The Pica Perspective

Do You Want Your Children to Be Happy?

TypePad, the company that hosts this blog, poses a question of the day. Today's is: What do you most want for your family's future? The number-one answer so far: happiness.

Naturally, you're thinking, But of course! I mean, who wouldn't want happiness? When it comes to our children, that simply has to be our first and foremost priority.

Doesn't it?

Not according to two authors/psychologists whom I've interviewed for Body, Mind and Child.

Aaron Cooper, co-author of I Just Want My Kids to Be Happy: Why You Shouldn't Say It, Why You Shouldn't Think It, What You Should Embrace Instead, contends that while millions of parents have pledged happiness for their children, kids are less happy than ever -- more worried, anxious, and depressed. Here are excerpts from the book:

We're not happiness-bashers. We're not opposed to living lives of contentment and well-being. There's no denying that happiness is a good thing; research and our intuition attest to that. But something troubling has resulted from the way contemporary families have put into practice the eternal desire to see their children thrive. And therein lies the dilemma: how to pursue a worthy goal without going awry....I just want them to be happy has become the leading obstacle in our children's way, impeding their stride toward that grand destination, and bringing about instead the very outcomes loving parents hope to avoid.

I just want them to be happy leads well-intentioned mothers and fathers astray in their child-rearing practices, ultimately undermining the ability of young people to face the challenges of life with balance, resilience, and imagination....it produces materially and emotionally indulged kids, ill-equipped to cope in a world that turns no somersaults for any one person's happiness.

Dr. Cooper, in his book and in his BAM interview, "8 Ways to Raise a Truly Happy Child,"argues that such ingredients as gratitude, optimism, a life of meaning, and acts of loving kindness are the basis of authentically happy lives.

Rick Weissbourd, author of The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development, whose interview I conducted on Monday, has similar thoughts. He believes that parents' intense focus on their children's happiness is turning many children into self-involved, fragile conformists. From his book:

Some parents...are so bent on promoting happiness that they are failing to help their chldren develop a basic capacity to tune in to others....Many of us, despite our good intentions, in subtle ways put too much emphasis on our children's happiness and too little on their responsibility for others. Many of us slip into habits in the name of promoting happiness -- such as regularly monitoring and seeking to adjust our children's mood, organizing our lives too much around our children, and praising them too frequently -- that are likely to make children not only less moral but, ironically, less happy.

Dr. Weissbourd makes the case that our primary focus as adults should be not on children's happiness but on their maturity, including their ability to manage destructive impulses and to appreciate and take responsibility for others -- qualities that are at the heart of morality and lasting well-being.

What will you answer the next time someone asks what you want most for your child?

Obesity Update

How is it possible, with everything that has been written and broadcast about the problem of obesity, that the situation has actually gotten worse instead of better?

A new report released last week by the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that both adults and children continue to get heavier, with increases in obesity rates in 16 states for the second year in a row. In not one single state did the obesity rate go down. Adult obesity went up in 23 states, with Missippi leading the pack for the fifth year in a row. Their adult obesity rate is 32.5 percent. Colorado ranks lowest at 18.9 percent. Southern states actually account for eight out of the top 10 states ranked highest for adult obesity.

In 30 states, the percentage of overweight or obese children is at or above 30 percent. Mississippi takes the prize here as well, with 44.4 percent of children ages 10 to 17 either overweight or obese! Utah and Minnesota tied for the bottom spot, with 23.1 percent.

The report is titled "F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America 2009." Key report recommendations for addressing obesity within health reform include:

• Ensuring every adult and child has access to coverage for preventive medical services, including nutrition and obesity counseling and screening for obesity-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes;
• Increasing the number of programs available in communities, schools, and childcare settings that help make nutritious foods more affordable and accessible and provide safe and healthy places for people to engage in physical activity; and
• Reducing Medicare expenditures by promoting proven programs that improve nutrition and increase physical activity among adults ages 55 to 64.

The report also calls for a National Strategy to Combat Obesity that would define roles and responsibilities for federal, state and local governments and promote collaboration among businesses, communities, schools and families. It would seek to advance policies that

• Provide healthy foods and beverages to students at schools;
• Increase the availability of affordable healthy foods in all communities;
• Increase the frequency, intensity, and duration of physical activity at school;
• Improve access to safe and healthy places to live, work, learn, and play;
• Limit screen time; and
• Encourage employers to provide workplace wellness programs.

To read more about the report, click here.

 

Alliance for Childhood Update

Last month, in partnership with the Forum for Education and Democracy, the Alliance for Childhood put on a briefing for Congressional staff members on the need to defend and restore play in kindergarten and preschool. The story was broadcast the next morning on Washington's NPR station.

Alliance partner Deborah Meier, who won a MacArthur Award for her creation of effective schools in East Harlem, spoke at the briefing about the importance of play-based learning in early education. In her blog on the Forum's web site, Meier called the evidence on the loss of kindergarten play "frightening" and wrote:

Can we literally have gone that far? We need some studies to see how reversible this is, and how it impacts children in later life. What we know now, thanks to the Alliance for Childhood, is that boys start out at even a greater disadvantage, are far more likely to be expelled and punished for inappropriate behavior, and that black boys will suffer -- once again -- the most. But that's the tip of the iceberg -- at heart it is influencing the intellectual achievement of all children.

In early June, in partnership with KaBoom!, the Washington D.C.-based play advocacy and playground building organization, the Alliance for Childhood produced a live one-hour "webinar" on the kindergarten report, Crisis in the Kindergarten, with an accompanying slide show that can be downloaded and used by educators and play advocates all over the country. You'll find a link on the Alliance home page. The report is also available in its entirety, along with an 8-page summary and other supporting documents.

Free-Range Kids

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Lenore Skenazy for Body, Mind and Child. Lenore was dubbed "America's Worst Mom" after letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway by himself. The stir she caused prompted her to start the free-range kids movement ("dedicated to fighting the other big movement of our time: helicopter parenting") and to write a book called Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. That book is what I want to tell you about today because it's absolutely fabulous!

Here are some of my favorite parts:

The title of Chapter one is "Know When to Worry -- Play Dates and Axe Murderers: How to Tell the Difference."

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Times have not changed. Especially not where childhood abductions are concerned. Those crimes are so very rare that the rates do not go up or down by much in any given year. Throw in the fact that now almost everyone is carrying a cell phone and can immediately call the police if they see a kid climbing into a van filled with balloons, a clown, and automatic weapons, and times are, if anything, safer.

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In his book The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner explains that once an image gets into that "reptilian" part of the brain, not only can you not shake it, you also can't extricate it from all the other images and feelings jostling around in there, either. After all, it's only been the last hundred years or so that the brain has started seeing realistic-looking images (TV, movies) that weren't directly applicable to its fate (lions, spears). So it hasn't figured out yet how to separate the real from the manufactured. Especially whatever's manufactured by Jerry Bruckheimer.

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The statistics cited by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children itself show that the number of children abducted and killed by strangers holds pretty steady over the years -- about 1 in 1.5 million. Put another way, the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infinitesimally small: .00007. Put yet another, even better way, by British author Warwick Cairns, who wrote the book How to Live Dangerously: if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen?

About seven hundred and fifty thousand years.

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This excerpt, from the chapter on avoiding experts, had me laughing 'til the tears rolled down my face:

The Potty Training Answer Book asks many of the questions you may or may not have been wondering about, including, "What books and videos should I choose for my child's potty library?"

Her what?

You know -- a how-to library filled with picture books like I Want my Potty, It's Potty Time, and even, I kid you not, What to Expect When You Use the Potty. (Thankfully, not for pregnant women.) The Potty Training Answer Book lists a full twenty books you might want to get your child about the issue.

And six videos.

Is your child studying for an advanced degree in Potty Studies? Has she been invited to present the "Scatalogical Preschooler" lecture at Oxford? I got through a college course on twentieth-century Russian history with less reading. But the Answer Book then suggests some "favorite potty training resources." Because twenty books and six videos are just not enough.

If you're tired of living in fear -- or want to convince yourself that you're not crazy for letting your child play unattended in your backyard -- read this book! And watch for Lenore's interview to go live on BAM Radio!