How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  It’s also possible to be happy, or at least happier, when your life includes real challenges. In interviews for this book, I’ve spoken with parents with physical disabilities, with histories of abuse or addiction, or who have lost partners or children. I’ve talked to parents whose children deal with mental illness, learning disabilities, or other issues, or who have lost jobs or struggle financially. Those parents were still looking for, and finding, ways to be happier. Sometimes things are hard. We’re sandwiched between a rock and a hard place, and it’s rainy and cold and the forecast is for snow, and no one is suggesting you be happy about that. But you’re still getting up in the morning, and the kids still need school lunches—and they’ll still surprise you with a hug, delight you by learning something new, or move you to tears by helping you out when you need it most.

  We can find happiness even when things aren’t great, and it’s okay to want to be happier, no matter what else is going on in your life or in the world. If you need an excuse, happier people make better employees. They volunteer more. They’re more creative, healthier, more productive. They spread their happiness to the people around them, and they have stronger relationships—and children who have better relationships with their parents are happier, too.

  Which brings me to another important point. This whole happier thing isn’t a destination. You don’t become a happier parent and then put a finish coat on it and call it done. The goals I set for myself, and the ideas you’ll find for setting your own goals and making your own changes, aren’t goals of achievement. They’re goals of motion. If, on any given day, things feel better, go more smoothly, leave us putting our heads on our pillows with a sense of pleasant expectation for tomorrow, then we lick the back of a gold star and keep going. Because while there is an end goal of parenting (raising functional adults), this book isn’t about getting there. Just the opposite. It’s about not wanting to rush to the end, because you’re right in the middle of everything you love.

  When I did that survey asking people to describe their trouble spots as parents, mixed in with all the terrible mornings and chore battles and one awesome picture of an infant peering up from between his mother’s legs in front of the toilet upon which she was seated, I found these complaints:

  They grow up.

  Long-distance calls (not enough of them).

  They’re far away.

  This period—this time we have with everyone packed into the house and living life so fully intertwined—it ends. And yes, we know that. We’ve all been stopped by someone as we slog through the grocery store with three children under five and reminded to “enjoy it, because it goes so fast.” We know the truth of Gretchen Rubin’s saying: “The days are long, but the years are short.” As I write this book, my oldest child is fifteen; by the time you read it, it’s likely we’ll know where he’s going to college.

  Our family lives will change. That’s all the more reason to do everything we can to make these years as good while they’re happening as they’ll be in hindsight. A satisfying family life is attainable, and it isn’t about raising great kids and churning them out at destination: success. It’s about finding happiness—real happiness, the kind you look back on, look forward to, and live for—along the way.

  interlude

  TEN MANTRAS FOR HAPPIER PARENTS

  Before we go any further, I’ll go ahead and reveal the book’s ending, at least for me: I’m happier. When I started to apply what I’ve learned, things changed. My children get along better, and I handle it better when they don’t. Mornings aren’t ultra-stress sprints anymore, and while homework is scarcely making anyone in the house happy, it’s not a big drain on my personal resources at the end of a long day. That leaves me with more to give at bedtime, and more ability to do things for myself as the evening winds down.

  Some of what got better came from doing things differently, and the details—the ideas and tips and hacks—are coming, topic by topic. But so much of what shifted for me wasn’t in what I did, but in how I thought about it. I was like Dorothy with her sparkly red shoes: I had what I needed to get where I wanted to go all along, but I still needed to travel my own road.

  As I did, I found that I kept coming back to a few fundamentals. There were basic rules that applied again and again, and those came to form the guiding principles of my own life as a happier parent. When I’m uncertain, reaching for my next move, or about to lose my mind over a seeming “crisis,” these are words I come back to. I hope they’ll work that way for you, too.

  What you want now isn’t always what you want later. So many times, I would rather just take the easy way out. I can clear a child’s dishes off the table. I can tell her the answer to that math problem. I can email his teacher to get him out of a jam. But me doing those things now doesn’t teach my kids to do them later. In the short run, it means I’ll spend a lot of time doing their work, and in the long run, it will mean I haven’t given them what they need to grow up. In parenting, you mostly have to go the long way.

  There is nothing wrong. This came from a book I read years ago with a very Buddhist slant (Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big Life). In her usage, there never was anything wrong, and there never could be anything wrong, because whatever had happened had already happened and was therefore the way it was, and not wrong.

  I can’t take it that far (which is why I am not a Buddhist), but I find this a comforting place to return to when things are going wrong. Child tantrum, job troubles, teenager in crisis, sickness, broken bones . . . fundamentally, nearly always, things are still okay. As philosopher Michel de Montaigne put it, “My life has been full of misfortunes, most of which never happened.” I often say this one as there is nothing really wrong, but editors famously dislike the word “really.” So I try to go all in, and most of the time, it’s exactly true: There is nothing wrong.

  People, including children—especially children—change. I’m a first-class catastrophizer. If something isn’t going well, I tend to think it never will. He will never like school. She will never eat yogurt. Those two will never get along. I’m almost always wrong. Picky eaters evolve. Lazy students get motivated. Kids learn. That’s kind of the point. But it’s very important that we let them, instead of getting in their way by assuming they’ll stay where they are.

  You don’t have to go in there. This is my shorthand for reminding myself not to be infected by my family’s moods, from my daughters’ dramas to my husband’s occasional grumps. It comes from the tendency of one child to go into her closet and slam the door when she’s upset. While it’s true that sometimes I need to literally “go in there” to be with her, I don’t need to go into her mood, and it won’t help either of us if I do.

  If you see something, don’t always say something. I don’t have to leap into every sibling battle or correct every minor infraction, especially if a child is having a bad day. Many things go better if I don’t intervene, and it’s possible to learn even the lessons that need the most repetition while occasionally getting a pass.

  You do you. I have friends who do a lot of great things with their children. They take them on hundred-mile-long cross-country-ski camping trips. They spend a year in Madrid. They build a treehouse, volunteer at a soup kitchen, jam on their guitars, build a stone wall, rescue endangered turtles, have board game tournaments, show cows, take their crepe cart to farmers’ markets.

  We do not do any of those things. Importantly, I do not want to do any of those things. We do our things, some of which sound just as fantastic and some of which don’t, and that’s okay. I can’t raise my kids as traveling circus acrobats because I am not a traveling circus acrobat, even if that would make a fantastic college application essay. A corollary to this is you can’t do everything. You can’t. The end—or at least, it should be.

  You can be happy when your children aren’t. It isn’t my missing Thomas the Tank Engine. It isn’t my homework. It isn’t my sports team. It isn’t my college admis
sion. Our kids will have disappointments. They will make terrible decisions. Other people will screw them over. Luck won’t always fall their way. Sometimes we will ache for them. Sometimes we will be struggling not to say “I told you so.”

  Either way, we can keep our own inner equilibrium. Sympathy and empathy don’t have to mean that our worlds come crashing down around us when that’s how it feels to our kids. Usually, we have something our children don’t: perspective. We know that Thomas will turn up or be forgotten, that the homework will get done, and that there are other teams and colleges. We know what’s big and what isn’t. In her book Rising Strong, Brené Brown says that we need permission to feel our emotions. This phrase is permission to understand your child’s feelings from the security of your own, and to give your child the distance she needs to experience her own emotions without a sense of being responsible for yours.

  Decide what to do, then do it. Being a parent can mean doing a lot of waffling. TV or no? Candy? Snack? Rabbit? Sleepover? Hoverboard? Scary movie? Concert? We weigh alternatives. We reconsider. We think, sometimes too much. Decide what to do, then do it reminds me that most of these choices aren’t life-altering. It also reminds me to actively decide and then stick with it, instead of answering thoughtlessly and then giving in to begging later.

  You don’t have to get it right every time. Actually, you’re not going to get it right every time. You’re not even supposed to. No one does. Sometimes, you will yell when you wish you’d been calm. You will accuse an innocent child, and let a guilty one off the hook. You will help too much, or too little. You will bring the wrong child to the dentist, you will buy dinner from a vending machine, and you will realize that there isn’t always a “right” choice anyway. And then you’ll get another chance tomorrow.

  Soak up the good. Unlike the rest of the mantras, soak up the good reminds me to do something I want to do instead of avoiding the things I don’t. In his book Hardwiring Happiness, Rick Hanson (you’ll hear more from him later) describes the way humans are wired to put more weight on negative experiences than on positive ones, in part because it’s more important to remember to avoid a tiger than that the berries on this bush are sweeter than the ones from the tree over there.

  We can be happier, he says, if we train our brain to revel in the positive. Hanson is a neuropsychologist, and according to his research, noticing when things are good and making an effort to soak that in feeds dopamine (a positive, calming neurotransmitter) to our amygdala, helping it to want and seek out more dopamine. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially, the more you soak up the good, the more good you see to soak up, and the more your brain is able to stay in that calm, more positive place.

  Thanks to Hanson, I’ve been pausing to absorb even the simplest of good moments. We’re all in the car talking and no one is squabbling. The sun is shining and my kid is excitedly sharing plans for the afternoon. It even works when things aren’t obviously going well—when one of my kids comes to me with a problem or a disappointment, even while I sit with that child, holding and talking, a part of me takes in the pleasure of being there. Soak up the good builds a reservoir of happiness for when things feel bad. Fill that reservoir, and you have happiness that stays with you.

  one

  MORNINGS ARE THE WORST

  For us, a family headed by two night owls and populated by children who are slow to move at the best of times and can easily lose twenty minutes to the discovery of a yo-yo on the floor of a closet, mornings are the worst. They start so early. They go so quickly. They involve so very many have-tos and where-is-mys and snooze buttons and tardy bells.

  I should find some more positive way to put it. Mornings are challenging, I should say. It takes a lot of effort for me to get up and get going at all, let alone to help others get up and get going. And it generally feels impossible to get up and get going in a manner that does not spread misery and gloom among all those around me. “Challenging” is a lovely word, suggesting as it does a spirit of enthusiasm, of embracing the day. It’s so much more in keeping with the spirit of bringing happiness back into our family lives.

  But really, mornings are the worst.

  It all starts with mornings, too. A good morning sets the tone for your whole day; a bad morning either does the same or sets us all up with something to overcome first thing. Becoming a parent changes most things, but it really does a number on your morning routine. Gone are the days of staying up until two and sleeping until ten, or leaping out of bed at the last possible moment to allow for an almost on-time arrival at work or in class.

  Now, not only do we have to get up early, but we have to get up early enough to get others up, to do the things for them that they can’t do for themselves, and to help them learn to get up and get going. Worse, we have to do that with good grace, both to give everyone a pleasant start to their day and to teach by example: when something has to be done, stomping around and screaming at everyone while you do it only makes it worse. (I haven’t done that for months. Well, weeks.)

  What Goes Wrong (Besides Everything) in the Morning

  The process of getting yourself and your entire family moving in the morning is hard. It’s hard for nearly everyone. Aside from a few exceptional parents who are making quinoa crepes for breakfast (or are willing to lie about it for articles with headlines like “The Morning Routines of People Who Are More Awesome Than You”), mornings are the great equalizer. It’s not that you’re overscheduled. It’s not that you’re insufficiently present, or that your children have too much screen time or are hovered over, or any of the other guilt inducers of the modern parent. The problem is straightforward: it’s hard to feel happy when everyone has to be somewhere earlier than almost anyone wants to be anywhere, and some of the people in this equation are too young to take responsibility for getting themselves out the door.

  Parents are up against a lot in the mornings. What goes wrong? Some answers: “They start too early.” “It’s dark and cold.” “I have to make coffee before I’ve had coffee.” “Having to rush everyone.” “High school starts at 7.” “Elementary school starts at 7:45.” “Whining.” “My child who gets up at five a.m. no matter what.” Everything from the weather to our children seems to conspire against us, and the boulders of morning doom start to pile up before we even go to sleep the night before, invariably too late to get enough sleep to face another dawn.

  Lack of sleep is a big problem, but it’s far from the only problem. Mornings are packed chock-full of other parent challenges. Transitions. Multi-tasking. Things to remember. Deadlines, time limits, and cutoffs enforced by people and places outside of our control. Mornings are unforgiving and for most of us they come with a built-in performance evaluator ticking away on the wall of the kitchen and the car dashboard. How are we doing? We can see the answer right there on the face of the clock.

  Then there are the children. The younger ones scoff at your foolish demand for punctuality. Time is meaningless to the baby who has a set-in-stone routine of blowing out his diaper the moment he’s placed in his car seat. The toddler with separation issues cares nothing about your need to punch in at work. A slightly older child may seem as if she can understand the kindergarten teacher marking her tardy and even dislike the feeling of running in to join morning circle after the bell, but that possible future pales in comparison to the allure of the plastic sheep she just found on the kitchen floor, which needs to join its flock, which she is pretty sure she put under her bed somewhere, or maybe in the laundry room.

  Middle graders and teenagers have some of the same organizational problems parents have in the morning, but without even our dubious ability to get it all done in time. One forgot to print out his homework; another forgot an assignment entirely. Your daughter didn’t pack her hockey bag; your son really believes he can make a complex sandwich for his lunch in the thirty seconds he has before he leaves to catch the bus. You’ve coached them through the process a hundred times, and you’l
l do it a hundred more before they’re capable of the kind of planning it takes to make a morning run smoothly, but meanwhile, your nine o’clock call doesn’t want to hear it.

  Mornings can be better. There exist parents, not all naturally early risers, and not even equipped with superpowers, who have figured out ways to feel happier amid the morning madness along with getting the whole thing to run more smoothly. There are researchers and experts with data that might finally convince us to make some changes that can benefit our own health and happiness and that of our kids. One big hint: it starts the night before.

  The Single Biggest Thing We Can Change About Mornings

  Bed. It’s the most inviting place in the world early in the morning for older kids, teenagers, and adults—and the last place some of us can make ourselves go at night. Meanwhile, those younger kids, the ones that pop up at five a.m. and appear in our rooms, all sunshine, and then pinch our cheeks and shout, “GET UP, MOMMY! DADDY, GET UP!”? They don’t want to go to bed, either. Going to bed, and getting others to go to bed, is hard. But the later we go to bed, the more painful it is when morning comes.

  Everything eats away at bedtime, from the jobs we’ve put off until the last minute to our desire to extend the part of day when we get to do what we want to do instead of what we have to do. The minute we go to bed, it’s practically tomorrow (an effect that’s worsened when tomorrow is Monday). When our children are young, the time after we tuck them in is our grown-up time. It’s time with your partner, if you have one. It’s time for yourself, to get things done or just enjoy the opportunity to read a book without interruption. As our kids get older, they start to feel the same frustrations. Especially if they’re loaded up with homework, or even if they’re busy after school with things they enjoy, they share that sense that the minute their time becomes their own, it’s time to go to bed, or they won’t get enough sleep.