Happiness Habits for Children

Creating habits can help us move toward any goal, whether it’s building muscles at the gym or learning how to calm and center. The power of habit is immeasurable. In her book Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin shares how habits change our lives little by little, especially when we schedule those habits.

What I know for sure is that creating habits—such as my Five Joys before bedtime every night—lifts my heart and helps my mind focus on the good things. It’s a simple practice, but something I do without even thinking. When we do anything regularly without needing to think about it, it becomes a habit.

Let me give you another example. I love coffee, but the doctor said it’s not good for my body (ugh). To help myself quit the coffee habit and replace it with a healthier one, I place two lemons nightly in the kitchen, and when I wake, I make a hot lemon concoction with cayenne. So, I replaced my coffee habit with something better for my body, and boom—it happens daily without much thought. I have simply taken my thoughts, my mind, out of the equation and harnessed the power of habit.

Although I encourage the development of mindfulness in children and ourselves, there is also a powerful ally in mindlessness. Habits help us take our resistance and our minds out of the equation. The ability to create a habit helps us not overthink something; whether it’s hitting the gym or doing a gratitude or breathing exercise with our children, it gets hardwired into our lives.

Helping Kids Create Happiness Habits

Cultivating certain habits in our children can help them begin to master their emotions and become happier. Some ideas include:

• Hand on Heart: Before sleep, when your child is relaxed, have them put one hand on their heart and one on their tummy. They simply feel how calm they are, and allow their breathing to deepen. You can even ask “What are we grateful for today?” to add another layer—but the important point is to help children do this for at least three weeks, at which point their bodies will likely viscerally remember when I put my hand on my heart, I relax and can calm myself. This habit doesn’t take a long time but helps your children begin to calm themselves when they need it most. (I explain this a bit further in The Emotionally Healthy Child.)
• Three Good Things: Whether it’s three good things at bedtime or saying one good thing around the dinner table, this is a simple habit that can help children learn to focus their minds and look for the good things happening in and around them. Many children get “stuck” in seeing only what’s wrong with life, which is a habit of negative thinking. Helping your child to choose more positive thoughts even on a tough day can be helpful, and is linked to happier life experiences as well as resilience; researcher Martin Seligman, among others, studied optimism and evidenced the power of Three Good Things. Of course, some days are simply lemons and you cannot make lemonade—but oftentimes you can.

• Digital Journal: One of my clients, Mark, is ten years old and is developing the ability to slow down and pause before reacting. Every night, he’s enjoyed writing in a digital journal: he jots down in an app the good things from the day and takes a photo to capture it. He also can write down what he would have changed from the day too (situations, his reactions, experiences) so he’s become more self-aware and developing the ability to be reflective—which, ultimately, can lead to better choices.

Children build their lives on what we show them, the words we say to them, and the habits we help them create. It’s up to us to help them build healthier habits, especially around how to stop, calm, and bring themselves back to emotional balance.

Regular habits, not periodic ones, are important to nurture in children. They help children acquire the ability to calm down faster despite whatever may be happening, and then come back to their center.

My suggestion is to choose one thing and incorporate it into your emotional health program. Whether that is meditating together or practicing daily gratitude, there really is great power in adding one thing. Before you know it, things change, and progress happens.

And since we’re turning the page on a New Year, it’s the perfect time to add one thing. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but it can pay you back in positive emotional dividends all year long.