Harvard and Yale experts suggest 3 tips to raise happy kids

Parents go through a lot to raise the kids the society wants, and the family desires. At the same time, parents also struggle a lot to make their kids emotionally healthy. The need to raise happy kids is being emphasized currently, the reason being happy kids grow up to be successful. These kids are believed to see the best in everything and hence it motivates them to stay positive always. A recent report by CNBC quotes two happiness researchers: Laurie Santos, a psychology professor and an instructor at Yale University, and Arthur Brooks, a Harvard University professor, who have talked about the 3 tips on raising happy kids.

Laurie Santos says that getting upset, sad, or anxious is a difficult concept for adults to understand and it is way more difficult for kids to interpret. The Yale University Professor says that parents need to make their kids understand that negative emotions are okay and there is nothing bad in feeling so. It is unfortunate that many kids experience the negativity of life earlier than others, but that should not distract them from staying happy. Parents should teach their kids that having negative emotions like sadness, anxiety, and frustration is temporary and will go away.

In their attempt to prepare kids for the future ahead, parents over-prepare kids by introducing them to adversities. Arthur Brooks advises to not teach kids to fear the world. "The world is full of negative headlines — but if you try to prepare your kids for every worst-case scenario, you run the risk of scaring them. That won't keep them safe, and it'll make them anxious and less likely to succeed," CNBC quoted Brooks. "Prepare children for specific problems they're likely to encounter and be realistic about the level of danger. You can teach kids to never accept rides home from strangers without making them fearful of all new people in every situation," he suggests.

Brooks suggests that while overpreparing kids for the worst does not help, sugarcoating the adversities for them does not help much either. Talking about his daughter's pessimism, in The Atlantic, Brooks wrote: She told us about the gloom and doom each evening at dinner, and my wife and I could see her growing pessimism. So we set about deliberately countering the scary narrative. We didn’t sugarcoat the threats; we simply tried to be specific about the kind of behaviors we witnessed, and ways that the world was safer and more prosperous today than in the past. It was our way of sharing our genuine belief that on the whole, most people are good and things are getting better.

Both experts agree on the importance of happiness within families. They explain this in a simple way: If you are anxious about your kid's performance all the time, your kid will automatically incorporate the anxiety and start worrying about his/ her performance. These experts advise adults to regulate their emotions when it comes to their kids. The conclusion is likely, that happiness prevails within the family and how elders respond to a situation is how kids interpret happiness.