Moms Talk: Is it Wrong to Make Our Kids Happy?

It seems like there is no shortage of studies looking for correlations between happiness and parenthood, and most of them seem to reach grim conclusions: Being a parent does not make people happy. Two years ago, a researcher from the University of York in Great Britain reviewed many of the studies on the matter and found that parents were less satisfied with their lives in general, their marriages and their state of mental well-being than non-parents, as reported by The New York Times’ Motherlode blog.

Now, a story in the July/August edition of The Atlantic looks not at how happy our kids make us, but how unhappy we are making our kids by trying to make sure they are happy. Is your head spinning yet?  

The writer is therapist Lori Gottlieb, who started seeing a parade of 20-somethings on her couch whose chief complaint in life was that they had nothing to complain about. Their parents had done an excellent job raising them, were considered their best friends, and had basically done everything in the nurturing, protective manner that we generally consider the right way. The young adults felt guilty for seeking counseling—many times on their parents’ dime—when life had treated them well and they hadn’t faced much, if any, adversity.

Gottlieb writes that these stories of woe from the children of decent parents went against all she had learned in grad school, leading her to wonder, “Was it possible these parents had done too much?... Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?”

The experts Gottlieb consults in her story suggest that we need to let our kids feel discomfort, pain and sadness in small ways now so they are equipped to tackle bigger problems as teens, young adults and as parents themselves one day.

In an age when parents are more obsessed than ever with their children’s happiness, I think letting your kids feel pain or adversity of any kind is a tough sell. I agree in theory, but it’s difficult not to want to shield your kids from misfortune, from a scraped knee to something much bigger than a boo-boo.