Positive Parenting Challenge: intro

My friend Meredith, who is blogging about her journey to parent positively, inspired me to take up a similar project.

I've struggled often with how to write about the joys and challenges of parenting without sounding like I was in way over my head and accentuating the negative or sounding like I was super mom and accentuating only the positive.

The thing is, parenting is so much a mix of both. I think a lot about how what Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, put it in this Aspen Ideas Festival speech that was aired on MPR a few years ago. He said studies show that while being married does increase our happiness, having children does not. In fact, people are happier shopping for groceries than they are with their kids.

And you know what, a few nights ago I did find myself in the grocery store with only my safely contained baby-in-womb while Joe swam with Truman and I told the clerk "shopping without my toddler is like being on vacation."

And I meant it. The ability to free my mind and think clearly about anything and everything. To dilly-dally if I like. In a way, to be a child myself instead of being a parent.

Gilbert acknowledged that this idea sounds terrible and that he wouldn't deny he loves his children and is glad he has them. But the facts are still there: from a science of happiness perspective children do not increase our happiness.

His point is this: all of the work of raising children at certain points in their life takes so much energy it clouds out other sources of joy. That's why when I am not with him I am able to see joy in even the mundane because my mind open to it.

But what he pointed out, and what I always latch onto is this: while our overall days may be filled with things that decrease happiness, the moments of happiness shared with or inspired by my children are ecstatic. Having children heightened my ability to be happy, even if they themselves do not always make me happy or provide me with a net gain of happiness.

Now that I am a parent the grocery store is a vacation and the dentist a spa. These are truths.

Parenting is work and in this project I am going to explore that work and challenge myself to parent in a way that is positive, gentile and leads us to a place of fulfillment and happiness.

And I will touch on this now because it is glaring me in the phase: are positivity and happiness inseparable? Do they necessarily lead to each other?

I do not know the answer, but I am going to be engaged in looking at these questions. My approach to this project is about positive parenting, but also my own personal journey to approach each day in a way that it leads to happiness and how all of these things interact.

All posts on this subject will be labeled PPC and then the title and tagged with positive parenting challenge. To see them all, just run a search.