My kids are on vacation this week with their dad and his wife, which means this is my annual hardest/easiest week of the year.
Hardest because, even after four years, it feels unnatural and impossibly sad to send my kids on a family vacation that Iām not part of. Easiest because Iām temporarily responsible only for myself. I can see friends, get to the gym, work late, finish conversations and various other things I struggle to do when Iām parenting a 6- and a 10-year-old.
Iām melancholy and Iām blissful, often at the same time. There was a period of my life (most of it, to be honest) when this would have seemed a ridiculous contradiction: Which are you, happy or sad? Anxious or grateful? Make up your mind, woman!
Now, thanks to therapy and being 41 years old, I understand that you can experience all sorts of emotions at once. It doesnāt make you contradictory. It makes you human.
What if I could teach my kids to embrace this truth at an early age? What if I could help them feel just as comfortable with sadness and disappointment as they do with glee and joy?
So many of us say, āI just want my kids to be happy.ā I donāt just say it, in fact; I mean it. I do want them to be happy ā more than just about anything. But I want their happiness to be a byproduct of a life well lived, not an assignment that looms before them, taunting them if they donāt feel it at all times and in all places.
I ran all this by John Duffy, a Chicago-based clinical psychologist whose work I admire. Heās the author of āThe Available Parent: Expert Advice for Raising Successful, Resilient, and Connected Teens and Tweensā (Viva Editions), and he does weekly podcasts on WGN Plus that are always timely and wise.
āWeāve decided culturally that happiness is the goal,ā Duffy told me. āAnd that removes the permission to experience and embrace the full range of emotions. Real happiness only exists in contrast. You have to know something besides happiness in order to understand true happiness.ā
That strikes me as everything. If weāre constantly talking our kids out of their other feelings, or protecting them from having to experience them in the first place, how will they discover that all-important contrast?
āIt can be really anxiety-provoking to try to always be happy,ā said Duffy, who runs a private therapy practice. āI see it all the time. Kids say, āThey expect me to be happy all the time.ā Itās like perfectionism. It would be so much healthier for them to be able to say, āIām miserable. I intend to be happy again, but right now everything doesnāt feel OK.āā
But parents take miserable personally.
āThey think, āBut weāve provided you this beautiful life! You should be happy!ā ā Duffy said. āInstead of encouraging kids to name and manage their full range of emotions.ā
Ironically, he said, people who learn to experience and sit with other emotions ā anger, fear, sadness, frustration ā are usually the happiest and most successful.
āSuccessful people understand how they and others feel,ā he said. āTheyāll speak up in a meeting, āBob, are you hearing what you want to hear here?ā rather than waste an hour because they canāt read peopleās emotions. Theyāll talk about their feelings in a relationship instead of allowing themselves to become disconnected, and disconnection is toxic.ā
I asked Duffy how we can help our kids experience and accept their full range of emotions. If you pulled aside random parents, I doubt most of them would say, āI accept happiness and happiness alone. All other feelings are banned from our home.ā But do we subtly send our kids that message?
āThe first thing you want to do is hear your kids out,ā he said. āItās validating. āYeah, that does seem awful. Thatās a drag.ā ā
Donāt give the sense that youāre disappointed in them for feeling blue.
āThen you create a little collaboration,ā Duffy said. āI like to draw solutions out of the kids. Instead of, āYou should go ride your bike,ā create a sense of, āWeāre in this together.ā You could say, āSometimes you feel better after a bike ride. What do you think?ā Or maybe theyāll say, āIf I could just listen to music by myself for a while, I think Iāll feel better.ā ā
Then let them.
We also have to model this to our kids. That doesnāt mean turning to them with our every problem, but it does mean being authentic.
āWe assume kids are fragile about our own emotions,ā Duffy said, āso weāre not comfortable saying, āIām kind of sad today.ā ā
The anniversary of his fatherās death recently passed, he said, and he told his son he was having a hard day because of it.
āJust being able to say that gives your kid permission to do the same,ā he said. āThen you can talk about how youāre going to work out of it: go for a walk, go for a run, hang out with a friend.ā
We can also encourage our kids to recognize when they feel more than one thing at once.
āOftentimes Iāll ask a kid, āHow are you feeling?ā ā Duffy said. āThen Iāll ask, āWhat else are you feeling?ā ā
When little kids are in therapy, they use charts with cartoon faces to point to what theyāre feeling: angry, frustrated, scared, happy and so on.
āSometimes kids will point to four different faces,ā Duffy said. āAnd you can say, āTell me about each of these.ā ā
Even when theyāre not little ā even when thereās no face chart ā we can help them talk about each one.
āI think weāre an anxious nation because weāre not emotionally tuned-in,ā Duffy said. āI donāt think we spend enough time thinking about how weāre feeling, and it leads a lot of people to abuse drugs or alcohol or the internet or the people around them. Oftentimes thatās an artifact of people not understanding themselves, so they act out instead of considering, āHow do I feel right now?ā ā
And the answer doesnāt have to be happy.
āThereās no joy in being happy all the time,ā Duffy said. āThe range is the richness. If we miss that, weāre leading one-dimensional lives. Thatās what we want to teach our kids.ā
And ourselves.
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