Dr. Becky Doesn’t Think the Goal of Parenting Is to Make Your Kid Happy⁠↗

Well, our kids live in a world of immediate gratification. The internet, the iPads, the ease of everything. Because there are so many ways right now to get around frustration, you have to be mindful to raise kids who learn how to tolerate it. But what would cultivate happiness? The work, the intention, the frustration, the failure. That used to be the pathway to happiness. Maybe we’re spending more time with our kids, but the ease of things makes it harder to build pathways that lead to longer-term happiness.

The more we focus on becoming happy, the less tolerance we have for distress and the more we search to feel any other way than how we’re feeling — which is the experience of anxiety.

Bulimia, addiction, these are all struggles with emotion regulation. They’re all different ways of saying, “I can’t be in my body.”

There are so many things capturing our attention that it’s hard to have attention on yourself. How hard is it to sit and breathe for five minutes? How hard is it to not be on your phone? There are so many things that are orienting us away from ourselves, and that’s the emptiness that we’re all grappling with.

Whenever any of us pictures a sturdy leader in our life, it’s someone who has beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and is willing to name them. That person is willing to say: “I’m feeling anxious right now. I’m feeling worried. This is what’s going on for me.” That allows them to show up as parents and to stay grounded even when their kids are not.

We’ve often been presented models of parenting in which it’s all about the kid’s feelings, and you feel depleted.

People say to me, “How do I not have an entitled kid?” But entitlement, what does that mean? It’s the entitlement to not feel frustrated. Because when a kid is like, “You didn’t get me a first-class ticket,” it’s not that they expect “first class” so much as they feel that they shouldn’t have to be frustrated. It’s so easy to look at kids like that and think, What a [expletive] kid. But I would take the other side: That kid must be having a terrifying experience in their body to feel something that they’ve learned they should never feel. Using money to always avoid disappointment can lead to that. This is not, like, Families with money, poor you. But those parents almost have to think, Where is frustration built into my kid’s life? So that when those frustrating moments come, the kid’s body says, “Oh, this is part of living; I know how to do this” instead of, “This should not be happening; I have no skills to deal with it.” Which is actually very sad.

What I can say is, our kids are the most unique human beings. There has never been anyone like them.