In puzzling over this recent and vaunted “happiness” thing, I think it must be so alien an idea to me, whether in relation to my own life or to that of children in my care or under my influence, because I have given it almost no thought over my long life. Purpose, meaning, service – those I have fallen into and have come to value through association with others who live their lives that way with little comment on it as well as through my own personal experience of an almost accidental choice of a life’s work. But happiness??? Am I happy? Seems so. I love my husband. I love my family. I love my work. I love my confounding struggles. I love my life. The byproduct of all that seems to be “happiness.”

The following are short bits from an article on bringing up children to become unhappy adults.

Why the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods. A therapist and mother reports.

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-land-your-kid-in-therapy/308555/1/

“Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. “But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”

“Observing this phenomenon, my colleagues and I began to wonder: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?”

“Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA who came to speak at my clinic, says the answer may be yes. Based on what he sees in his practice, Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.”
“Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop ‘psychological immunity.’”
“Kindlon also observed that because we tend to have fewer kids than past generations of parents did, each becomes more precious. So we demand more from them—more companionship, more achievement, more happiness. Which is where the line between selflessness (making our kids happy) and selfishness (making ourselves happy) becomes especially thin.”

“In her practice, Mogel meets many parents who let kids off the hook for even basic, simple chores so they can spend more time on homework. Are these parents being too lenient (letting the chores slide), or too hard-core (teaching that good grades are more important than being a responsible family member)? ”

“But, she (Twenge) says, what starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of oneself—a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.”

“A kid will say, ‘Can we get ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me tomorrow, because the answer is no!’”

“Barry Schwartz, at Swarthmore, believes that well-meaning parents give their kids so much choice on a daily basis that the children become not just entitled, but paralyzed.”

“What does this have to do with parenting? Kids feel safer and less anxious with fewer choices, Schwartz says; fewer options help them to commit to some things and let go of others, a skill they’ll need later in life.”

“But Barry Schwartz’s research shows that too much choice makes people more likely to feel depressed and out of control.”

“In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting go.”

“As Wendy Mogel likes to say, ‘Our children are not our masterpieces.’”