Moreover, and I think this is my biggest concern, the influence of commercials, product placement, and celebrities—especially if my kids’ heroes are endorsing a product or style just by wearing it—is not happiness-making.  Consumption and materialism are in large part learned; the materialistic culture often represented on television creates beliefs and behaviors that ultimately make kids dissatisfied (and whiny) rather than joyful.

All these cons, and still I am tempted to have cable installed.  I’d love your comments and feedback about how you handle the omnipresent boob-toob in your household.

More from the Raising Happiness (formerly Half Full) blog:

Let Kids Just Play
Summer is the perfect time for unstructured play (which science says is more important than homework!).

How much “screen time” is too much?

Turn Off the Boob-Toob (short video)

Also on Greater Good:

Is TV Not as Bad for Kids as We Thought?

Can We Play?
Play is essential to positive human development, but kids are playing less and less. What can we do to build a new culture of play?

Play to be Happy

Confessions of an Anxious Parent
Are today’s parents afraid to let their kids play on their own? Strike a balance between safety, freedom, and success.

What Happy People Do

Raising Happiness Happenings
As summer comes to a close, I’ll be shifting my focus from the “Walking the Talk” feature, where I’m blogging about my own attempts to put the science into practice, back to “The Main Dish” postings, where I dig a little deeper into the research and it’s implications for parenting.  Please suggest topics in the comment section that you’d like to read about in the coming school year.

Take the Raising Happiness Class!  Designed for busy parents, teachers, and caregivers, you can take this parenting class online or live at Head Royce School. Over the school year, we will develop happiness habits: practices, beliefs, and behaviors likely to bring more joy into our own lives and the lives of our children.  Sign up here: www.raisinghappiness.com.

© 2010 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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