The Happiness Choice: Teaching My Daughter Positive Thinking (and My Own Doubts)

My daughter Pumpkin’s half-birthday recently passed. A friend of mine had invited me to a limited-space event for which she had to register. Without thinking of what day it was and eager to see this friend whom I don’t see enough of, I readily accepted. It turned out to be on my daughter’s half-birthday. When I make a commitment, it takes a true emergency for me to back out because it matters to me that friends and family can depend on me (I’m happy to set this expectation). Therefore, when I recognized the conflict a few days ahead of time, I gave Pumpkin choices about when and how to celebrate her half-birthday before the actual date. We ended up inviting one of her best friends over for a lengthy playdate, and then the following day I took her to her favorite FroYo shop for a treat.

However, later she started thinking about how her half-birthday was the following day, and she lamented long and hard about how I was not spending her actual half-birthday with her. I told her, “You know what? You could just be happy that I celebrate your half-birthday at all. So many people would scoff at the idea of celebrating a non-event, but I like to recognize the milestone because at this point you do grow and change quite a bit over six months. So how about, ‘Hey, mom, thank you for giving me an afternoon with my friend! Thank you for taking me out for a week’s worth of sugar in one delicious half-birthday treat! Thank you for making me feel special and loved even though it’s not my actual birthday’?”

That evening I took her to gymnastics. After gymnastics, we usually hang out in the parking lot while every other family makes their quick escapes to begin the preparation for bed. Pumpkin plays with a pair of siblings (the sister is one of her besties) while their mom and I chat. One of the games the kids like to play is “check out cars” where each introduces the others to their car and all of the magical wonders inside it. However, on this particular evening we ended up making a hasty retreat because Pumpkin had a fit that we were not letting her do the first introduction.

I pointed out to Pumpkin that, like with the half-birthday situation, she has a choice to make about whether she looks at the situation in a positive light or a negative light. Her choice (autonomy) is a) to enjoy the fact that she has the opportunity to play with friends who are perfectly willing to take turns with her, who enjoy her company so much that they are excited to share their space with her, and who have the same energy and humor as she does (social, esteem), or b) focus on the fact that things are not going as she had planned and that she is not getting her way.

This is a lesson I have already tried teaching Pumpkin, and I suspect I have years ahead of me where I have to keep hammering home this point: so many times we have a simple choice about where to focus our attention, and the difference is between walking down a happy path and a miserable one. This is the reflection stage of the Four Stages of an Event, and it has significant power in magnifying your short-term happiness or unhappiness.

The very next day I stumbled into a mini crisis about these conversations. I happen to be reading Nataly Kogan’s book Happier Now, and I came across this passage:

We live in a society, especially in America, where we’re expected to manage our emotions and shift the negative into a positive. “Don’t cry, have a cookie. Don’t be angry, have a toy,” says my friend Emily Fletcher, who runs Ziva Meditation, a meditation studio in New York. “We hear this all the time. We’ve been trained since childhood to not feel our feelings because it makes other people uncomfortable. We’ve been taught to not feel what we feel if it’s not something good.”

I had the sudden worry: is this what I am doing? Am I pressuring my daughter with so-called “toxic positivity?” It’s true that sometimes I have little patience with loved ones’ misery. The problem is that since I have developed what I think is a very clear definition of what makes a person happy/unhappy, sometimes I feel like I am looking through a crystal ball and seeing exactly what the problem is. I get frustrated when my advice goes ignored. I want to help my loved ones be happier, and it can be hard to watch them choose otherwise (or so it may seem to me).

For example, for a while my husband, Mr. Transportation, would come home from a work trip and spend at least the first 30 minutes of being home ranting about how rotten his work trip was: the passengers or flight attendants were rude, the hotels were cruddy, the shuttles took too long, his colleagues nattered on about politics, and so on and so on. I tried to be sympathetic, but it got to the point where I dreaded his return, knowing whatever joy I was feeling would quickly be overwhelmed by his stream of negativity. I eventually got fed up and told him, “If you’re so miserable at work, do something about it! Go find another job. It’s your choice, but if you’re going to insist on staying where you are, I don’t want to hear your complaints.” He did have good reasons for staying with his company. What I failed to see was that the decision wasn’t as easy for him as it seemed for me, and to this day I’m not sure I made the right decision to step away as an outlet for his frustrations. Perhaps there was a better approach I could have taken. [He did stay with his company and quit complaining to me, circumstances eventually improved, and staying put probably has benefitted us more than harmed us (especially during COVID).]

However, after mulling over my conversations with my daughter, I don’t think I’m advocating toxic positivity. I am generally supportive of her feeling her feelings when it matters. There are plenty of those times, such as feeling sad when she leaves after a visit with family or feeling betrayed when someone does something she has specifically asked them not to do. The trick is distinguishing between those moments, the trivial and the consequential. If anything, Happier Now brought to my attention how careful I may need to be in helping Pumpkin differentiate the two.

How skilled are you at focusing on the positive in your day-to-day life? Have you tried any gratitude exercises to help you find more positivity? If so, I’d love to hear about them.