Aditya Banerjee's Library tagged happiness → View Popular, Search in Google

Dec

2011

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy - Magazine - The Atlantic

Pretty interesting article on the pursuit of happiness - maybe we aren't designed to feel happy all the time.
“Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.”
“Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing. But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”

www.theatlantic.com/...8555

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psychology happiness parenting

Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy
Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing
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- But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaste
- 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.”
- When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance.
- In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.
- Kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems. And they’re right—they don’t.
- parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment
- The irony is that measures of self-esteem are poor predictors of how content a person will be, especially if the self-esteem comes from constant accommodation and praise rather than earned accomplishment. According to Jean Twenge, research shows that much better predictors of life fulfillment and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing—qualities that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day.
- “Research shows that people get more satisfaction from working hard at one thing, and that those who always need to have choices and keep their options open get left behind,” Schwartz told me. “I’m not saying don’t let your kid try out various interests or activities. I’m saying give them choices, but within reason. Most parents tell kids, ‘You can do anything you want, you can quit any time, you can try this other thing if you’re not 100 percent satisfied with the other.’ It’s no wonder they live their lives that way as adults, too.”
- underlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. 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.

Apr

2010

Extreme Commuting

Is it really worth spending a couple of hours or more a day just travelling to work & back?

www.businessweek.com/...b3921127.htm

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Aditya Banerjee's Library tagged happiness → View Popular, Search in Google

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy - Magazine - The Atlantic

Extreme Commuting

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Top Contributors

Groups interested in happiness

Psychology: The Science Of Human Nature

Brain Hacking

Accelerated Family Learning - Friends of Campaign4 Learning

self-improve,happiness life

Health

Wealth - route to Happiness