All parents want their children to be happy. However, in a recent interview with Today With Hoda & Jenna, author, public speaker, Harvard professor, and happiness expert, Arthur Brooks suggests otherwise. Brooks states that the true key to a child’s happiness is parents actually allowing their kids to experience being unhappy.
Appearing on the show to promote his new book, “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” Brooks shared some valuable insights with Jenna Bush Hager. When asked about the biggest mistake parents make in helping their children achieve true happiness, Brooks replied that one of the most common mistakes he encounters is that, “parents don’t allow their kids to be unhappy”.
“One of the things that I see is that parents are too freaked out about their kids being unhappy,” Brooks responded to the host. “They’re freaked out about it. A lot of helicopter parenting is because they’re thinking about their kid’s feelings all the time, and they’re trying to wipe out the bad feelings, and that’s a mistake.”
“Your kid needs to be alive,” he continued. “Your kid needs to learn; your kid needs to grow. You want your child to live a full life of happier-ness.”
Although this may seem counter-intuitive to many parents, many experts agree, in addition to Brooks, that allowing children to experience a wide-range of emotion is beneficial for their healthy emotional development.
In an interview with CNBC Make It, Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development, states that there is a certain strength that comes from parents allowing children to have intense emotions and work through them themselves.
“Strength comes from being able to have these pretty intense emotions, like anger, [then] handling it and knowing that ’Mommy or Daddy is still there for me, they’re not upset with me, they’re not going to cast me aside,” Tovah said in her interview.
She went on to say that, the hardest part of this process for parents is feeling unhappy themselves while allowing their children to be “unhappy” because, “We’re happiest when our children are happy.”
Although this is one part of a parenting journey that is uncomfortable to say the least, it is an extremely important one. To develop into emotionally happy and healthy adults, children need to experience the entire gamut of emotions and work through them on their own.
Not saying that parents should not be there for support, as they should, but allowing your child to be in the drivers seat, helps them to, as Brooks says, “live a full life of happier-ness.”
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