The Pitfalls of Trying to Make Children Happy

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The speaker highlights the negative consequences of parents trying too hard to make their children happy and stresses the value of giving children the tools and resilience to handle life's challenges. The chapter emphasizes the role of parents in helping their children become responsible for their own happiness.

A parent is only as happy as their unhappiest child, goes the expression. And even if that wasn’t true, even if it didn’t directly impact our own happiness, would any of us want our children to be unhappy? Of course not. We love them so much. The last thing we want is for them to feel pain.

We want their lives to be wonderful. We want them to have fun. We want them to have a great life. We want them to be happy!

There’s nothing wrong with this…except that oftentimes trying to make someone happy is a recipe for failure. “Happiness is not my ultimate goal for my own kids,” Dr. Becky Kennedy writes in her amazing book Good Inside (which we continue to rave about). “Unhappiness certainly isn’t my goal for them, but here’s a deep irony in parenting: the more we emphasize our children’s happiness and ‘feeling better,’ the more we set them up for an adulthood of anxiety.”