3 Ways to Achieve Lasting Happiness for Children

We all love happiness, but it is most often fleeting. The challenge we are faced with is the moment it leaves and unhappiness shows up at the door. The following are ways to strengthen your children’s growing sense of lasting happiness, so they don’t have to go from joy to pain, and back again, continuously. Children can learn how to become happier, understand their emotions, and point in a direction that continually feeds their joy.

Helping Others

Have you ever noticed the more you place the focus on helping others, the more “magic” that occurs, and you end up feeling happier? The thinking goes from “me, me, me” to “we, we, we,” and you forget some of the things that bothered you. The same is true for children. Guiding children to help others, share their toys, hold the door open, volunteer as they get older, and participate in a “bigger” way in life are all ways to help them develop lasting happiness. Recently, I had a child client who volunteered to help his elderly neighbor clean up their yard before the family invited some foster youth over for a 4th of July barbeque. Whether it’s a smile, a nice word, or some other helping you or your children can do, it is a recipe for happier life experiences.

Using Challenges as Opportunities

You can guide children to see situations as challenges to learn from, and opportunities to move in a better feeling direction. Think of challenges as stepping-stones to something better. For example, in my book: The Happiness Workbook for Kids, I have an activity where children put a problem inside a square and on each of the four sides, they put something they can learn from the problem. Say they wrote: My BFF is moving away. They can learn:

1. To keep in touch on Facetime, and play video games together online
2. To make new friends
3. To visit each other
4. To wish her good luck (even though it’s hard) in her new school.

Learning from challenges, and pointing toward a better feeling situation, makes children happier—every single time.

Calming the Mind

The number one thing I recommend to parents, especially new parents, is to help their children self-soothe. Children who learn to calm themselves can often stop before making not-so-smart choices. Some calming strategies to learn alongside your children are:

• Breathing techniques: for example, flower petal breathing, hot soup breath, and hand on the heart (all from the workbook)
• Mindfulness: For example, "Can you spot all the red on our walk?"
• Creative outlets
• Exercise

And there are more. The aim is for your children to slow down, calm down, and make those better choices even with tricky emotions. (Tip: Have your child teach you some calming activities, and they’ll be the feelings boss.)

Becoming happier is a skill for children to learn—just like reading, counting, and making their own peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The aim is to have fun with it. Fill up your happiness bucket as a family and be creative. Do happiness experiments like gardening, going to the zoo, making a new recipe, watching a funny movie, or something deeper—helping others, learning to meditate, or taking a mindfulness walk. The door to lasting happiness is open for children, and they can learn to create real happiness sooner rather than later.