Ep 69: Happier Parenting

KJ Dell’Antonia, author of How to Be a Happier Parent, joins Andy for a look at how to get happier while parenting. It’s time for parents to stop thinking about their kids so much and get back to what makes them happy!

Full show notes

Remember the days when you’d lose your mind over kids drawing on the walls or refusing to eat the dinner you prepared for them? You might still experience the same headache with your teenager. But you put up with it because parenting is about loving your children, no matter what wild rides they put you through! However, parents so often put themselves before their children, but they can unintentionally neglect their own happiness.

I don’t think parents should have to sacrifice their own happiness in order to be a successful parent and raise good kids. I think there’s a trick to simple happy parenting, and the best way to uncover it is to talk to the pros.

In order to figure out the tricks to happy parenting, I called up KJ Dell’Antonia. KJ has been a parenting expert for the better part of a decade, and she has a wealth of knowledge about happy parenting. KJ is an accomplished author, having written first for Slate and then the New York Times. She hosts a parenting podcast with Jessica Lahey, and she is also about to publish her first novel!

In addition to her personal career, KJ is an accomplished parent. She has raised four kids, and much of her parenting experience has fed her career as a writer. Her most recent book on parenting, How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute of It, is an awesome resource that I myself love. This week, KJ helps me investigate methods to happier parenting.

The Situation

It’s a hectic Sunday afternoon. You’ve been running around all weekend, going from activity to activity. Two of your teens have soccer tournaments, and both are inconveniently located on opposite sides of town. If either one goes to overtime, you’ll be late to your third teen’s spring musical at the high school theater. You’re exhausted, and you still need to figure out dinner.

In the attempt to keep up with all of your teen’s activities, you hardly had a moment to catch your breath. In these moments of exhaustion, it can be so easy to feel discouraged when facing the world. But what strategies can you use to achieve simple happy parenting?

While she was editor for the New York Times, she wanted to share a piece on simple happy parenting. She decided to come up with a list of solutions that would make her feel happier as a parent. However, she quickly realized that she did not have enough time in the day to invest in “happy parenting” methods and needed to pivot her approach.

Instead of adding new activities to boost happiness like yoga, 2-hour runs, or hot stone massages, she needed to be taking stuff off her plate. Parenting is crazy enough, so reducing her hectic schedule is what helped KJ unlock the trick to happy parenting.

The key to happy parenting is finding ways to make parenting less stressful.

This proves to be a beneficial strategy, and sparked inspiration for How to Be a Happier Parent.

The “Ground Rule” Solution

KJ decided that the easiest way to make parenting less stressful was to create ground rules for certain parts of family life. This made expectations clear for everyone, and in turn reduced the general chaos of family life. One solution KJ created was a set of five ground rules for dinner because she found it difficult to make a meal without one of her children complaining. Here’s one in action:

Rule #1:

At KJ’s table, everyone in her family has to accept everything on their plate. Before this rule, it was relatively common for one of her children to reject the food presented to them outright. In response, KJ said that everyone had to accept the food that is given to them. Whether or not everyone likes the food is up to them, but her teens can’t ask for a whole ‘nother meal to be made especially for them. Implementing this rule was great, KJ says, because it helped reduce her stress at the end of long days.

As she implemented this strategy of creating simple ground rules, KJ quickly found that this strategy wouldn’t work in every situation.

Another example she mentioned to me was getting dirty dishes in the dishwasher. One of her daughters would put her dishes in the dishwasher every time, and never needed a parent to stand over her shoulder to make sure things got in place.

Contrarily, KJ’s other daughter would chronically forget that the dishwasher ever existed. She would leave dirty dishes around all the time, and rarely get them in the dishwasher unless KJ was on her case about it.

In situations like these, KJ told me that sometimes there is nothing you can do to create happy parenting.

Ultimately, the trick for parents is that they need to be resilient about asking teens to complete tasks. It is a great help when they are done correctly, and these skills are things they will remember for the rest of their lives. Some teens will have no problem following rules, but others might need to be reminded on a daily basis. It might take a year of moving your kid’s dirty dishes to their bedroom for them to actually remember to clean them on their own!

But, don’t give up hope. You can’t expect teens to be perfect because progress doesn’t happen overnight. However, with the right guidance, the “ground rule” solution will help good behaviors become muscle memory to them.

Over-Involvement

Another strategy for simple happy parenting that KJ mentions is to avoid getting over-involved with your kids’ lives. Surprisingly, over-involvement is a common issue among fathers who fixate on their teenagers’ performance in sports. It is easy for these parents to get carried away with their teens’ lives because they want to be supportive and helpful, but it can be harmful for both the parent and the teen. Unfortunately, over-involvement in cheering for your teen has negative side-effects.

One downside to over-involvement is that parents can lose sight of themselves. If parents lose sight of themselves, they might also lose sight of happy parenting. It is important that parents make sacrifices for their kids, but not to the extent that they are constantly unhappy or unable to focus on themselves.

When you lose focus on yourself, your happiness can become dependent on what you are focusing on. If a father is constantly focused on his teen’s high school batting average, the teen might think Dad’s happiness is based on athletic performance. On one hand, it puts extra pressure on the teenager. On the other, basing a father-son relationship on something as insignificant as a high school batting average is unhealthy for everyone. It doesn’t make sense for a father (or anyone) to be happy only when their son is having a good day on the field. Teenagers should not be expected to bear the brunt of someone else’s happiness!

Parents can avoid over-involvement by looking at the bigger picture. By focusing on the bigger picture of what your teen loves to do, you can support them in a positive manner without becoming too attached to what they are doing. If your teen h...