Happiness myth traps parents

[EmptyTimCup]

HICKS: Happiness myth traps parents

By Marybeth Hicks | Wednesday, June 3, 2009



There's a parenting proverb that says, "Prepare not the path for the child, but prepare the child for the path." I can't find the source of it, though I once had a lovely decorative tile with this phrase that I kept in my kitchen until my son broke it. At the time he apparently was on a path of destruction.

There's a lot of wisdom in that phrase, but in our culture, it seems we parents spend a good part of our time trying to smooth out the bumps in the road for our children, rather than help them develop their own sets of internal shock absorbers. Our fixation on our children's happiness has created a perverse and unnatural reality. We're raising up a generation that expects life to always be fair and predictable; and also not too painful and not too difficult.

So entrenched are today's children in the habitual comforts of their parent's largess that the media created a narrative around the question, "How to say 'no' to kids in this difficult economy?" It's hard to say which generation ought to be more insulted by such a suggestion - our youth, who apparently are so coddled that we don't expect they'll understand the notion of family sacrifice, or their parents, who are such wimps they don't even know how to utter a simple phrase such as, "Sorry, kid, money's tight."

I think the culprit is something I call "the happiness myth." It's the belief on the part of parents that the principal job of parenting is to make our children happy. This is our cultural standard, as if happiness is a worthwhile measure of success and that maintaining a constant state of happiness will assure a continued constant state of happiness. All our focus on raising happy children robs them of the ability to be content and the skills to find intrinsic joy in life, no matter their circumstances.