How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  With a younger child, you can take as much time as you need to restore the privileges that are taken away after a major incident—for example, at our house, more than $200 in in-app purchases made when a child was given too-early access to the family account. You can talk about what happened, why the child was tempted, how he came to make the wrong decision, how he felt afterward, and how to keep it from happening again. You can talk about the restored trust at each step (the return of the screen privileges, access to the device without supervision, and eventually access to a new password).

  With an older child, you may have to restore privileges more quickly, so that you can once again assess whether that child will be ready to take care of herself in a college environment. The same conversations should happen, but in a shorter time frame, because both of you need to see that your child is capable of doing better before she heads out on her own.

  As for the external consequences—the real-world results of an arrest, or cheating, or a very large bill for some very virtual goods—Dr. Ginsburg says it’s a parent’s role to support a child through those consequences, to help her advocate for herself, to do all you can to mitigate any long-term or even permanent impact, but not to absorb them or find a way to make them go away.

  It’s likely you won’t feel very happy when your child makes what feels like a massive mistake. You’ll feel its weight on you; you will be disappointed in your child and for your child. It will be difficult to be happy even though your child is not. But you can return to the basics. You and your child and the rest of your family are safe and secure. You can, again, lift your gaze to the horizon and see the bigger picture. At some point, life lessons start coming from life itself.

  A mother in Delaware who says her daughter made more than one suicide attempt in her early teens (the result of depression and a neurological condition) describes how the experience changed her perspective on discipline. “You have to really think about what is important to fight about when you have somebody in that situation,” she says. For some children, the consequences the real world provides are more than enough to raise anxiety levels and can be overwhelming. When parents pile on, fragile kids can shut down. This mother chooses to focus on being supportive at home for both that child, her oldest, and a younger sibling. “They know,” she says, “‘If I didn’t do my homework I’m not going to get yelled at by Mom; I’m going to get a bad grade and that’s going to affect me.’ Their actions are up to them.”

  If you’re worried that your child is made overly anxious by the combination of parental and external pressure, you may need professional help to strike the right discipline balance—because no matter how off-balance things seem, lowering expectations to zero is almost never the right answer. Your message to your child—your future adult child—should always be “I know you can do this, and I will help you get to the point where you know it, too.”

  Rules for Parents

  For me, it often helps to have a go-to when I’m feeling challenged by a moment that seems to need a disciplinary reaction from me. I need a reminder or a mantra of sorts that I can pop up when I’m at a loss. Here are a few of the things I say to myself when I need to respond not react, impose a consequence, or repeat myself again and again.

  Don’t engage. My daughters would be the first to tell you that they’re an emotional pair. Even my sons can go in for the occasional rant. When there is a child stomping around my house, angry, frustrated, and letting it all out (often with a bonus “I hate you!” for good measure), I remind myself not to engage. You don’t have to go in there. That’s her mood, his problem, her time to vent. Sometimes there’s even a good reason for it. That doesn’t mean I have to join it.

  Don’t hold a grudge. This is really, really difficult for me. I can nurse a grievance for days, especially a real one, and who wouldn’t be angered by a child who has a tantrum after winning a hockey tournament? Or who ignores the request to take the Starbucks cup out of the car door, with the result that when the door is slammed, it spills everywhere, causing the car to smell of vanilla steamer for the next three months? Those things make me feel justifiably angry. It’s hard for me to remember that I have to be not just the grown-up, but the parent: the one who lets you make mistakes, loves you anyway, and doesn’t keep rubbing it in.

  Don’t yell . . . back. Sometimes I yell at my children. I am a yeller. I grew up in a house of yellers. If I walk in on a situation that seems to me to require yelling, if I get a note from a teacher that demands my fast and furious response, I will find you, and I will yell at you. I’m working on it—I’ve learned that yelling doesn’t make me happier, either. I haven’t quite reached the no-yelling-at-all stage of personal Zen. But this I can do: If you yell at me, I almost never yell back. If I am angry, and I yell, that tells you how serious things are. It gets children moving. But if a child is yelling, and I yell back, then that child just dragged me into her drama. That never makes me happy.

  Don’t second-guess. Once the heat of the moment has passed, it can be tempting to ease up on a longer punishment (like two weeks without a phone). This is a very bad idea. If you’re imposing a consequence, choose it carefully and stick with it. Holding firm the first few times means less begging later, and it’s easier on you, too. Decide what you want to do, then do it.

  Don’t push them away. This, too, is about not holding a grudge. If anything, once something has gone really wrong, you want to bring your child closer. This is hard. As much as we try not to take our children’s failures personally, we’re often angry and disappointed when they mess up. It’s natural not to want to be close to them for a while (and sometimes necessary when we need to cool off).

  But once we’ve put things back into perspective, it’s important to reconnect. Grounding has a big advantage beyond being painful—it gets the child home and under your wing. (Although at times, you find you’ve effectively grounded yourself, too.) One parent found at the end of her son’s junior year in high school that not only had he not done any of his math work for the entire semester, but that he was planning to try to smuggle marijuana back from a long-planned summer trip with a friend’s family. She canceled the trip, made him a place next to her desk, and had him work through the whole semester’s math, all summer long, right under her eye. Once they got past the first part, it changed their relationship, and the son credits it with turning him into someone capable of going to college.

  It’s okay to enjoy it. If you must punish your children, you might as well see the funny side of it, especially when they’re young. When I grounded one of my children for the first time, I regretted the things she was missing almost as much as she did. Three years later, when I grounded her younger brother, I was so able to squash those feelings that I called up a close friend, the mother of his best friend, and asked her to please invite my child for a sleepover to which he would not be allowed to come. “I want him to feel it,” I said. He did. And I did the same for her a few weeks later.

  Get working, side by side. After the smoke has died down, and things are on their way back to normal (or the modified normal that is your punishment), get that child and get to work. Tackle something. Prepare the garden. Clean out a section of the basement. Make brownies. Mend some metaphorical fences. This is not a punishment, but a way to dig back in and ground yourselves in the kind of work that puts us on the same team. Uniting your efforts toward a common goal can restore the balance in your family, and remind you and your child that you’re in this together. “Kids absolutely want to do the right thing,” says Dr. Ginsburg, as we wrap up our conversation. “They look to us to show them and tell them what’s safe and what’s right.” They want, and need, our guidance as well as our love and support, when things are going well and when things are going wrong. It’s all “discipline” and it can—it really can—make you all happier.

  eight

  FOOD, FUN, AND FAMILY TIME

  Cooking and eating are polarizing. Love to cook. Hate to
cook. Love to eat or not so much, for reasons of diet, personal history, and taste. Left to your own devices, you can indulge your own quirks, whether it’s eating the exact same basic meal every night or spending hours putting together a fresh version of Lobster Thermidor. But once children enter the picture, you have to feed them, too. It’s likely that you have a vision of what those meals “should” look like. Once “should” enters the picture, “fun” often exits.

  I fall into the “love to cook and eat” camp, but even for me, the constancy of the requirement that we nourish these four children of ours is overwhelming. It’s such an incredible amount of work, acquiring the food, preparing the food, serving the food, cleaning up after the meal. At a certain point, children become able to help, but we’re talking thousands of meals before that point. Really truly thousands. Thousands. I feel like I should throw in the dishtowel on this chapter right now, because how can that be fun?

  But of all the topics I’m covering in my quest to help all of us enjoy our family lives more, this is the one I feel most attached to—the one where I can honestly say, Okay, I got this. I don’t always love the process. I don’t always love the result. But cooking, eating, and sharing meals together are truly one of the ways I find joy in my family, and I want you to share that experience—in a way that works for you. Because this really matters. Like mornings, mealtime is family time. When it comes to getting everyone together all in one place with the same thing in mind, dinnertime is typically what we get.

  In dual-income families, most parents and school-age children spend more weekday hours outside the home than in it. Researchers who observed interactions in middle-class families found relatively few hours when all family members were likely to be home simultaneously. Not surprisingly, those were concentrated in the early mornings and the late afternoon and evening. When we are all home together, we’re most likely to congregate in the kitchen, and of all the things we do as a family, researchers find that we spend the most time eating together.

  In other words, if family meals aren’t happy, then your overall batting average for family happiness probably isn’t as high as you’d like. This is an area that’s ripe for change.

  I’m among those who think eating together is important—a human ritual that we shouldn’t sacrifice to outside pressures. Research has linked eating meals together (particularly dinner) to a host of benefits for children: stronger vocabularies, higher grades, a decreased likelihood of drug and alcohol use, and greater feelings of connection to family. In my own research, we found connections between eating meals together and parent satisfaction as well. Eating more meals as a family and considering everyone’s desires when choosing those meals were among the factors that went along with a greater sense of satisfaction with life.

  But even putting research aside, there is obvious enormous value for us as individual parents and children in the act of eating together, and every meal does not have to reflect some imaginary ideal. You and your partner may work different shifts, so that the whole family eats together only a few times a week. You might be dealing with food allergies, or living in your parents’ house and eating at their table, or have children who split their time between two households. Those things matter less than we think. Our children are absorbing powerful memories about who we are, how we eat, how we sit, how we talk to one another, about the food, our lives, the people and things around us—but not all at any one single meal. Eating together is cumulative; the rituals evolve gradually. When your children eat in other houses, they’ll compare those rituals and expectations. When their friends come to your house, you’ll see little clues to how they expect a meal to go in how they act and respond to your meal. Family meals reflect family values. They show us not who we want to be, but who we are.

  So, to sum up, family meals are great! Yay eating together!

  It’s still a lot of work.

  What Goes Wrong

  Ask people to name the one thing they like least about parenting, and meals rarely come up. Let them choose their top three, though, and there it is: “snacks and meals,” “my toddler throwing food back at me,” and “What, you want dinner again? We just had dinner last night.”

  The trouble with family meals is twofold. First off, we worry about what our kids are eating—whether it’s good for them, good for the planet, sustainable for everyone, generating a lot of waste, helping them form a healthy lifetime relationship with food—you know the drill. We look around and we worry that what we’re doing isn’t good enough, and the fact that there’s a billion-dollar industry dedicated to persuading your children (and you) to eat more of exactly the foods most of us would rather limit is just one of the things that can make meals a source of worry rather than a daily pleasure.

  Second, we worry about the mechanics: buying the food, paying for it, storing it, preparing it, cleaning up after it, and all the rest. Women, in particular, feel pressure to prepare meals that meet external standards like “healthy” and “homemade” within an often-limited budget of both money and time, and can be disappointed when those meals aren’t met with enthusiasm by children and partners.

  That burden becomes even heavier for parents who don’t feel competent in the kitchen. Americans spend more at restaurants than we do on groceries, and while it’s hard to get a good number on how many of us feel like we don’t know how to cook (survey answers range from 7 percent to 28 percent), it’s hard to feel good about what we eat if we feel as though we have no ability to make it ourselves.

  Then there’s the built-in irony: the easier it is to get the food on the table, the less satisfied we tend to be with whether it meets our standards of how we want to feed our families. Convenience can be cheap, or it can be healthy, but it is almost never both. That means our two problems with food—what our families are eating, and how hard it is to get it on the table—are often in conflict. Improving both isn’t easy, but it can be done.

  How can you do what’s best for you to get happier when it comes to food and family? By focusing on our bigger goals: happily enjoying healthy meals together, sharing good times around food, and taking pleasure in the experience and the company. How we achieve those things can differ among families and even within our own family depending on circumstances. I wouldn’t cook different things for different people at the same meal; you might not let your child eat “chicken-french-fries” twice a day every day for a week on vacation (I have). But we can both be happier about making the choices that work for our family, even if those choices are different. For most Western parents, there is nothing wrong with our lives around food. If you can afford enough to eat, a table to eat it around, and a roof to eat under, finding the rest of what makes you and your family happy is just gravy.

  If food is a medical issue at your house—if, for example, someone in the family struggles with an eating disorder—please remember that no one expects you to feel “happy” about that. Some of these strategies may help to bring more joy to something that’s difficult, but still a big part of your daily family routine, while some just might not fit where you are now. In any area where we’re on a rocky uphill path and it seems as if everyone else is rolling gently down a grassy slope, it’s important to go easy on our expectations. Try to picture what your meals would look like if things were going well around your table, with your limits, rather than looking to some imaginary ideal. Build goals around that reality. It’s almost always possible to get a little happier. But to do that, we need to look at where we are, make a choice to make things better, and then consider the mechanics: how our family plans and prepares meals, and how we eat them.

  The Right Attitude for Change

  The first step toward happier family meals is to really want happier family meals. If you see the whole thing as just a chore, you’re writing off something wonderful and consigning what constitutes the bulk of time your family will spend together into the “have to” bin. The dinner hours are when we nourish our
families in every sense of the word. “For me—like most people—it’s sometimes the only time all day I have a meaningful conversation with my kids,” says Jenny Rosenstrach, a popular food blogger and the author of Dinner: A Love Story. “We always say that the table is a safe place and I think it really has become that.” Dinner in the Rosenstrach family is a priority, and as a result, they know that most nights, they’ll have that time together.

  But maybe all that pressure just makes you feel more anxious. For some of us, it isn’t that we need to invest more in dinner or those evening hours. Instead, we might need to care less about achieving some personal standard of perfection at every meal. You don’t have to get it right every time. No one single dinner makes a family. It’s the accumulation of all that time together, in the kitchen, at the table, eating whatever it is you’re eating. That time should be a source of peace and solace, and even joy, no matter what’s on the plate or the conversational menu. “I don’t mean to suggest that every night in our house we are having emotional epiphanies over the meatloaf,” says Rosenstrach. It’s just dinner, but with a family of individuals all going in different directions, she loves having an established time when they all expect to be together. Grilled cheese while quarreling over who gets the last sandwich half is still family time. It’s so easy to let the perfect get in the way of the good when, really, it’s enough that you’re all there at all.