Resentment, Joy, and Why Moms Don't Believe They're Allowed Either

Dr. Becky (0:00)

Always a good time to rediscover the sense that your life, before you were useful to anyone, you were already good.

Inside, good inside, good inside. Just reading all the branding.

I did not ask her to add that.

I just want my kid to be happy.

Of course, we do. We want our kids to feel light. We want them to feel loved. We want them to move about the world with ease and confidence. But at the same time, maybe optimizing for our kids being happy is a little bit out of our control or has a cost to us or isn't actually good for them long-term, which doesn't mean we want our kids to be unhappy. But in today's conversation with Kate Bowler, I talk about happiness and joy, and I can tell you it gave me a totally different perspective on my days with my kid. I mean, I end most days thinking about how the day went. And I know I'm going to be asking myself different questions to assess my day because of this conversation, and I have a feeling it's going to do that for you as well. Kate is a professor at Duke University. She's the author of so many amazing books, and she's honestly just a deep thinker who translates her thoughts into very practical, manageable ways to go about your life differently today. I know you're going to love this conversation. I think it's also going to lead to new thoughts and new associations and a new way of seeing your day.

All right, here's where I want to start. You are only as happy as your unhappiest child. True? Not true? I think people think it's true and it shouldn't be. Not that you want to look into the eyes of your child and be like, I'm thrilled. Sorry, having a bad time.

Is it the worst? Not for me.

But I think this endless calibration of our own emotional worlds to the unhappiness of our children has got to stop.

Yeah, where, okay, so you're saying, I'm so attentive to and perceptive of my kid's emotional state, which probably I think I've noticed is more and more common, right? Because there's maybe, maybe an overcorrection, but I think it comes from a good place of feeling like nobody looked at my emotional state when I was growing up, right? And no one cared in the 80s. No one cared. No. And so I'm not going to do that. No. But now, I'm so attentive. And you're saying, because your language is around kind of that being the barometer. Now, my mood, I don't even know what my mood is until I've kind of assessed my kids. Right. And I think it starts with moms in particular believing that happiness is ultimately the goal. Like, and I know we really share this deep in abiding hatred. But happiness has... Hatred of happiness. Hatred of... Quote us, Kate and Dr. Becky hate happiness. Is that the... She hates it. I hate it. I hate it.

Agreed. Yeah. I think, well, because happiness has such a distinct psychological profile, it's supposed to feel like ease. And if you think about happiness as ease, and then suddenly it's women's job to guarantee ease it's wild when you think about all the things that would have to fall under that list for that to be true. Do you want a snack? No, my... Is the temperature okay? Do you want a snack? Like it would take a thousand details to put everyone in your life at ease. Okay. We're going to come back to the first thing I said, but now I'm on to a second thing. So I'm just going to follow my thought, which is I just want my kids to be happy, but that swap is really powerful because it changes that sentence for me. I just want things to be easy for my kid. Like, and then, oh, I have a little more dissonance. Is that, do I really want that? Yeah. Right? Yeah. I think you're right. I think we start with saying, I just want them to be happy. I care so much about their happiness. But when you think about it like, I want my kid to feel relaxed all the time. I want my kid to feel only comfort and no distress. I don't want my child to experience the gamut of human emotion and ever be uncomfortable. Then I think we start to realize how many things we would have to do to fill in a gap that maybe we should not be filling. Oh, my goodness. I mean, yeah. It feels less enticing as soon as I replace it with ease. But maybe because I know if my kid only experiences ease and comfort in their early years when their body is being wired up for the rest of their life, then they're locked into a version of life where they should always be comfortable in that ease. Even in adulthood, maybe even locked into a version of life where anything even a little bit hard feels this hard just because their bodies kind of experience like, well, what is this? I've never had this before. But also nothing even about childhood is always comfortable and easy. So the other part of that that doesn't feel good to me is my brain goes to, oh, is that my job then to morph and to get ahead of something and to take away and to exit. And that it makes me think about how exhausting it can be as a mom in modern day parenting. But maybe some of it is this. This is how I'm operating all the time. I think we feel like plugged in to everyone else's nervous system. And that feels for a lot of people like very tight and anxious and kind of and worried, and noticey. And if that's, it's sort of, so then it creates two very distinct roles. The mom is the professional happiness manager, and the child as the bubble-wrapped precious darling, whose job it is to feel this, to receive love as comfort.