by Ron Fournier
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Aspies aren’t big on metaphors. They tend to be literal and pragmatic; Tyler certainly is wired that way. Which is why I consider the brief conversation we had in the car driving away from Monticello to be a breakthrough.
“I’ll make you a deal, Tyler. You don’t have to do your homework in the car if you will talk to me about this amazing paradox. I mean, one of the founding fathers of freedom was a slaveholder. And your father—I wanted you to be happy, but on my terms. What’s with that?”
Tyler chuckles at the lame founding father/Fournier father comparison. “Okay, I’ll pursue your happiness.” He tosses his textbooks in the backseat and turns serious: “You love writing. I can barely pick up a pencil. You love playing sports, and I was never a sports guy.”
“Yes.” I say, “What do you make of that?”
“Kids aren’t always going to be like you,” he says. “My kids could grow up to be freaking jocks, for all I know.”
I’m stunned. I can’t believe he’s opening up, even this little. It’s rare to hear him talk about his future, let alone fatherhood. I balance my notebook on the steering wheel and start scribbling at 60 mph. “I’d approve of them playing sports,” Tyler tells me, and laughs. “Heck, I’d even go to their games!”
I protest: He won’t go to sporting events with me. “Yes, but you’re my dad, not my kids. I’ll do what my kids need me to do.”
I ask whether he felt pushed into sports.
“I guess, but you never said, ‘You’ve got to play baseball, Tyler.’ You said, “Hey, buddy, want to play ball?’ I knew you wanted me to play. I knew it was important to you that we play together. So I did. I did it for you.”
I circle back to the happiness paradox—how I wanted him to be happy, but my actions might have had the opposite effect. “Were you happy as a little kid?” I wince, afraid of the answer.
“I’d say so.”
Now?
“Am I happy now? I’d say so. My kind of happy.”
“But you don’t have many friends.”
“That’s the problem,” Tyler objects. His tone is matter-of-fact, not accusatory or defensive. “You have a picture in your head of what makes a kid happy. But then you have a kid and it doesn’t turn out that way. That just means your picture didn’t come true. It doesn’t mean I’m not happy. I have a different picture.”
“Are you happy in your picture?”
“Most of the time, yes,” he says. “Are you always happy in yours?”
“No, buddy. Not always.”
“Same with me.”
My childhood is a buffet of happy memories, including one that evokes a shivery blast of Canadian air, acres of smooth ice, and the bittersweet aroma of hot chocolate on sweaty gloves. We were playing hockey on a frozen Lake Erie—me and my two brothers, Mike and Tim, and our best pals, three Canadian brothers who lived near our parents’ cottage outside Windsor, Ontario. A half mile from shore, the only sounds on the lake were ours. “I’m open!” “Nice shot!” Laughter, so much laughter, and background noise: the clatter of wooden sticks and steel blades at work, grinding delicate lines into the hard surface.
I was maybe 10 years old. The other boys were younger, but not much. My dad was there, too, towering over us at nearly seven feet tall in skates. His shadow was as long as the makeshift rink as he glided around us during a game of keep-away—him vs. us. We could have been pylons for what little chance we had to steal the puck, which seemed tethered tightly to Dad’s stick by an invisible string. “Mr. Fournier, we give up!” one of the boys shouted. They worshipped Dad. My brothers and I did, too. He was the dad who played with the neighborhood kids all day and partied with their parents all night. The neighbor who showed up when something needed to be fixed, built, or solved. The big guy. The funny guy. The good guy. The Guy: That’s what Dad tried to be.
“I give up, too,” he called with a grin, passing the puck softly across the ice to the kid who’d called it quits. “Good game. You guys take it from here. Let me see if I can find you better ice.” Dad sat in a snowdrift and changed into boots, then walked away from our game, away from shore. He kicked away snow in search of a smoother patch of ice for 50 yards…100 yards…150 yards, and suddenly…splash! I looked up from the game in time to see Dad pulling himself out of the lake. Dripping wet and sprawled across the ice on his stomach, Dad spun himself around and dipped a hand into the hole to fish his boots out of 15 feet of water.
He could have died, but that thought never crossed my mind. Dad was invulnerable, I thought, unstoppable. Shivering and clutching the boots to his chest, he lumbered back to the hockey game and warned us about the thin ice. “Skate around the hole,” he winked. His wet clothes stiffened in the frosty air as Dad walked the half mile to the cottage. “The ice is fine,” he told Mom as we piled though the door. “It’s the water that’s a bitch.” Mom wrapped Dad in a blanket and poured him a glass of Crown Royal. “No ice,” he said, melting Mom’s look of stern disapproval. We boys giggled.
Four decades later, that memory came to mind while I was reading a book called The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness by Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, a clinical psychiatrist and a father of three. In its first pages, the doctor recalled a happy childhood memory: tobogganing near his Massachusetts home after a massive snowstorm. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was…doing what I recommend in this book,” Hallowell wrote. “I was learning how to create and sustain joy, a tremendously important skill. I was also acquiring the all-important qualities of playfulness, optimism, a can-do attitude, and connectedness—qualities that have deepened in me since then, qualities that make me, for the most part, a happy man.”
Can you remember a happy day from your own childhood? Chances are it channels the attributes that Hallowell called the keys to raising happy children: optimism, playfulness, self-esteem (“can-do attitude”), and the sense of being a part of something greater than yourself (“connectedness”). Consider my memory.
Optimism: I knew Dad would be okay when he fell through the ice.
Playfulness: Hockey on a shoveled piece of lake, boots for goalposts, and snowbanks for sideboards.
Self-esteem: No trophies for the losers. Actually, no trophies for anybody. But everything about that game (and sports, in general) made me feel better about myself. Practice didn’t make me perfect, but it made me better. I couldn’t win them all, but I could do my best. I hated to lose, but I learned to grow from defeat.
Connectedness: These were my brothers, my friends, and my dad—and we came together one wintry day and created the very thing every parent says they want for their kids: happiness.
I asked once on Twitter, “Parents, you say you want your kids to grow up ‘happy.’ What does that mean?’ ” The answers were as wise as anything you’ll find in the typical be-a-better-parent book. “I tell my kids it’s not my job to make them happy,” wrote Beth Anne Mumford. “Love them with all my being, but happy is not the same as ‘good person.’ ”
“Happy is the wrong goal,” added Andrew Siegel, father of twin boys. “The goal should be to want your kids to be good people.” Tom Anderson said, “Having the tools to boldly take life by the horns and pursue their calling.”
Don Graber tweeted his meaning of childhood happiness: “Godly, appreciative, humble, confident, capable, big dreams & real expectations, wise, discerning, kind [and] compassionate.” I asked him via email to explain what he meant by “real expectations.” He replied, “It sounds a bit contradictory: Dream big, but don’t expect too much. But that’s not all.” He wrote:
I have two daughters. My oldest is eight and the younger will be four next month. The younger is still in the “tag-along” stage. Mimicking her sister and basically being as big of a ham as possible to get as much attention as possible. Not many independent interests as of yet. The older however is very involved in Irish step dancing. She is in a performance company as well as participating in competitions. Essentially this is her life outside
school. She loves it, she is good at it, and if you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up she will tell you without hesitation that she wants to be an Irish dance teacher and have her own school. Her interest in competitions is growing as well, and wants to eventually go to Worlds.
My wife and I are obviously very supportive of this and do everything we can to help her. However, we do not hold her hand or coddle her. If she is going to be serious about dancing and competing she needs to have the confidence and discipline to achieve it. Real confidence does not come from people telling you how great and wonderful you are. It comes from work. It comes from achieving something. She cannot be shielded from criticism and failure. She needs to experience that in order to grow and improve, in order to have the capability to do those things. She needs to know that she will not always win, she will make mistakes, she needs to work her butt off, and in turn she will appreciate her victories when they come.
So, I love that she has these dreams of winning Worlds, becoming a dance teacher, and starting her own school. I love that, and I want to do everything I can to help her. And that includes keeping her grounded in reality. She won’t always win, but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t try. I want her to do what she loves, but she can’t have so much of her identity wrapped up in it that failure would destroy her. She needs drive and passion, but also a healthy sense of self.
I can almost guarantee that Graber’s girls are growing up happy. He and his wife are defying the conventional wisdom of modern parenting, which has led parents to believe that exposing kids to negative emotions will hurt them. Most children are shielded against injury, embarrassment, and the many other flavors of failure that can actually make them stronger. Bubble-wrapped kids never learn how to deal effectively with their emotions.
In his book Positive Pushing, Jim Taylor calls “emotional mastery” the first of three keys to a child’s success. The second is self-esteem. The third is a sense of ownership of their course in life. When a parent takes charge of a child’s academic success and interests outside school, the kid loses ownership—the sense that life’s ups and downs are in the kid’s own hands, not Mom’s and Dad’s. The goal is to help your child do the hard things “because I want to,” rather than “because I’ve got to.”
Hallowell put it this way: “Life is a game of multiple failures. The people who prevail in life—who become happy in themselves as adults—are the ones who can fail or suffer loss or defeat but never lose heart.”
What other paths to happiness can we find in Graber’s note? There’s optimism: “She has these dreams of winning.” Martin Seligman, a pioneer of research on happiness, found that optimism protects against depression and anxiety later in life. While genetics play a role in a person’s optimism, Seligman determined the attribute can be learned at an early age.
Graber’s older girl also is playing, which we know is an important part of a child’s development: “She loves it, she is good at it.” Drawing from the research of psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hallowell concluded, “Play generates joy. Play becomes its own reward.” It’s a key to happiness.
Finally, Graber’s older daughter is experiencing what researchers call “connectedness,” forming bonds with her parents, her dance troupe, her sister, and even her Irish roots. Hallowell said nature gives almost all children and parents the ability to connect. He wrote: “I say ‘almost’ because some children are born with problems in making meaningful connections with others: These are the children with autism, Asperger’s syndrome, childhood schizophrenia, or pervasive developmental disorder.”
I wrote in the margins of his book, a few days after touring Monticello, Can Tyler connect? Yes!
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The trip to Jefferson’s home was not in pursuit of happiness. It was in pursuit of understanding. Tyler is fundamentally optimistic and playful, blessed with a unique spirit that I can only call self-esteem. His autism and my obtuseness hid those attributes from me for years.
I thought an optimistic boy must be swaggering, popular, and ambitious. In Tyler, optimism is a steely, quiet confidence: “My kind of happy.”
I thought playfulness was best exhibited through sports, like a pack of boys lacing up skates on a frozen lake. For Tyler, video games (in moderation) are a healthy outlet, and I’m starting to think there’s something special about his dry sense of humor: I’ll pursue your happiness.
I thought fathers and sons could only connect through sports—and then one day I’m wiping away tears at the home of a dead president: I knew it was important for you that we play together. So I did. I did it for you.
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My conversations with parents almost always start with a basic question: “What expectations do you have for your children as they grow up?” The answer almost always begins with some variation of “All I want is for them to be happy.” But I wonder, is that really all they want? After all, I’m sure there are happy serial killers. Think of all the happy assholes you know. “Why is it that bad people can be happy?” wrote Marc Gellman in a 2006 essay for Newsweek magazine. “The reason is that happiness as defined by our culture has become just a synonym for pleasure, and anyone can feel pleasure.”
I highly recommend Gellman’s essay, “An Argument Against Happiness,” because it blows conventional wisdom to smithereens. The synonym for happiness is not pleasure, he wrote. It’s goodness. “True happiness, the kind of happiness we ought to wish for our children and for ourselves is almost always the result of doing hard but good things over and over.”
People tell researchers that getting married didn’t make them any happier, and neither did having children or making a lot of money. That’s because happiness for most people is defined as pleasure, and most of what makes a marriage or parenthood fulfilling is not very pleasurable. But it is good.
The unbounded pursuit of pleasure is harmful. Researchers in the booming field of positive psychology see a direct link between increasing cultural emphasis on materialism and status and the rising rates of depression, paranoia, and psychopathology. People who focus on living with a sense of purpose are more likely to remain healthy and intellectually sound and even to live longer than people who focus on achieving feelings of “happiness” via pleasure.
There is nothing wrong with the pleasure that comes with a big meal, a sexy night, or victory on the playing field—but it’s fleeting. Raising kids, working through marriage troubles, and volunteering at a soup kitchen may be less pleasurable, but these pursuits provide fulfillment—a sense that you’re the best person you can be. Researchers call this “hedonic well-being” and link it directly to lower levels of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and other maladies. The research appears consistent at every income and education level, and among all races.
This reminds me of a family story. When my brothers were in their teens, they delivered televisions for an appliance store in suburban Detroit. One day they were assigned a delivery in an achingly poor and crime-ridden Detroit neighborhood. After installing the TV, my brothers were walking out of the apartment building when they noticed a familiar form headed toward them, a huge man wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It was Dad’s day off, and he looked startled at first—then a bit angry.
“What are you boys doing down here?” Dad said, sternly. “This is a bad neighborhood.” He was carrying two bags of our clothes—pants and shirts that we had outgrown.
Tim asked, “What are you doing down here?”
Dad shrugged. “Just seeing some people I know.”
At this point in our lives, we already knew Dad couldn’t pass a stranded driver; he always stopped to help. I once saw him shake hands with a homeless man outside a Red Wings game, discreetly passing a couple of crumpled dollar bills to the guy he called Bill. “Thank you, Ron,” the man said.
What do I ultimately want for my kids? I want them to pursue the happiness that is found in goodness. On a day off, I want them to bring outgrown clothes to a bad neighborhood.
You know about one of the happiest days of my childhood, playing pickup hockey on Lake Erie. Now I’ll tell you about one of the happiest days of my adult life: June 29, 2013, the day my eldest daughter, Holly, married Tom Flickinger at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church near their home in Detroit. Lori and I arrived from Washington a few days before the wedding and focused on getting our parents to the ceremony.
Lori’s mother was rapidly fading from dementia, which was making her antisocial and combative, unwilling even to be diagnosed or treated. Her decline was devastating to watch, as Shirley Rumpz had been a loving wife, mother, and grandmother—a sharp, dynamic woman who ran her household and the University of Detroit union negotiations with no-nonsense efficiency. Now she was talking about skipping her granddaughter’s wedding.
As for my father, four years had passed since I first noticed his decline. For his 70th birthday, my brothers, my sister, Raquel, and I arranged to have Dad throw out the first pitch at a minor league baseball game in Grand Rapids. It seemed a perfect gift. He loved baseball and still looked game-ready. Mom tried to talk us out of it, saying Dad would be embarrassed by the attention. “Nonsense,” I said. “He’ll love it.” But when Dad arrived at the park and learned of our plans, he got angry and refused to take the field. I threw the pitch for him.
“What’s up with Dad?” I asked Mom.
She said, “Everything’s fine, honey.”
Everything wasn’t fine. In addition to the “mild neuropathy” that our parents had told us about and minimized, a neurologist had diagnosed Dad with Parkinson’s disease. Dad dismissed the diagnosis, and Mom enabled his denial. He was The Guy, a prideful man whose self-image was built on the myth of his invulnerability, and inflated by every person who idolized him—his friends, his co-workers, his neighbors, and, most important to him, his four kids and wife. Mom covered for Dad out of respect for his pride. She loved this strong man her entire life, and wouldn’t let go easily.