Dr. Becky Kennedy: Why Making Your Kids Happy Is The Wrong Goal For Resilient Adults

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0:38Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:48Why is our job not to make our kids happy? Because when we focus on making our kids happy, we actually start to make them fearful and less tolerant of all of the other emotions that will inevitably be part of their life into adulthood and so when our kid says i make this up like um the only one in my class who can't read it's like the most painful moment as a parent oh i feel my kid's pain right and maybe let's just say it's true they really might be we have the urge to say everyone reads at their own pace or but you're amazing at soccer but you're so good at math I want to make them happy all that does for my kid is because during childhood kids are not just learning about a situation with a parent they're taking interactions and they're making generalizations not for one moment but patterns about what emotions are safe what emotions can I deal with?

1:53What can I tolerate? And what emotions, as soon as I feel them, do I need to like turn off right away? And so when a kid says, I'm the only one who can't read, the truth is when our kid is an adult, they probably won't say that, but they'll probably say, I'm the only one who, whatever it is, didn't get a job yet. I'm the only one of my friends who didn't buy their own house, right? Whatever it is, like we're always going to feel that way. And so when we make our kid happy, what we actually say to them is I am just as scared of this emotion you're feeling as you are. And so then what they don't want to deal with this emotion.

2:32I'm terrified. I want to run away from it. I want to do anything but this. And so what a kid's circuit is, I feel, let's say it's this, I feel less than, or it could be, I feel jealous. I feel sad. I feel disappointed. And what gets layered next to that in the circuit is my parents' fear, my parents' avoidance. Those things get put together. The irony is when you make happiness a goal of childhood, you actually set a kid up for an adulthood of anxiety because they have a range of emotions that they've encoded as wrong and fearful. And to me, anxiety actually isn't a feeling. It's the experience of wanting to run away from a feeling.

3:09And if avoiding it, yeah, it is. And you can't really run away from a feeling inside your body. That's what anxiety is. You're like, wait, this is not going to win. And so to me, the idea of we want to help kids become resilient, resilience over happiness and resilience comes from being able to tolerate and sit with the widest range of emotions, not constrict ourselves. I interviewed a brain surgeon on here who was also a neuroscientist, a PhD in neuroscience, but also had done a thousand brain surgeries. And I said, what's the number one skill you wish every human being can learn to be better humans?

3:42And he said, emotional regulation. like from doing a thousand brain surgeries and studying neuroscience the mind he was like emotional regulation will support us and being healthier happier human beings and it goes back to what you're saying which is learning how to navigate all of the emotions and be with them and feel uncomfortable and sad and know how to manage them not avoid run away be distracted by them right that's right because like when you know i always joke when i was in private practice i saw a lot of, you know, 20 year olds, 30 year olds, 40 year olds, and not one of them came to my practice saying, Dr.

4:18Becky, like I'm the best parents. And you know, those emotions, other people feel like jealous and sad and like those hard things. I, I got rid of them. My parents got rid of them. I've never felt them again. Like that's never, that obviously has never happened, but what happened over and over, even though no one said it, but their stories and behavior really exemplified it was I am now 23, I'm now 45, and I'm literally no better able to regulate frustration and disappointment and sadness than I was when I was a toddler. Wow. But the stakes are higher. Way higher as an adult. Way higher. So emotion regulation, that is the goal of childhood.

4:57I mean, that's the goal of adulthood too, by the way. Right? It's still the goal. We're all working on it.

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