If you're a parent, you probably want your children to be happy. But that's easier said than done, especially when advice from parenting experts feels counterintuitive — like avoiding the urge to always cheer them up when they're feeling down.
Happiness researchers like Laurie Santos and Arthur Brooks can help. They're two of the field's most prominent voices: Santos is a psychology professor and the instructor behind Yale University's most popular course, and Brooks is a Harvard University professor who runs the school's Leadership and Happiness Laboratory.
Their research particularly matters right now, when it comes to kids. Depression and anxiety are among the biggest concerns parents have for their children amid a youth mental health crisis, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of U.S. parents.
Compared to their peers, happy kids are also more likely to grow up to become successful adults with better overall work performance and improved social relationships, research shows.
Here's some of the best advice Brooks and Santos have shared for parents on how to raise happier children:
Teach kids that negative emotions are normal and not permanent
"Sometimes, we're just going to be upset or sad or anxious or frustrated or whatever it is. And that kind of thing is normal," Santos said on her podcast, "The Happiness Lab," earlier this year, adding: "This is a hard concept for adults to get. But it can be especially hard for children."
Parents often rush to cheer their children up — telling a joke or offering a bribe, like a cookie or a new toy. But a temporary solution doesn't address the bad mood's source, and it avoids teaching your child an important lesson: Negative emotions are normal and will eventually pass.
Children need to learn how to manage their feelings to build resilience, child psychologists say. That means parents need to help them understand not to be ashamed of feelings like anger, sadness, or anxiety.
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Try using an easy-to-grasp analogy, like the weather's sunny and rainy days, Santos suggested.
"We can teach kids that sometimes, your emotional weather is like it is in San Diego, where it's — in theory — sunny all the time," she said. "And sometimes your emotional weather is kind of like where I grew up in the northeast, where it's snowy or rainy."
Just like the weather, it's normal for emotions to change over time, Santos added: "It cannot be sunny everyday when it comes to your emotional health."
Don't teach children 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, says Brooks.
Children who see the world as dangerous and threatening "are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed and less satisfied with their lives," Brooks wrote in a column for The Atlantic last year, citing a 2021 psychology study. "They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts."
His solution: 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.
Brooks and his wife worked to counter their daughter's "growing pessimism" by sharing specific, factual positive insights about the world, he noted.
"We didn't sugarcoat the threats; we simply tried to be specific about the kind behaviors we witnessed, and ways that the world was safer and more prosperous today than in the past," Brooks wrote. "It was our way of sharing our genuine belief that on the whole, most people are good and things are getting better."
Try to be a positive influence, because happiness is contagious
Brooks and Santos agree on a key point about happiness: It's contagious. When you're joyful, your kids can become joyful simply by being around you.
"The No. 1 issue that I see in family dynamics is a social contagion of negativity," Brooks told the Harvard Business Review earlier this month. "That's what each one of us has to turn around, is to try to inject the happiness virus into our family and to basically do it on purpose."
That's true of all emotions, research shows, and a good reason for parents to mirror the healthy behavior they hope to see in their children. "For better or for worse, parents have an enormous effect on their kids' set of emotions and their kids' level of anxiety," Santos told U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy's "House Calls" podcast last year.
If you feel anxious about your kids' grades or social relationships, your children will incorporate that anxiety into their own lives, said Santos. Regulating your anxiety and "practicing a little bit of self-compassion" — even taking time off work to relieve some of the pressure in your own life — can be "really helpful," she added.
"If you can start reframing [your mindset], as adults with your fully formed frontal lobes and all your emotion-regulation skills and data that you have, if you can work on that, that's going to be a huge help to your kids," said Santos.
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