The Happiness Project: Bad parenting: back from the brink

The Happiness Project

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT is the memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier – happily, it was a #1 New York Times bestseller. As one of the hundreds of experiments I've conducted, I started this blog. Here, I recount my daily adventures in pursuit of happiness. –

Gretchen Rubin

What Started Me Thinking

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up." Mark Twain
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
“Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
“Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope

Happiness Theories I Reject

Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

This morning I almost made a classic bad-parenting move: denying a bad feeling.

We began the day at 6:30 a.m. with the Big Girl claiming, “No one’s paying attention to me. Everyone pays more attention to the Baby. Even when she’s ripping my book or pulling my hair, no one cares.”

This is absurd, and I started to snap back with the usual, “She’s too little to know what she’s doing, and how can you say no one’s paying attention to you? We played eight games of Uno yesterday,” etc., etc.

Just in time, I remembered the principle I’d recently re-read in the greatest parenting books of all time, Faber and Mazlish’s How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. (It’s a parenting book but the principles apply equally well to dealing with other adults.)

They say: Don’t refuse to acknowledge someone’s feelings of anger, irritation, or reluctance; instead, name the feeling and articulate the other person’s point of view. This is much harder to do than it sounds, because the urge to correct a bad feeling is very strong: “you can’t be hungry,” “you love Tae Kwon Do,” “you always have fun at parties.”

But I gave it a shot. “You wish people would pay more attention to you? You’re feeling neglected?” She nodded.

“Come here,” I said, “let me give you a big hug.”

As simple as it was, that did the trick. And the nice thing about this approach was that not only did it work, I felt nice doing it, while that other kind of arguing puts me in a bad mood.

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