Happier Parents, Happier Kids Pt 2: Letting Children Try and Fail

If you've listened to part one of this two part parenting episode, which you really should, you'll know that Julie is pretty evangelical about the harms of overparenting, but she also gets just how easy it is to do. Laurie, I get it a little bit too well. Okay, I'm this former dean at Stanford seeing a generation of overparented kids. Air quotes young adults in college who realized, to my great shame, and I don't use that word lightly that Oh no, I'm doing it to my own kids too.

Julie had observed the same disturbing patterns and her students at Stanford as I did in my own community at Yale. She saw an entire generation that was suffering from imprecedented levels of depression and anxiety, twenty some things who struggled in the face of seemingly simple setbacks like a single bad test grade. These were young people who seemed more dependent on their parents than any previous generation she'd worked with. Julie worried a lot about the parenting styles that had

caused this profound decrease in student resilience. She even gave an address to the parents of the new Stanford students when welcoming their incoming freshman class, explaining the adventure their children were embarking on and reminding them that it was probably a good idea to back off and just let their kids be. Julie was a warrior against overparenting. Well maybe then I come home, after seven years of railing against overparenting, rooting for my students, I sit down at

dinner one night. We're having chicken. I'm seated next to Sawyer. I lean over his plate and begin cutting his chicken. And that was when I was like, oh shit, I'm doing it. I'm one of those parents. I'm currently laughing at the college level. I'm doing the same equivalent thing with my ten year old, and this overparenting wasn't confined to the dinner table. Julie's two kids also never did any chores or took on their share of household responsibilities.

They rarely traveled alone and were carefully chauffeured to all their activities. They even received constant praise and attention. So I've been trying to undo this patterning with my own kids since I discovered I was complicit in the problem. In our first episode on this subject, we explored where some of these problematic parenting strategies came from, all the cultural and structural forces this seemed to have profoundly affected

child wearing over the last few decades. We discovered that it is possible to learn new techniques for raising happier and more resilient kids, ones that can make moms and dads less anxious too. We talk to science writer Michaelan Duclef about a set of healthier parenting strategies summed up by her acronym TEAM, which stands for Togetherness, Encouragement, autonomy

and Minimal Intervention. We covered the first two letters, T and E, learning how parents can do more things together with their kids and how they can use more evidence based forms of encouragement So in this episode we'll tackle the A and M autonomy and minimal intervention, and we'll see that what kids really need from their parents is a lot more autonomy and a lot less intervention, the exact opposite of what many anxious moms and dads think

is the root to raising happy, successful children. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. Life teaches humans how to live unless a parent is effectively living your life for you.

All parents want their children to live a good life, but Julie worries that, rather than guiding kids down life's road, many parents forcibly take the wheel for far too long. They wind up influencing their sons and daughters' choices and denying them autonomy, the superimportant psychological sense that one has agency over what one does in the world. Now, of course, it makes sense not to give your kids all that

much autonomy early in life. I mean, infants and toddlers simply can't make choices or express preferences, so parents do need to be calling all the shots when children are really, really little. But Julie has observed that some parents never put their kids in the driver's seat. It's sort of like, even though they've chronologically grown, they're still in the car seat,

being driven through their life by you. Many parents also hinder their children it's autonomy by listing the activities they think their children should and shouldn't be spending their time on. Growing structural inequality means moms and dads worry about their children's future prospects. They feel incredible pressure to ensure their children make the right choices and have every advantage they can the best grades, the right enrichment activities, and as

many accolades as possible. After all, a caring mom or dad might say, that's the only path to getting my child into the kind of college that will ensure a decent salary and good opportunities later in life. But the anxiety and worry parents feel often means forcing students into incredibly busy schedules that kids themselves wouldn't choose. And advance my activities that they might not even enjoy. I call these cages of enrichment. There is no longer a downtime

in childhood. They are stacked to the hilt with activities, all designed to enrich them, all designed to demonstrate to a college admission dean I am worthy. Many parents also have strong opinions about the specific activities that are and are not worthy uses of their children's time. But what counts is worthy is all too often determined not by what a child enjoys, but by what mom or dad believes will help them win that race against their peers.

It's a tendency that Julie fell prey to herself when her daughter Avery was in preschool. I'm picking her up one day and the teacher's trying to point out that my daughter has made some stunning watercolors. Avery had a real artistic side, said the teacher. She was a fantastic budding painter. We rarely see this degree of artistic maturity in a four year old. And I'm like trying to act like I care, But Lorie, I didn't care because

it was art. So I'm smiling and nodding and performing the part of the proud parent, But inside I was thinking, it's just art. It's not relevant, it's not going to get her in to Stanford. But it's not just that parents are tempted to decide which activities their children should pursue. Moms and dads can also be a bit too willing to step in and intervene in the things they do

deem worthy, sometimes in ways that impede kids learning. Rather than engaging in minimal intervention, they instead opt for what we might call maximal intervention, tying their shoes too alarm like me, cutting their meat too long, bathing them too long, holding their hands literally too long. You might think this is the kind of thing that's confined to kindergarten or

elementary school, but it's not. In my role as ahead of college at Yale, eyewitness parents coming to campus to do their adult child's laundry, stepping in during a mild roommate dispute, dictating what students major in, heavily editing essays and problem sets, and even calling their phones each morning just to make absolutely sure their adult offspring woke up in time for class. Why because they never set the expectation in elementary school that the child would wake up

to an alarm. The parent was always effectively the kid's alarm clock, So they can't stop now that they aren't Yale. Some ancious parents even take on the role of high end concierge's, continue only stepping in to smooth out any sticky situation. Oh they forgot their backpack, I better bring it. Oh they forgot their sporting equipment, I better bring it. We deprive them of the learning because we're they're rescuing.

The urge to intervene means that we sometimes forget that we need to allow children to learn from their own mistakes. Of course, you want to bring that backpack, But what is it you really want? You want your child to

be successful? Well, how are they going to be successful by overtime learning from having experienced the consequence of forgetting, They're more likely to remember it the next day, whereas if you bring it today, they're more likely to forget it again because now there's a system of you always bring it. So why do so many parents deprive their children of these important learning opportunities, from cutting their meat to remembering their forgotten lunchbox to serving as their child's

college alarm clock. Well, let's establish it's a habit that seems to work. When you tie your child's shoes every morning, it gets done correctly and fast enough for everyone to get out the door on time, and with parents feeling more time pressed than ever, that is indeed a real benefit, at least in the show term. When you cut your child's meat, it's cut neatly, it's in the right sized chunks.

They don't harm their little hands. When you overhelp with their homework, and let's not mince words, parents are overhelping, rewriting essays, doing the math outright, doing the science projects. Do you get the right grade? You're rewarded for this overparenting. Maximal intervention has also begun to seem like the child rearing norm, and when everyone else is doing it, it can feel like, well, I'm neglecting my child because I expect them to go to the corner store without me

at twelve. But Julie's research has shown that limiting your child's autonomy through maximal intervention has a number of pretty major downsides. The first is a reduction in parental well being. It is incredibly stressful to be micromanaging someone else's life. You're effectively leading the life of your child on top of your own life, and if you have more than one child, you are paying attention to the situations, trajectories, and outcomes of so many people. It is wearing you thin. Happiness.

Researchers talk about what's known as the parenting paradox. Most parents report that their children are hands down the most meaningful part of their lives, but when researchers look at moment to moment happiness, it often tanks as soon as a person has their first child. Some studies have even found the American parents are depressed at twice the rate

of the general population, twice the rate. When the worries that come from all this meat cutting and shoe tying and chauffeuring are added to the normal anxieties of life, it's a recipe for overwhelming stress. No wonder we're all withering, and it's not just moms and dads who suffer when parental stress goes through the roof. We're also setting a bad example for our kids. We're supposed to model that adults have amazing lives. We have hobbies and the interests,

we gather with other adults. We laugh, we do things that children don't do. I long to be an adult because it looked like fun. Nowadays adulthood looks like misery, and misery has a way of trickling down through a family because the research shows that kids pick up on parental angst. They see the worry in our faces about what's happening with them. This is helping to fuel this anxiety crisis. Now I get that all this sounds pretty bleak.

Out of genuine love and concern. Parents may be inadvertently stymying their children, hindering their ability to grow into happy, successful and independent adults. But science does offer hope for another way, one that can make parents themselves happier, and one will explore when the happiness lad returns in a moment. Back in the nineteen sixties, psychologist Marty Seligman ran an experiment that changed the way scientists think about optimism and resilience.

Like many researchers back in the days of so called behaviorism, Seligman was interested in whether animals could learn new behaviors to avoid a painful stimulus. In a famous study, one that might now be considered kind of mean, he tested how three groups of dogs would react to mild electric shocks. Seligman's first set of dogs could easily turn off the electricity simply by pushing a button. These dogs quickly figured out how to use the button to shut off the punishment.

The second group of dogs got the same shocks, but had no way to stop them. They had a button to press, but it didn't work. They just had to stand there and take the pain. The final group of dogs was the luckiest. They got no shocks at all. Seligman was interested in whether a dog's past experience controlling shocks affected how quickly it learned to avoid punishment in a new situation, so he placed all the dogs inside

a metal crate. The floor on the left side of this crate was electrified and yet again delivered mild shocks, but the right part of the crate was totally safe. It didn't deliver shocks at all. Seligman placed each dog on the electrified floor to see how long it took them to move away from the shocks, and what did he find. Well, the dogs who'd use the button to churn off the shocks figured out the new solution pretty quickly.

They were used to taking action to avoid pain. The dogs who'd never had any experience with shocks also escaped straight away, But the dogs who hadn't been allowed to escape the shocks showed a very different pattern of performance. They did nothing. They never figured out there was a super easy way to escape. Their lack of autonomy in the original task seems to have taught them that there was probably nothing they could do, so why bother trying.

Seligman later ran a version of this study with people and found pretty much the same pattern. When we don't have control over a bad situation, we start assuming that we never will. We develop what Seligman famously christened learned helplessness. When we get evidence that our actions don't matter, we become passive and depressed. Seligman argued for the importance of what he called contingency. Our mental health relies on seeing evidence that our actions do something and that we can

control the important outcomes around us. But we don't just care about contingency when it comes to bad things like electric shocks. One of Seligman's recent books, Authentic Happiness, asked what might happen when people get praise or rewards without putting in any work or effort. His answer was that it might also lead to a sense of depression, passivity, and hopelessness made a minute. I am not the actor in my life. Things happen, results come even if I

do nothing. Educator Julie lifth got Hims, who overparented her own kids back in the day, now thinks that so much intervention might be breaking the link between effort and reward in the minds of our kids. And somehow the psyche seems to know that's not satisfying. I don't want to just be helped and handled. I don't want the little pelletive love to come my way if I didn't

work for it. We get this sense of well, it doesn't really matter what I do, because stuff's going to happen to me regardless, and it might even be good stuff. But I didn't do it. I know this is a tough message for many parents to hear, since they're literally exhausting themselves to make their children's lives as good as possible, making huge sacrifices. We think, Oh, I've handled it, I've made it happen. I got my kid into this, I

reminded of this, I brought them this III. While your kid becomes an inanimate actor in their own lives, you have deprived them of living a life and that will catch up to them in the form of a profound unwellness. But with Sellingman right, does maximal intervention really result in children who feel more passive and try less hard. I think I had this idea that I was going to be an Olympic gold medalist, which is totally not something we should be planning in kid's heads. This is my

friend in colleague, Julia Leonard. Julia is now a professor of psychology at Yale, but as a kid, she'd hope to become an elite athlete, a champion Olympian in her chosen sport of ice skating. That is, until grown ups around her warned her that she'd never reach that pinnacle. So I was told basically that I didn't have the right body, I was too tall, and I wasn't going to make it. If Olympic medals were out of the question, did it make sense They asked to continue in the

sport at all. And as a kid it turned out like I actually was having fun, but I thought I should be getting medals, and so when I was told like, no, this isn't going to work out, I decided to change course. And do something where I could be successful at it. Julia looks back on her decision to quit with regret.

One of the things that I've really enjoyed doing as an adult is trying things where I have no prior expectations of how I'll do, because I find that I'm much more persistent if I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to be good or bad, and it doesn't really matter. It's just for the enjoyment of it. These days, Julia is really excited about one new sport, in particular, rock climbing. I just immediately caught onto the community aspect

of it, the problem solving aspect of it. We climbing requires the constant challenge of deciding whether or not to give up. It requires what psychologists call persistence. There's always some point in a climb where you're not totally sure you can make it to the next grip, and you're attempted to tell your belayer to get you off the wall right now. But then you can kind of have

a conversation with yourself. It's like, but maybe I can do it, and might as well just try, Like, are you going to keep going or are you gonna be like, take me down, I'm done with this climb, and so I find that to be pretty exciting and very meta. With my research, Julia studies persistence and what causes children to keep going when the going gets tough. Her experiments involved giving little kids puzzle boxes that they don't realize or impossible to open. She then measures how long those

toddlers spend pushing to find a solution. And one of the biggest challenges I ran into when I was doing these studies is I was giving kids impossible tasks in front of their parents, and I was excluding a lot of participants because the parents jumped in. Parents are just like, oh my god, my kid can't figure it out, and so they interfere and they try to figure it out

for their kid. Losing lots of data because anxious parents kept stepping in was annoying, but it did of Julia an idea for a new research question, why are parents doing this and what is the effect. Julia brought families into the lab and ask parents to fill out a survey on how their child typically tackles a challenging question. Does your son or daughter keep going until they've been successful? Do they give up quickly? When they run into difficulty

and so on. Julia then gave the kids a challenging woodblock puzzle, and the instructions for the parents was just see how many of these puzzles your kids can do. The family was left alone for five minutes while Julia observed their actions on video. Her results were pretty shocking. The parents who said their children didn't show great persistence on the survey were the same parents who interfered most in the puzzle task, either by placing the pieces themselves

or telling their child to quit. But obviously that's a correlation. We wanted to know if there was actually a causal a fact of this, and so Julia devised an experiment. One group of children did the same block puzzles, but had an adult repeatedly take over. The second group of kids was allowed to work without intervention. Both sets of children were then given a new puzzle game, one that involved a small box with lots of levers that looked

easy to open but was in reality impossible. And then all we want to see is how long they persist And the real question was if an adult had just stepped in and did something for you two times in a row on a puzzle. What are you thinking about this task? If you were a child who had not been allowed to complete a puzzle alone, you might be doubting your abilities to solve the new one, or you might conclude that someone's probably going to step in to

help you. And this is exactly what Julia found. The kids who experienced maximal intervention gave up far more quickly than the ones who got to try to figure out the puzzle on their own, Just as Marty Seligmann had expected, parental intervention maybe changing children's beliefs about their capabilities, maximal intervention maybe having a bigger psychological and motivational cost than

we realize. We think that that solves the problem and we're actually doing something that's really helpful, but in reality we're potentially hurting their motivation. Now both Julia and I realize that there are some times in which parents have no choice but to intervene, like when the school bus is turning the corner on your street and you just got to get out the door. So sometimes you really are in a rush, and those shoes need to be tied,

so you really need to take over there. We also get how tempting it is to step in even when the clock's not ticking. Julia recently had a chance to head back out onto the ice to tutor a colleague's daughter, Clara, who never skated before, and I was like, Okay, I'm gonna move your skates like this, I'm gonna teach you how to do it. I'm gonna hold you the whole time. Seeing Clara's struggling, Julia just couldn't help herself because you just go into this like primal state of like this

is what the kid needs to succeed. Julia had inadvertently entered maximal intervention mode. I was like, oh, I'm doing the thing that we found is bad. So Julia backed off, letting Clara try things on her own. The girl fell a few times, but she also had the autonomy in space needed to figure it out on her own. And what really made Clara the happiest was when we step back, she figured out her own complete different way to skate.

It was not actually like correct skating, but she was able to do by herself, and she lit up and she was so excited. So what are the everyday practical strategies parents can use to strike a healthier balance between nudging our kids towards success and allowing them their autonomy. We'll run through these tips when the Happiness Lab returns from the break. Look nobody wants to fail. I failed great. Nobody says that it's not that you want to be

like I want to constantly fail. You want to be like I am good with things going wrong, because then I will learn from them and get stronger. Author and educator Julie lithgot Him says that if parents really want to raise happier and more resilient kids, than they need to play the long game. We need to know they're capable. Not that you did everything for them, but that you raised someone who got increasingly capable at doing for themselves. And the first step in long term parenting is something

that should be a relief for moms and dads. As the saying goes, parents need to put their own oxygen masks on first before worrying about their kids. Our mental health is suffering. Parents are experiencing way more pressure and anxiety and guilt than ever, often because they're worried about not being the best mom or dad they can be. But studies show that we parent less effectively and intervene

more often when we are feeling threatened or overwhelmed. So if you want to try to make better parenting decisions, then start taking care of your own mental health. Trying to engage a little self compassion is a good foundation. Remind yourself that parenting is hard, that even the expert struggle, and that beating yourself up doesn't really help. You can also put that oxygen mask on by reducing your own anxiety. Start by telling yourself that it's normal to worry that

your child might struggle or fail. Sometimes all parents fear this, but you'll also feel better and parent better if you can work to regulate those worries. Some simple tips were doing that include taking a deep breath, which can literally switch off your body's fight or flight response to fear. Or you could try engaging in a practice known as radical acceptance and which you remind yourself that worry is a part of life and that you're committed to noticing

and accepting it rather than acting on it. So if you can remember this sort of parent for the long haul thing in the moment, maybe that'll help you regulate your own emotion. Julie also recommends concentrating on preparation and practice rather than performance. It's what clinical psychologists Robin Kosluidz has called valuing the process rather than the product. Instead of worrying about whether your child wins a particular trophy or gets a great test grade, you should instead make

sure they're using a process that actually prompts learning. We're supposed to be instilling skills in these young so that they can be strong and guess what survived when we're dead and gone. You need to know they can exercise good judgment when you aren't there, and that means making sure kids learn more daily life skills. So tag your kids in for more duties around the house, helping with cooking, taking out the garbage, caring for pets, or younger siblings

doing the laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and so on. Once are they found that parents today give kids twenty five percent less housework than they did back in the nineteen eighties, then we wonder why they can't do anything. And after they've raked some leaves or folded some bedsheets, there's something

else very important they should experience. Julie thinks that today's kids are deprived not of nutrition or love or academic opportunities, but if something just as relevant for their future success failure. The way we get to excellence, to achievement is through some trial and error, or trying and failing or falling, fumbling, floundering, flewing, effing up. I call them life's beautiful efforts. They are

our greatest teachers. But letting these effort teachers do their work requires that parents do something that's admittedly really, really hard. We need to let bad things happen to our kids. Parenting experts Michael Anderson and Tim Johansson drew up a helpful list of things that all kids need to experience.

It includes things like brace yourself not being invited to a birthday party, finding out that your friends did something fun without you, working really hard on a paper or test and still getting a crappy grade, being picked last in a sporting event, and even being made fun of by another kid. Letting your kids suffer through painful events like these might make you wins, but Julie argues that they're valuable learning experiences. We get better at coping by

having coped. If your son or daughter hasn't explicitly asked for your help, let them be the ones to navigate conflict during playtime. Or discuss a bad grade with a teacher, and resist the urge to step in to fix all of their mistakes. Don't drive out of your way to deliver a forgotten pair of sports shoes or a lunchbox. Rescuing them might feel good in the short term, but it will rob them of a precious opportunity for learning. Let life teach them the lesson, because that's how they'll

remember it. Yale psychologist Julia Leonard, who was told that she should drop the sport she loved since she wasn't Olympic material, argues we need a new approach to helping the children we care about. She thinks parents need to

become what she calls a warm demander. So it's kind of like setting high expectations and letting your kid try a lot of difficult, challenging things and setting that expectation that you believe that they can do those things and that's something that you value, but also being there when they need help. A warm demander creates space and time for kids to figure out their own solutions without putting them under intense pressure. So basically like creating more times

where they can fail and the stakes are lower. I think is probably best for both the kid and honestly the parent, so that they don't feel s pressure to take over. And if you still struggle to resist that powerful urge to intervene, then counter twenty slowly in your head, giving your child time to figure things out on their own before you step in, or just do something to distract yourself. I don't know, put some dishes away, clean up, and wait for them to ask for help if they

need help. Otherwise, just let them kind of go for it and try to figure it out. If it's taking a really long time, maybe you might want to ask if they need to hint and offer a strategy. Phrase is like I wonder what would happen if can preserve a child's autonomy while also edging them closer to a solution. Educator Julie Liffe got Himes suggests an even more profound

shift and how we think about parenting. We need to set aside the aspirations we have for our children and in brace how they want to live their own lives. It's a strategy, she calls parenting the kid You've got. Let us take this interest in who our kids are instead of who we wished they would be. When we dreamed we might have a child one day. As a dean at Stanford, Julie saw the pain that parents can inadvertently cause when they fail to see their children's real preferences.

If you've made them be a doctor when they don't want to be, they will feel however successful air quotes they are as a doctor, they will feel like a drone in their own life, right, like someone else is directing where they go and what they do. And it may look amazing, but that inside person is going like I didn't want this. And then they're in therapy getting over why you basically force them down a path that

they never wanted. Julie remembers advising one of her Stanford undergraduates, in particular, a twenty year old, highly accomplished four point oh student. The woman had come to Julie's office in distress because her parents were forcing her to become a premit when she wanted to work with rescue animals. And she is trying not to cry as she tells me the story of how they have planned her entire life. And I'm trying to unpack. But who are you really? What would you do if it was just up to you?

And that was when I got it. I'm looking at a grown up version of Avery, Julie's young daughter, Avery a budding painter, something Julie didn't think was a useful skill on a college application. As she sat across from that dejected Stanford student being pushed into premet against her will, Julie couldn't help but think of Avery and God. I knew that my child would say, well, I was good

at art, but my parents wouldn't take it serious. And that day I began to be a better parent to Avery, who is now twenty and majoring in cultural anthropology and dance. I pivoted and I saw my child for who she was, and I started saying, you know what, She's an artist. She draws and paints, and this is who she Isn't how dare I dan paper my child down to look

the way I want her to. It was like I was given a gift by the universe to see the child you've got and love them for who they are and help them become better at being that person instead of going to some profession I have deemed is the one. My God, if anyone listening to this resonates and you know you are failing to see your child here. My tears These many years later, I only regret that I didn't pivot sooner, or that I ever was that way.

The good news, as Julia has seen, is that with the right strategies, every parent listening right now can pivot. We can commit to taking care of our own mental health first, which the science shows will naturally lead to fewer interventions and more autonomy for our children. We can regulate our anxiety and expectations so that our kids can pave their own paths, and in doing so, we can achieve all the benefits that science shows come with being

a warm demander. We can start to feel less anxious and stressed and overwhelmed, and we can ensure that the young people we love so much develop resilience and much more happiness. They are not pets or bondside trees. They are wild flowers. We've got to give them light and water and love and let them be who they will become. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Joseph Fridman checked our facts.

Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle Heather Fame, John Schnars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserved, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by

Pushkin Industries and Nate Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts,