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You’re living inside the head of a little girl, Riley, from the moment of her birth, living the drama of her inner world – her emotions, identity, the memories that make Riley Riley. Our focus is riveted on her primary emotions: Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger and Disgust, who control her feelings, thoughts and as a consequence, her behavior. Joy runs the show, filled with positive energy and loving micromanagement of Riley’s experience.
She – and we – want Riley to be happy. She wants Riley’s core memories to be happy ones that give her a solid sense of herself and her family, her unique personality and a positive outlook on the world. She is most watchful of Sadness, who with a touch can turn a positive memory sad, much as we can reframe our experience and our feelings. She does her best to exclude Sadness, at one point drawing a small circle on the floor and making it her job to stay safely in that small place away from the action. In Joy’s mind, Sadness and her influence on Riley is to be avoided at all costs. It’s a powerful statement of protection, or, of over-protection, as it turns out.
Without giving away all the movie, Joy and Sadness are pulled out of Riley’s control center, leaving Fear, Anger and Disgust to try to run Riley’s inner world as she handles tough real life situations. Without Joy running things, Riley is experiencing a gamut of painful emotions. However, it turns out that Sadness plays a critical role in Riley’s having the resiliency she needs to rebuild herself and her world.
Why do I insist you see this? In this world of helicopter parenting, aren’t we a bunch of Joys, trying to micromanage our children’s experience to protect them, especially from our fear of sadness and the thoughts and behavior that might result? Our children might have low self-esteem! They might see themselves as failures! They might give up, or not be successful! We run interference with the people and experiences in their lives to maximize every moment, make every child a winner, every grade a good one.
We think we’re engineering success and happiness, but we’re actually just limiting their growth. We’re preventing our children from growing through their negative experiences and developing the resiliency that will help them make it through the struggles they encounter. If they expect every experience to be successful, every manager to recognize their specialness, everything they do to be admired, they may flounder in college, when we’re not there to run interference. These grown up helicopter children don’t know how to take criticism and hard times as a positive incentive to persevere. They see themselves as victims.
My take away message is simple but profound: our kids need to have a full range of experience in order to grow. We all want to protect our children, and we should. Their health and safety is our job. We want to channel their strengths in productive directions and help them have new interesting experiences, learn new skills. At times, it’s appropriate to intervene, like when serious bullying is going on, or if there is a serious problem in the classroom. If a child has trouble learning, it’s our job to make sure the school investigates why, and that needs are met. If our kids need help developing skills, like making good peer relationships, or if anxiety or other emotions prevent them from fully engaging in life, we get them help. But we don’t keep them from having a full range of real experiences.
When we take over for them and engineer happiness and success we’re on a slippery slope. We keep them from having authentic feelings in response to the good and the bad. We keep them from experiencing acceptance for who they really are, and gaining the strength from acceptance and support to feel OK about what’s happened. We take away experience that helps them go through tough times and come out the other end stronger and able to move on. Our kids will survive feeling sad or feeling disappointed. In fact, it fuels growth. We don’t have to be so afraid of it. This is what Joy learned over the course of the movie. Hopefully, we can learn it too.
