Greater Good - The Science of a Meaningful Life

My kids and I had a very fun summer, maybe because they are finally old enough to entertain themselves while I work. As I write this, one is huddled up under an oak leaf hydrangea with a friend “making homes for Fairies.” The other is upstairs singing every song she can think of with our neighbor, from Aerosmith to “Amazing Grace.”

In other words, the kids are playing. And they are really, really happy.

Because play makes us happy, of course. But will it make us successful? This is hardly a theoretical question for me; it’s one with which I struggle at the start of every school year, when I find myself tempted to sign my kids up for every imaginable activity labeled “enrichment.” 

On the table right now: piano lessons, hip hop dance, rock climbing, tennis, math tutoring, ceramics, and swimming lessons while it is still warm. They could end up doing something every day of the week—all while I’m telling the world that I don’t believe in over-scheduling my children.

It’s a problem we’re lucky to have, of course—I’m grateful that my kids have so many “enriching” opportunities. But at some point, these opportunities do start to feel more like a burden than a blessing. Why do we (I know I’m not alone here) feel the need to sign our kids up for so many darn activities? Here are my reasons:

(1) I want my kids to find “their thing.” I’m afraid that they may have some hidden talent that goes unexpressed. For example, what if Fiona is really a star tennis player, but we never find that out because I didn’t let her take lessons?

(2) I want them to spend time doing what they love. If Molly is DYING to take ceramics again, who am I to stand in her way?

(3) I want them to get into college, and I’m afraid that if they spend their afternoons making fairy houses under a bush, they won’t be able to play a sport in high school—and then they won’t get the college of their choice.

Notice that two of these three reasons are based on fear—an irrational fear that my children might not be “successful” if I don’t fill their days with enriching activities. Embedded in that fear is a very faulty assumption that perhaps they won’t find happiness or meaning in their lives if they don’t follow in my Ivy League, over-achieving footsteps.

And yet the rational sociologist in me is totally convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a narrow focus on achievement does not make for fulfilling and happy lives.

Even if I was a Tiger Mother and really believed in structuring my kids’ every movement, there is absolutely no evidence that highly scheduled kids are more academically successful than kids who just come home after school and play, according to economists Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) and Roland Fryer. So parents who shuttle their kids from athletic practice to music lessons to chess class, and are off to the museum on the weekends, might be having fun or they might be making themselves crazy—but they aren’t improving their children’s academic success.

Let me explain. Levitt and Fryer analyzed data from a survey by the U.S. government that tracks kids from birth through grade school. And they found that the number of activities that kids do has no effect whatsoever on their academic success.

Here are some things that do increase the odds that our children will lead joyful, meaningful, and, yes, successful lives:

1. Social and emotional literacy—particularly around complex emotions like compassion. Playing with friends in unstructured activities is a great way to develop this sort of social intelligence because it requires problem solving and negotiating complex social situations.

2. Time with friends and family. Especially at dinnertime.

3. Mastery and flow. This is different from achievement, at least in the way that I’m talking about it here. Mastery is the joy that comes from the process of working at something and getting better at it, rather than just from winning the game or getting an A+.

4. Our sanity and happiness as parents. Always being on-the-go stresses me out, which makes me less patient, which makes me feel guilty for yelling, which makes…you get the picture.

Clearly, knowing this doesn’t allay all my fears—I can’t say I’m not still tempted to sign the kids up for yet another activity that seems extra-enriching. But it’s enough to help me walk back from the over-scheduling cliff yet again and keep my family to a more sane schedule. There will be no activities that interrupt dinnertime, and I’ll try to help my kids carve out time for unscheduled play every single day. (This means that sometimes after-school care is better than a so-called enriching activity.) We’ll stick with piano lessons, and build in ample time for practice. And we’ll make time for playdates on the weekends.

Happy back-to-school, everyone! Good luck getting back into some happy rhythms this school year.

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© 2011 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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Guess what? You can.

Because my great-grandparents grew olives, I’ve learned a lot about olive trees over the years. Olives are an “alternate bearing crop,” which means that they produce a lot of fruit one year, then basically rest the following year (producing what is called a “short crop”).

The more I think about this phenomenon, the more I think it speaks volumes about how to lead a happy—and fruitful—life. In addition to being a symbol of peace, olives are also a metaphor for how rest is a route to productivity.

In today’s hyperbusy world, most people don’t rest much. I can certainly be guilty of this, which you’ve probably noticed if you’ve been reading this blog for long. Rest is a topic I return to again and again in my Tuesday Tips, my online classes, and my speaking engagements.

Here’s what I’ve learned: It is a myth that we succeed through unceasing and tireless effort. Yes, research does find that consistent and deliberate practice leads to elite performance in many fields. But focused work and consistent practice are not the same thing as unending work. Olympic athletes must rest or they get hurt. Fruit trees forced to produce for more than one season lose their ability to bear fruit. And us worker bees can slowly develop sleep debt so deep and burnout so profound that we are left too exhausted to function.

When health problems forced me to dramatically change my work schedule last fall—cutting back 10 hours a week or more—something amazing happened: My productivity actually increased. As a sociologist, I know research shows that rest often does improve productivity. But somehow, I found it very difficult to actually internalize this in my own life; I was poisoned by that hypnotic belief, as Wayne Muller writes, that if I didn’t continually push myself, my work would tank and my children and I would be left penniless.

As I recovered from a nasty kidney infection and was treated for other chronic (stress-related) infections, I developed my own “sabbatical” plan. I can’t take a year off work, but I am trying to insert regular breaks into my life to rest, read—or just goof around. Here’s how it works:

 Twice a year, I take a week-long vacation. A real vacation—not the kind where your in-laws come for the holidays and the kids are home from school. I’m a big fan of the totally-unplugged stay-cation, especially now that airline prices are getting so high. No matter where I go, I try to make sure it’s somewhere I can’t be contacted by email (this August, I’m going backpacking in the high Sierras!).

 Once a month, I take a three-day weekend away from home. This might be an inexpensive camping trip, a meditation retreat, or a ski trip with the kids. (The beauty of living in California is that all of these are within driving range.) No work and no email allowed.

 Once a week, usually on Sundays, I take a full day off from all work and all chores; this means at least one of my weekend days involves no work. No computers get turned on. If I need to cook or shop for the upcoming week (or run errands or pay bills: you get the idea), I do it on my non-sabbatical weekend day. Giving myself a full day of recovery to read and play every week is the hardest, but most important, part of this “sabbatical plan.”

 Once a day, I stop to rest. Usually, after lunch I try to lay down and snooze for 20 minutes. This is super-hard for me to get myself to do, but when I do it, I’m always thankful I did.

My work is also cyclical. I post less over the summer and use that time to catch up on research. I stop giving speaking engagements for 6 weeks over the summer, and again over the holidays, so that I don’t get burned out. And even though it seems like all this rest might mean that I get less done, I know that when I stop taking these rests, I get stressed, and then sick. And illness (and healing) take precious time and energy I’d rather have for my work, my friends, and my family.

One of my readers wrote on the blog: “When you hear someone say that they feel like they’ve lost themselves, maybe what they mean (at least some of the time) is that they’ve lost their sense of play. We become too serious as we grow older, grabbing onto life like a little child squeezing a baby bird. As if holding it tightly and seriously enough means it will always be safe and forever be ours.”

Take your daily, weekly, monthly, and annual sabbaticals, and watch the baby bird in you fly!

Post a comment! What do you do to rest throughout the day, week, month and year?

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Previous Raising Happiness Posts about Rest:
No Labor Day
The Trouble With Motherhood
Tired Working Mother Sleep Saga
Is Sleep the Most Important Happiness Habit?
Podcast: Making Sleep a Priority

Greater Good Posts about Rest:
Just One Thing: Pet the Lizard 
Does Sleeping Well Make Us More Socially Adept?
How Well Do You Know Your Partner? 

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© 2011 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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Yesterday, I dropped my kids off at a rustic sleep-a-way camp in the high Sierras, where they will be for the next two weeks.

The drop-off didn’t go very well.

My children's home for the next two weeks!

When I was a kid, I begged and begged to go to sleep-a-way camp with my best friend Rory.  I did extra chores to earn it, and I counted the days until I got there.  I don’t remember being homesick, or sad at the drop-off.  I remember feeling wild and free.  I loved the horses and the outdoors and ceramics.  I got postcards from my teachers.  It was awesome.

My kids have had mixed feelings about going to camp: they were excited, but also scared.  “TWO WEEKS!?” my youngest cried when I told her what, to me, was great news: They were going to summer camp!  “They have horses!” I said cheerfully, trying to drum up excitement.  “And sailing!  I’ve never been sailing myself,” I mourned.  “You’ll get to do it before I do!”

I said this knowing full well that sailing is actually not on my daughters’ bucket list.  It’s on mine.

The kids spent the last few weeks readying for camp and making serious sister pacts to stick together.  My younger daughter, Molly, was particularly concerned about what would happen if her older sister made friends first.  Would Fiona and she still pick the same activities?  Could Molly join Fiona with her new friends?  Pinky-swears of allegiance were traded, plans to sneak into each other’s cabins made.

Molly had a plan: Fiona would take care of her.  She was nervous, but also excited.  Fiona was calm, reassuring. 

That is, until about an hour before we arrived at camp.  At which point Fiona became more clammy than cool and collected. She developed vague “not feeling well” symptoms.  She was too carsick to eat lunch.  When we arrived, she was faintly green.  Altitude sick, I declared.  “Drink some water,” I insisted.  “Take deep breaths,” I said, taking them myself.  “Think good thoughts, Fiona.  Find two things to be excited about.”

The thing is, I believe that it is important to challenge kids. To get them truly outside of their comfort zones so that they can grow.  Hence two weeks instead of a mini-camp. 

My desire to challenge my kids was reinforced in a recent Atlantic article about “Why the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods.”  The gist of this article is that “kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems.”  And the article is right—they don’t. 

The article reminded me that happiness—the often fleeting emotion—in and of itself is not the goal. That comfort—my own or my children’s—is not the goal. Instead, all of this is about how to lead a happy life.  And while it’s true that a happy life comes from positive emotions (like gratitude and compassion, for example), it also comes from having the tools we need to cope with life’s inevitable difficulties and painful moments.

My kids have had their difficulties in the last few years—my divorce, a move away from a beloved school and neighborhood, a humbling medical situation—and they’ve risen to each challenge, though not without pain.

(I’d like to pause to acknowledge that even with those difficulties, my kids have a pretty cushy life.  We don’t have to worry about where the next meal is coming from or where we will sleep tonight.  That said, the fear the kids had anticipating me leaving them at camp was very real to all of us.)

At any rate, by sending my kids to camp, I’m sending them the message that I believe that they can manage loneliness, and homesickness, and anxiety.  I believe that they can, at the tender ages of 8 and 10, handle these difficult emotions themselves, without me standing over their shoulders telling them to breathe.  As crappy as it sometimes feels to me, they simply don’t always need me there, telling them what to do and what to think.

By sending kids to camp, I’m sending them the message that I think it is incredibly important to unplug: not just from electronics, but also from their well-meaning but often over-bearing mom. That it won’t kill them to not report back to me on every high point and low point of their day, every kind deed, every “good thing.” 

In sending my kids to camp, I’m making it abundantly clear what I value: real time spent outdoors, the social skills needed to make new friends, compassion (the theme of their session is kindness), and most importantly, their own autonomy.

I say all this, but of course deep down I wanted it to be easy for them.  So when Fiona became so nervous as we dropped her off that she needed to lie down in the infirmary, I also became a nervous wreck.

“She’ll be fine,” the camp nurse, Tigger, reassured me.  “Now we need you to hop on that van – it is the last one headed back to the parking lot!” 

I had become the lingering parent who wouldn’t leave and who was making the whole thing worse for her kid by trying to make it better. But who could fault me for not wanting to leave my kid IN THE INFIRMARY?! I justified to myself.

In the end, Fiona rallied, and I did, too. I got on the bus and the girls began two weeks of what may be profound discomfort for us all. In addition to having tons of fun, I’m sure the kids are experiencing the discomfort of managing loads of new challenges on their own (albeit in a very safe environment).  I am managing the discomfort of not-knowing, not-connecting—of just trusting.  But I’m comfortable with that.

* * *

I love Nancy Davis Kho’s often side-splittingly funny blog “Midlife Mixtapes.”  This week she wrote on a similar theme about a difficult year she had as a child.

© 2011 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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