I said in the introduction that happier parents move from greater involvement with younger children toward cultivating independence as kids get older. My children are, for the most part, at or entering that “older” part of the spectrum, and that changes my job description. Nearly always, I need to teach them how to do something and then leave them to do it, even if that means homework doesn’t get done, laundry turns pink, or insufficient practice leads to not making the cut at some activity or another.
Sometimes it’s hard to let go of that tight control, especially when not all of my parenting peers are on the same page (although many are). Because it’s more natural for Americans to worry that we’re not doing enough than that we’re doing too much in nearly everything we do, when I realize I’ve stepped back in areas where others have stepped up, I question myself. (Those happy Danish, incidentally, are much more likely to chide one another for everything from overwork to overdressing to, yes, overparenting. They’ve got a solid societal expectation that everyone should do less.)
I’m raising future adults, not perfect children, and that looks different. Embracing that narrative has made me happier about those seeming failures. It takes time to learn to be good at being a grown-up. Personally, I’m still working on it. My kids have lots of space to improve, and we’re all much better off if I’m not trying to micromanage their every move.
I’ve also increased my happiness dramatically with a very mundane change: I sleep more. I’ve been writing about healthy sleep for children and teenagers for years, but in writing the chapter on mornings, I finally sold myself on the idea of healthy sleep for me. I set aside my belief in myself as a genetically programmed night owl, took my own advice, and counted backward from the time on the alarm to the time I’d need to go to bed to get eight hours of sleep. Then I did it. First for one week, and then another, and then another.
I felt the difference immediately. Although it still isn’t easy for me to get up at 6:20, and I never became someone who sings in the mornings, I gained more in patience and resilience and the ability to respond instead of react from that one simple change than from anything else I tried. I even, grudgingly, accepted the research that says that we’re better off sticking to essentially the same sleep routine on the weekends. I go to bed at close to the same time every night, although I allow myself some morning slack. Sometimes I get nine or ten hours of sleep. Sometimes I need nine or ten hours of sleep.
The person I am when I have had enough sleep is more pleasant for everyone to be around, including me, as well as more productive. That version of me is also more able to tolerate sibling battles and discipline challenges, and respond in the moment in the way I will wish I had responded later. She doesn’t worry as much about what other people think, she’s generally more optimistic, and she doesn’t have nearly as many voices in her head constantly berating her for failures and things left undone. I like her much better.
I try to be happy, I let more things go, I get more sleep—together, all of those things, along with other changes I’ve made as I wrote have meant a big shift in my overall state of mind. The phrase “If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” definitely applies in our house. I’m capable of a black cloud of gloom and fury that is almost immediately contagious (a friend who does the same once called that his superpower). Just as that cloud spreads, nearly everything else I’m feeling spreads, too. Even small shifts in my mood move my children. If I am rushed, they are rushed; if I am anxious, they are anxious. And if I am happy, everyone is happier.
And my being happier makes a big difference to the happiness of my entire family. One of my greatest challenges as a parent has been that my well of patience isn’t very deep, and while children excel at picking up on our emotions and mirroring them back to us, they don’t moderate their own behavior based on where we are on our personal emotional roller coasters. So often, when your day has been long, when it has just been one thing after another, when any external observer would agree that you’ve given enough, they demand more. They’re sick, they can’t sleep, their best friend just texted them something awful, they just can’t figure out a way to end this essay for English class. They need you now, and it isn’t optional. There’s no clocking out at the end of the day.
The less happy I am, the faster my well runs dry. When that happens, my reaction to a crisis tends to make me even more unhappy. Grudgingly, angrily, grumpily, sometimes nastily, I do only whatever is physically necessary. I go through the motions, holding without hugging and longing for my own bed.
When I’m happier, I’m far more able to drag the bottom of that well. I take the deep breath and open up, fully, to the problem and the child behind it, no matter how late, no matter how hard. I tell the child who has vomited grape juice onto the rug for the third time that it is okay and I mean it. I hold the child whose phone is pinging with anger and exclusion and I give her a safe and loving place to be even if she takes it all out on me.
I’m not perfect (far from it), but I’m so much more able to keep parenting as my best self than I once was. And as I found my way toward the generosity of spirit that feeds that ability, I found something that surprised me. Scraping the bottom of that well makes me happier, too. When I find it in me to give one more thing to one more child, I give something to myself, too. A moment that had me on the edge, about to snap or scream or yell or cry, becomes a moment to soak in the good. Happiness is cumulative. The more things that feel right, the more things that feel right.
I’m happier every time I pull that off, and I know I pull it off more often. Last night, at dinner, one of my children pulled a “conversation card” from the middle of the table (from a box of such cards meant to encourage family dinner conversations, which normally sits unused) and handed it to me. “You read it,” he said.
“What are your best and worst qualities?”
They shared theirs in characteristic ways. (“Sometimes I like to be annoying on purpose,” declared my youngest son, with a dimpled grin.) When it was my turn, I started with the bad, as one does. “I lose my temper really easily,” I said. “I don’t have much patience.”
“But you do!” said one. “You have lots of patience. You’re always doing things slowly and waiting for us.”
“And you mostly don’t yell,” said another. “Plus you make the best Rice Krispies treats because you’re patient. Most people burn the butter or the marshmallows.” An excellent use of patience.
Scraping the bottom of my well turns out to deepen it. Just like taking time to soak up the good makes us more able to see the good around us, the more often you locate that loving patience within yourself, the easier it gets to find. At the same time, so many of the things I learned from parents who had found happier ways to deal with things I found challenging meant I wasn’t dipping into my well as often, either. So maybe it’s deeper, or maybe there’s just more left in there. However it works, happiness is self-perpetuating. The happier I am as a parent, the easier it becomes to feel happy.
I still live in my house with my four amazing, glorious, delightful, stubborn, challenging, bickering children and my equally wonderful, but mostly not all the other things, husband. But it feels as if we have more room for one another somehow. I keep coming back to what Denise Pope said in the homework chapter, or Sally Sampson said in the food chapter, which amounted to much the same thing: when we’re not putting all our energy into getting our kids to eat or study or do anything else exactly the way we want them to, we can put it into a much more positive place. We can talk about other things, like birds and maple sap production and town politics. We can enjoy each other. We can be happy together.
That makes all the rest of it, from the mornings to the meals to the inevitable bursts of the hard kind of discipline, better.
I said in the introduction that I didn’t want to spend these years in a haze of resigned exhaustion, longing to be or do something else. For the most part, I don�
��t. That doesn’t mean I’m not sometimes exhausted, or that our weeks aren’t still peppered with those days when we zip madly from one place to another picking up, dropping off, and then figuring out who we’ve forgotten where.
That’s okay. I choose those days, just as I choose the slower ones where everyone basks in all the time in the world to do all things, and the other slower ones where they spend their time challenging one another to find new and inventive ways to announce that they’re bored.
This is what I wanted. I wish it would go on forever. It won’t.
But it is, right now, good.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people had a hand in this book somehow that I almost hesitate to start thanking you. I’m bound to leave someone out. I’m going to intentionally leave someone out, just so I know who I’ve forgotten. You know who you are.
But for now, let’s start at the beginning—thanks to Lisa Belkin, who set everything in motion, to Megan Liberman and Rick Berke, who took a chance on me at the New York Times, and even before them to Hanna Rosin and Emily Bazelon, who did the same at Slate. Megan, the day I got your first phone call goes down in my personal archives as one of the best days of my career, and I missed your supportive editorial push every day after you left.
As for the book itself, the first thanks go to Laurie Abkemeier, who took me on as a client long before I had that big ol’ New York Times sticker of approval on my forehead, and then to Lucia Watson, who saw what the book could be and let me run with it. To the team at Avery, who are as I write this making me feel like a valued and treasured part of the coming year’s catalog (see me using cool publishing words there?), thank you, thank you. Anne Kosmoski, Alyssa Kasoff, and Farin Schlussel, you’ve done all the work so far; Lindsay Gordon and Megan Newman, you’ve so clearly got everyone’s backs. And thank you Suzy Swartz, who took good care of me and all my emails and who is going to go on to great things.
Dawn Reiss, you helped me write this book; without you, the research portions would look something like this: TK, TK, I know I read something about this somewhere. Matthew Weinshenker, thank you for helping me turn a bunch of questions into a bunch of data and for reining in my enthusiastic embrace of those results.
To the hundred and more experts and fellow parents I interviewed directly for this book one way or another, thank you. God knows I would have absolutely no ideas on happier mornings, among other things, if it weren’t for you all. The world would be a better place if nobody ever had to get up earlier than they wanted to in order to go somewhere they weren’t awake enough to go to yet, but since we can’t have that, the world is a better place with you all in it. My Facebook community—you, too, are at the core of this. I hope you spotted each and every discussion we had over the course of many years of trying to figure this whole parent thing out. Motherlode readers and commenters, you’re in here, too. I miss you all.
Sarah and Jess, you are my writing group and my rocks. Stickers and chunks will get us everywhere.
Mom, Dad, Rob, Sam, Lily, Rory, Wyatt—I already said it at the beginning. Ain’t no book about happier parents without a happy family behind it. At least some of the time.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: THIS COULD BE FUN
We give up our own hobbies and pleasures: Jeanne E. Arnold, Anthony P. Graesch, Enzo Ragazzini, and Elinor Ochs, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors (Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2012), 70.
headlines like “How Having Children Robs Parents”: Georgia Grimmond, “How Having Children Robs Parents of Their Happiness,” Post Magazine, September 16, 2015, http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1858685/how-having-children-robs-parents-their-happiness.
“cocktail of guilt and anxiety”: Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety (New York: Riverhead, 2006), 4.
one study linking happiness to nudism: Keon West, “Naked and Unashamed: Investigations and Applications of the Effects of Naturist Activities on Body Image, Self-Esteem, and Life Satisfaction,” Journal of Happiness Studies, January 21, 2017.
we can build stronger partnerships: Kaisa Malinen, Ulla Kinnunen, Asko Tolvanen, Anna Rönkä, Hilde Wierda-Boer, and Jan Gerris, “Happy Spouses, Happy Parents? Family Relationships Among Finnish and Dutch Dual Earners,” Journal of Marriage and Family 72, no. 2 (April 2010): 293–306.
and friendships: Suniya S. Luthar and Lucia Ciciolla, “Who Mothers Mommy? Factors That Contribute to Mothers’ Well-Being,” Developmental Psychology 51, no. 12 (December 2015): 1812–1823.
share leisure activities with our families: Ramon B. Zabriskie and Bryan P. McCormick, “Parent and Child Perspectives of Family Leisure Involvement and Satisfaction with Family Life,” Journal of Leisure Research 35, no. 2 (2003): 163–189.
doing things that are pleasant for all parties: Kelly Musick, Ann Meier, and Sarah Flood, “How Parents Fare: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Subjective Well-Being in Time with Children,” American Sociological Review 81, no. 5 (September 2016): 1069–1095.
things in our lives that correlate with happiness: Tomas Jungert, Renée Landry, Mireille Joussemet, Geneviéve Mageau, Isabelle Gingras, and Richard Koestner, “Autonomous and Controlled Motivation for Parenting: Associations with Parent and Child Outcomes,” Journal of Child and Family Studies 24, no. 7 (July 2015): 1932–1942.
relationships with their parents are happier, too: Mark D. Holder and Ben Coleman, “The Contribution of Social Relationships to Children’s Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies 10, no. 3 (June 2009): 329–349.
1. MORNINGS ARE THE WORST
Researchers have worked with preschoolers: Amy R. Wolfson, Elizabeth Harkins, Michaela Johnson, and Christine Marco, “Effects of the Young Adolescent Sleep Smart Program on Sleep Hygiene Practices, Sleep Health Efficacy, and Behavioral Well-Being,” Sleep Health: Journal of the National Sleep Foundation 1, no. 3 (September 2015): 197–204; Annie Murphy Paul, “We Tell Kids to ‘Go to Sleep!’ We Need to Teach Them Why,” Motherlode, New York Times, July 10, 2014, https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/we-tell-kids-to-go-to-sleep-we-need-to-teach-them-why.
survey of one thousand new parents: Lisa Belkin, “Parents Losing Sleep,” Motherlode, New York Times, July 23, 2010, https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/parents-losing-sleep.
2. CHORES
they require their own children to do them: Jennifer Breheny Wallace, “Why Children Need Chores,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2015.
our children’s sense of being part of a larger whole: Elinor Ochs and Carolina Izquierdo, “Responsibility in Childhood: Three Developmental Trajectories,” Ethos 37, no. 4 (December 2009): 391–413.
with a sense of being adrift: Andrew J. Fuligni and Sara Pedersen, “Family Obligation and the Transition to Young Adulthood,” Developmental Psychology 38, no. 5 (September 2002): 856–868; Gay C. Armsden and Mark T. Greenberg, “The Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment: Individual Differences and Their Relationship to Psychological Well-Being in Adolescence,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 16, no. 5 (October 1987): 427–454.
whether it’s a five-year-old in Peru’s Amazon: Shirley S. Wang, “A Field Guide to the Middle-Class U.S. Family,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2012.
deeply invested in raising caring, ethical children: Carl Desportes Bowman, James Davison Hunter, Jeffrey S. Dill, and Megan Juelfs-Swanson, “Culture of American Families Executive Report,” Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, 2012, http://iasc-culture.org/survey_archives/IASC_CAF_ExecReport.pdf; Making Caring Common Project, “The Children We Mean to Raise,” Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2014, http://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/files/gse-mcc/files/mcc-research-report.pdf?m=1448057487.
moral qualities as more important than achievement: Marie-Anne Suizzo, “Parents’ Goals and Values for Children: Dimensions of Independence and Interdependence Across Four U.S. Ethnic Groups,�
�� Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 38, no. 4 (July 2007): 506–530.
thirty-three schools in various regions: Making Caring Common Project, “The Children We Mean to Raise.”
predictor for young adults’ success: Marty Rossmann, “Involving Children in Household Tasks: Is It Worth the Effort?,” University of Minnesota, 2002, https://ghk.h-cdn.co/assets/cm/15/12/55071e0298a05_-_Involving-children-in-household-tasks-U-of-M.pdf.
building skills in children: Julie Lythcott-Haims, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 166.
endorses paying for excellent work: Ron Lieber, “Don’t Just Pay for Chores. Pay for Performance,” Motherlode, New York Times, August 28, 2014, https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/dont-just-pay-for-chores-pay-for-performance.
3. SIBLINGS
Parent-reported and observational studies: Hildy Ross, Michael Ross, Nancy Stein, and Tom Trabasso, “How Siblings Resolve Their Conflicts: The Importance of First Offers, Planning, and Limited Opposition,” Child Development 77, no. 6 (November/December 2006): 1730–1745.
the same researcher found: Laurie Kramer, Sonia Noorman, and Renee Brockman, “Representations of Sibling Relationships in Young Children’s Literature,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 14, no. 4 (December 1999): 555–574.
two-thirds of children still share a room: Danielle Braff, “Why Parents Are Choosing to Have Kids Share Rooms Even When There’s Space,” Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2016.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 28