Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist specializing in parenting, managing anxiety, and building resilience. If you want to learn how to better manage meltdowns, manage stress and anxiety, or improve your child’s emotional regulation, you can purchase her courses which will teach you how to do exactly that through a connection-based, practical approach. Or check out check out her video to help you get started.

I  hear this over and over: “I just want my kid to be happy!” or “Don’t you just want your kids to be happy?” And yet… I would not say that my goal is to make my kids happy. To be clear, it is not to make them unhappy either.  

When we make happiness our goal, we start to see our kids’ distressing feelings as a problem to fix – rather than emotions to tolerate.  And then what happens is we actually pass on our own anxiety to our kids – when we are not able to sit with our kids’ difficult feelings, they learn that these feelings must be bad or threatening, and then they too start seeing distress as something to avoid, rather than something they should learn to manage.  

There is a big irony here: the more we help our kids learn to cope with distress, the less “space” those feelings end up taking up; this is what allows for the natural emergence of happiness, from a place of feeling at home with oneself, not from a place of avoiding hard things at all costs. 

The hard truth: we cannot help our kids develop patterns that we are not actively working on ourselves. If you want to feel stronger in the face of challenges and want more coping skills to manage through difficult times, follow this link to preview my Managing Stress and Anxiety Workshop.