The title of this blog is something that has been on my mind recently. The idea of wanting our kids to be happy seems fairly simple on the surface. We want good things for our kids, and it is hard to watch them get hurt or or get their hearts broken. Part of what is so difficult about parenting is that we have to balance their needs and wants as children against what will prepare them the most for adulthood. As complicated as this balancing act already is, an added complication is that we all have different values and ideas of what is important to prepare these future adults. However, we’re not done with complications yet because happiness is an emotion, and our emotions are what we experience in a moment. After the moment has passed, so does the emotion.

Perhaps what we’re looking for is fulfillment. Viktor Frankl has suggested that a life with meaning is what makes a person psychologically healthy, so it stands to reason that fulfillment is a better term to use than happiness. Only* ⅓ of Americans report that they are happy…as far as how this relates to fulfillment, I don’t know, but there is definitely a tendency to lump one’s overall happiness in with money, things, and fleeting experiences. The problem with this is that research on overall happiness and fulfillment have found that income level has no impact on this, and chasing a series of experiences can feel hollow in the long run. Maybe it would help to realize that **full-time happiness isn’t possible. Kids will be mad, sad, scared, worried, etc, and all of these emotions are normal and meant to be felt.

A nicely written article from the Parents website** encourages 5 ways to help teach our kids to be fulfilled:

Foster connections: In short, be there for your kids. Build strong connections with them by being involved in their lives.
Model what happiness means to you: Actively do what makes you happy and model good self care for dealing with stress.
Practice gratitude: There is a lot of research that shows practicing gratitude helps us feel better because we learn to focus our attention on the good in our lives instead of just overlooking it. Asking kids what they are happy about or grateful for each day can help them gain this focus.
Don’t try to make them happy: Weird, right? This refers to not fulfilling their every wish and desire and fixing all of their problems. Believe it or not, you’re not actually responsible for their happiness. You can help provide opportunities and connections, and they will have to learn to be happy throughout their lives.
Allow for failures and successes: They shouldn’t be guaranteed success with everything they do. That isn’t realistic. Instead, they should have opportunities to gain new skills and find success through effort.

Kids also need a sense of belonging* in order to build happiness and fulfillment. This is harder than ever due to technology. Research has suggested that using social media as a supplement to real-life connections is very helpful for boosting them. However, for many, digital connections are replacing real-life connections, and it is a weak substitute. Kids need opportunities for connections without screens, regardless of whether they resist this or not.

If we keep our long-term goal on helping our kids find fulfillment and meaning in their lives, we can allow ourselves to be less concerned with their momentary happiness. In fact, if a kid was constantly happy and never encountered any challenges, they would be ridiculously unprepared for adult life. It can hurt parents’ hearts to watch their child experience heartbreak, rejection, and pain. We can and should provide comfort and love during these times, but our job as parents isn’t to prevent them from experiencing the pain of the world. Our job is to help support them so that they are able to learn to endure it.

*https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/school-and-family-matters/201803/how-raise-happy-kids

**https://www.parents.com/toddlers-preschoolers/development/fear/raising-happy-children/

Recently, I gave a presentation to a small group of staff at a school district about educating kids who are considered, “at risk.” I wanted to share some of the information that we discussed on this blog platform as well. One of the key pieces of information I tried to emphasize is a concept that a wonderful special education teacher used to repeat over and over again: “All behavior is communication.” When we understand that behavior is communication we open ourselves to the idea that something is lying beneath the surface-level emotions, have a chance to be proactive instead of reactive, and can stop taking behaviors so personal. I think we can all understand this concept by reflecting on the last time that we were truly angry because beneath the surface of that anger was probably another emotion, like hurt, fear, or sadness.

Some typical reasons for “misbehavior” in kids are often found in a child’s past or in their attachment history. The first thing I’d like to share is a little bit of information about trauma. I define trauma as experiencing something that one was not prepared to handle…perhaps something that they couldn’t possibly be prepared to handle. There was a study on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) in the mid 1990’s consisting of responses from over 17,000 people, and it looked at the link between ACEs and poor health outcomes. Examples of ACEs are any type of abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, and families in which there is substance abuse, mental health problems, divorce, or incarceration prior to the age of 18. Results from an updated ACE study in 2016* show that roughly 2/3 of people report at least 1 ACE. People with more ACEs tend to have significantly higher levels of health problems from obesity, to cancer, to heart disease or depression. I’ve added a webpage** at the bottom so that anyone can check their own ACE score.

ACEs are examples of traumas. When people have experienced traumas, the experiences can continue to live on in the body. This is discussed in a previous blog on triggering. Our brains function in a way that allows our limbic area (the emotional center) to take over in times of high stress. This is because the higher thinking parts of the brain, while capable of complex thought and reasoning, move too slowly to save our lives. Limbic thinking is more like reacting with the focus on surviving the next 15 seconds of life. People who have been through trauma are much more easily triggered into this region of the brain, and it is hard to make good decisions with a part of the brain that is only capable of thinking about the next 15 seconds. In other words, kids with trauma histories are easily dysregulated, and while they are in this state, they can’t reasonably be expected to make good choices.

The next area I’d like to bring up is about attachment. We start to form attachment to our primary caregivers immediately upon birth. When parents play with their babies, make faces at them, and also make sure that the baby is fed and changed regularly, the baby receives the message that he or she is safe. Children with a safe and secure home base learn that they can take some risks and adventure out into a scary world because there is a soft place to land when something negative happens. Insecure attachment most commonly looks like anxious attachment and avoidant attachment. Individuals with anxious attachment desperately want and seek out connections and relationships, but they’ve also learned that relationships are unsafe or unpredictable, so when they start to get the connections they are seeking they have a tendency to push them away. People with avoidant attachment styles tend to have learned that it isn’t safe to get close to someone, so they come across as cold, uncaring, and as the name implies, avoiding interactions. Here’s the thing, though, these people aren’t robots. They feel everything that they aren’t showing. In fact, medical instruments can show the distress they are feeling on the inside, even while they aren’t showing it on the outside.

I bring these up in the context of background information about behavior because when we think about behavior as communication, it all starts to make sense. I don’t believe that any kid wakes up and decides to be a jerk to people. Everything that I have learned in my career suggests that behavior patterns make sense in the context of the purpose they serve. For instance, maybe a teen is irritable toward people and it is assumed that he is just rude. However, if we look at his past and find out that there was a major health problem at birth that resulted in multiple hospital stays over multiple months, we might reason that this interfered with his ability to attach to his parents.Then we can start to understand that he had to learn behaviors that helped him survive. He was unable to be predictably comforted and soothed in infancy, so he may not have ever been able to learn to fully trust. Is this his fault? Absolutely not. Is this his parents’ fault? Of course not; they and the doctors were trying to ensure his survival. He’s also not a lost cause. This teen has needed, and will continue to need, adults who are caring and consistent. He will need people in his life that show him time and time again that they can be trusted. He will probably test these bonds over and over, and it may take many years, but he can discover that it is safe to attach to others throughout his life and trust them.

In conclusion, I’d like to encourage 2 new ways of thinking in regard to behavior. First of all, the next time that you want to call a child’s behavior “attention seeking,” reframe it as “connection seeking,” and see if you think any differently about them. Second, the next time you are feeling frustrated with a child, ask yourself, “What can I do in this moment to improve my connection with them?” We can’t expect the kid to do all the work. If we want to see change in children, we adults have to be willing to make some changes in our approach.

*https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html

**https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/