Raising Happiness

 Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps For More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents is my new favorite parenting book.  I checked it out of the library a few weeks ago and found myself marking so many passages to photocopy that I finally decided to just purchase my own copy of the book.  Christine Carter, the director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, draws on the latest research and her own experience to come up with a succinct guide on how to raise not only happy children, but ones that are kind, grateful and self-motivated.  Not surprisingly, part of the recipe for happy children includes happy parents, so there are also plenty of tips on how to increase your own happiness and create a joyful family environment.

If you've read books like NurtureShock or Unconditional Parenting the science covered in Raising Happiness will not be new, and Carter does not spend a lot of time rehashing the research, she is more interested in the conclusions and how we can apply them to our parenting practice.  The thing that this book does amazingly well is offer specific advice while providing enough flexibility to tailor the recommendations to your family.  If saying a prayer before dinner as part of a gratitude practice doesn't work for you, how about a toast?  If you can't volunteer with your child, maybe you can pick up trash at the park together.  So many parenting books are either so rigid you feel that one misstep will doom your child for life or else so nebulous that you can't figure out how to apply any of their suggestions.

Initially I was a little put off by the book. The first chapter draws heavily on Carter's experiences as a working mom and I was starting to wonder if her tips would apply to parent who stays home.  Especially when, in a section on building a good relationship with your partner, she wrote "busy couples with kids and two full-time jobs don't have sex less than couples with a stay-at-home parent."  As if I have nothing to do other than lay around in lingerie thinking sexy thoughts.  Anyway, despite the shaky start, I was totally won over by the end of the second chapter. Raising Happiness is organized into short chapters, with sub-headings and "Try This" sections that make finding the information you're looking for easy.  She only employs one acronym (ERN - empathy, reason, non-controlling language) which is actually simple enough for me to remember and make use of when dealing with my 3 year old.  Plus, she recognizes that kids may respond differently to her tactics.  She actually includes an example where labeling a angry child's feeling does not diffuse the situation, but instead prompts him to shout "I AM NOT FRUSTRATED.  I AM HAPPY!"  So many of the examples in this book spoke to my own experience, from being bored while playing with my son to chaotic dinner time situations.

Since the book is about creating a happy and fulfilling family situation, its messages are relevant to families with infants all the way up through the teenage years.  Once you are beyond the books on when to introduce solids and how to get your baby to sleep (I read plenty of those!) I highly recommend picking up Raising Happiness.

Siblings Without Rivalry

So I decided I'd better get in one book on siblings before baby #2 comes along and Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish came highly recommended despite being written 23 years ago.  I liked the book and thought it was helpful, but it definitely read like something written decades ago, and not just because of the dated cover design and references to the library card catalog.  In case you missed it, I read a lot of parenting books, and I generally try to read current books-- NutureShock, SuperBaby, The Parents We Mean to Be, Unconditional Parenting, etc.  These books were all written in the last few years and tend to be footnoted extensively with references to scientific journals, experiments and additional resources.  And this scientific rigor has never bothered me; I like the fact that the advice being doled out has been tested and that there is more than just some "expert's"opinion or personal experience backing it up.

Siblings Without Rivalry is structured completely differently from most of the books I read.  It's based on a 6 week workshop on sibling rivalry and includes the conversations, stories and handouts from these workshops.  We hear about the participants' struggles with their children, their own sibling relationships and even tearful confessions of what they wished their parents had done differently. At times it is very much like sitting in on someone else's group therapy session from 1987 when latch-key kids were the norm, gender stereotypes were readily accepted and promoting self-esteem was paramount.

I know this does not sound promising, but I actually found the structure quite refreshing.  Instead of reading about carefully controlled experiments I was reading about real conflicts between real siblings.  We don't just read about what the research says you should do, we actually get to see how imperfect, tired, angry parents apply the techniques and hear about how they work or how they don't.  And, perhaps most encouraging, we get to see parents head down a wrong path, change their approach mid-conflict and still end up with a mostly positive result.  In so many of the books I read the author provides so much evidence for a particular approach that I start to feel doing anything differently will doom my child to a life of sleeplessness or low IQ or anxiety, etc. etc.

Sure, some of the illustrations in the book are a little hokey and the first chapter, which asks us to explore our child's feelings about a new sibling by having us imagine our husband bringing home a new wife, was more amusing than anything else, but I do feel that I gained valuable information on how to help Baby M deal with a younger sibling.  (And I did have to laugh when the authors asked me to write down my reaction to my husband giving the new wife one of my old sweaters and saying "you've put on a little weight, your clothes are too tight on you and they'll fit her perfectly.")   Some key points from the book:

1. Acknowledge each child's feelings about their sibling, even if they are negative
2. Do not compare the children to each other
3. Do not put children in "roles", even if both roles seem positive (e.g. the smart one and the funny one)
4. Instead of focussing on giving kids equal parts, try to give each child what they need when they need it
5. Intervene in fights when necessary, but try to put the onus for solving the problem on the kids.

These suggestions may sound obvious, but I can see how easy it would be to forget about them in the heat of the moment.  If my boys were fighting about the number of pancakes on their plates I can absolutely see myself snapping "You both have four pancakes" instead of asking if they were still hungry.  It's straight-forward examples like this one that make the tips in this book easy to remember and hopefully easy to implement.