Happiness Means Accepting “This, Too, Will Pass”

Thumbs up from a child experiencing happiness

Newspapers and social media today place so much emphasis on making our children happy that it’s probably setting us up to fail as parents. Life isn’t like that! Happiness isn't like that.

And worse, we can also sink into our own pit of despair if we, too, have swallowed the lie that happiness means no sadness, no fear, no anxiety.

But surely that can’t be so. We need contrasts to construct our reality.

For instance, from an early age we learn to distinguish one thing from another in lots of ways, not just by the word we give it. Of course, we do learn a blackbird is not a robin and we can then report which is on the Christmas card! But that’s the word association.

But what about the dog that scares us witless as it approaches, compared to a friend’s dog we know is silly-soft? The way we view the dog in relation to ourselves is also a differentiator. Without the scary experience, we don't know a safe one.

We simply can’t know one thing from another without having a point of comparison – whether by word or feeling.

So it seems an outstandingly good idea to let our children learn from an early age that life is not always 

  • wonderful, 
  • fun, 
  • cool, 
  • pretty, 
  • gratifying, 
  • loving and 
  • kind to us.

That's not the ingredient list for happiness!

So what can we do about this “life must be happy” ideology?

How can we teach our children the true meaning of happiness?

From my experience of working with children in therapy, two things spring to mind, and they both seem super important. So let’s look at them in turn – in relation to happiness.

1 Accepting all emotions as "good" – because they’re messengers bringing a message. 

The idea here is that we don’t kill the bad emotions! Instead, we accept them alongside the good ones and re-phrase them as messengers. Messengers are our useful friends. They help us decipher what's going on.

This is crucial for your child to learn, because happiness is much bigger than whether we’re feeling good or bad, angry or sad. And if we ourselves grasp this, we can pay it forward to our children.

How does this help with happiness? 

Rephrasing the emotion as a messenger in this way means you can:

  • “Read” the message the messenger brought (name the emotion!). 
  • Work out what it means (what might have caused it in the context it came in). 
  • Take action as a response rather than simply acting out the feeling, which is often damaging to the child or to others. 

It’s a bit like receiving a text, understanding what it’s saying, and typing in a reply! 

And it's the reply that matters. Your child can decide what to do "in reply" to the message in the feeling – that's empowering. And certainly alters the situation. 

And if you like the feeling (happy, proud etc), well, your reply is about how to make it happen more often! What's not to like. As I said, teach them not to shoot the messenger. Messengers are friends.

Want a good, fun way of exploring this idea? I’ve suggested a great balloon game you can play with your child or children, or even with another family when the children are together. You can find it here. (It will open in another tab so you can experiment later!)

2 Learning that feelings pass in time – so look outward while you wait.

This second idea follows from the first. Messages about feelings are things that come and go. You can even explain this fact by showing them a quick scroll on your WhatsApp screen – but only quickly, so your messages stay private!

In the same way that text messages arrive and then get buried, feelings arrive and disappear. They don’t hang around. They change millions of times a day. 

And your child’s happiness doesn’t depend on them.

You can try demonstrating this to your child by helping them go through the main events of their day before bed:

  • Remind them what they did from one hour to the next.
  • Ask them which feeling they had at that time.

It’s almost always a parade of different feelings!

Note, the trick here is to help them see that “not so nice” feelings disappeared too. The good did. The bad did. They don’t hang around. Your child could still have been happy overall.

How does this help with happiness?

You can remind them regularly to look outward from themselves at something or someone else while – or until – the feeling passes.

It’s become rather trendy to take a “me, me, me” approach to life – and we’re all a little bit guilty, aren't we! How so? 

  • Posting everything great that happens to us to our favourite social media?? 
  • Being annoyed a shop has run out of our favourite something or other? 
  • Righteous indignation our flight was cancelled?? 

Whatever. It’s not a criticism, but a comment on what’s happening in the world. But we can model for our children

  • an attitude of “this too will pass” and
  • a way of looking outward to think of or help someone else in the meantime.

...so they realise their own feelings can pass and they can turn their attention to something else while that happens. (Distraction is a good way of changing feelings anyway!)

In this way, they'll manage anxiety, difficult feelings and set-backs far better.

Where does that leave our happiness narrative?

The happiness narrative is not a minute-by-minute story but a huge overall arc about real life in general. A story arc your child needs to grasp and learn to deal with if they’re to be truly happy.

So – if we can model to them that… 

  • we all have emotions,
  • they’re just messengers about something that’s happening,
  • we can learn from the message,
  • the emotions always pass in time, and
  • it’s possible to look outwards while the feeling morphs and shimmies into something different...

...we’ll have helped our kids to understand the true nature of happiness. It's higher and wider than everyday feelings. And, above all, something they can choose to do something about by their attitude. Give it a go?

TAKEAWAY>>>>>

  • Life isn't always about being happy all the time, and that's okay.
  • We should teach our kids that all feelings are helpful messages, even the not-so-nice ones.
  • Kids can learn to manage their emotions better by understanding the message and responding in positive ways.
  • Feelings come and go, so it's essential for children to focus on other things while waiting for them to change.
  • True happiness is about understanding life's ups and downs and choosing how to respond positively to them.

And one other thing…

Just after I wrote this blog post, I came across Beth Tyson’s piece, written at New Year 2022, about being authentic with our children about what life is really like and not denying the bad feelings. It’s a lovely read, including her own steps to redefine happiness for children. Synchronicity or what?

Screenshot of Beth Tyson's blog header on happiness for children in 2022