The Science Behing Being a Happier Parent

When you become a parent, your own happiness seems to become an afterthought. Parents often become so focused on maximizing their children’s happiness that they neglect their own. That is, until you read research informing you that happier parents are more likely to have happier children. You might agree, in theory, that your own happiness is also important but, by the time you get the chance to focus on your own happiness, you realize that you have no idea how to actually make yourself happy. You may have heard about “self-care” or about practices that you frankly don’t have time for such as meditation, pursuing a new hobby, or journaling but do these actually increase happiness?

Where does a busy parent start when they want to try to boost their happiness?

A recent review article provided a summary of high-quality studies that examined strategies to increase happiness in adults. This review included only pre-registered experiments (translation: studies in which the experimenters had to report what analyses they planned to do in advance so they couldn’t just keep running analyses until they got a positive result). This review defined “happiness” as high levels of life satisfaction, high levels of positive emotions, and low levels of negative emotions. This review found that the following practices may be actually linked to increased happiness:

1. Valuing time over material possessions: Researchers gave participants $40 and told half of them to spend it on something that would save them time (such as paying for someone to clean your house or to mow your lawn) and half of them to spend it on material goods (such as new clothes. Participants reported greater happiness when they spent $40 on something that would save them time. Researchers speculated that avoiding unpleasant tasks may help to boost well-being and that outsourcing unpleasant tasks may be an effective way to improve your mood. This is an important finding since it might not be your first instinct to spend money in a way that saves you time and this may be a relatively underutilized way of increasing happiness. Only 2% of people reported that this is how they would have spent this money without being told to do so. You can easily incorporate this into your own life by thinking through how you can budget more money toward outsourcing tasks that you don’t enjoy and less money for material items.
2. Treating the weekend like a vacation: Half of the participants in one study were randomly assigned to treat their weekend “like a vacation” and half were assigned to treat it like “a regular weekend.” The participants who were told to “think in ways and behave in ways they would on vacation” reported that they were happier on Monday at work and were more present in the moment during the weekend. However, these participants also spent less time on housework so this practice may not be sustainable. However, if you need a mood boost occasionally, this might be worth a try!
3. Being more social: Research finds that talking to strangers more in daily interactions (even when you don’t feel like it!) may result in a happier mood. In one study, participants were randomly assigned to talk to strangers on their commute and those who did were in a better mood than those who did what they typically do during the commute or those who sat quietly. Another study found that acting more extraverted over a longer period of time resulted in a more positive mood.
4. Expressing gratitude to others: Research finds that expressing gratitude toward others through a letter, text message, social media, or email resulted in more immediate happiness, although it is unclear how long these effects may last. One study involved asking parents to write a gratitude letter to someone important in their lives. Parents reported an immediate boost in mood but no impact five days later. Another study found that undergraduates who expressed gratitude via letters, text messages, or publicly on social media showed more positive emotions the next day. Interestingly, this study found that there may be more benefits to texting a person directly with your thanks versus sharing it publicly on social media.
5. Smiling: Have you heard that simply smiling even when you don’t feel happy may improve your mood? Participants in these studies are asked to mimic the face of someone smiling. Researchers have found that just the act of smiling seems to improve mood. This experiment even seems to work on people who say they don’t believe it will work or when they are told by researchers that it won’t work. The idea here is that you “fake it until you make it.” In other words, just try smiling even if you aren’t happy and it might make you become happier!
6. Helping others: Research consistently finds that being kind to others is associated with increased happiness. Most studies involved giving money to others in need, such as purchasing a goody bag full of treats for a sick child versus keeping it for yourself. This is particularly true when the decision to give to others is a free choice and when participants were able to directly observe or vividly imagine how their gift would benefit others. Surprisingly, researchers found no evidence that volunteer work or random acts of kindness increased happiness but further research is needed.
7. Giving up social media for an extended period of time. One study found that participants who deleted their Facebook accounts for four weeks reported greater happiness and life satisfaction at the end of the four weeks (all participants were regular Facebook users when the experiment started). However, another study looked at how participants felt on days they used social media versus on days that they avoided it completely and found that participants did not feel better on days they avoided social media and some analyses even found lower satisfaction with the day when participants avoided social media. The researchers had expected that participants would replace social media with more enriching forms of communication and social interaction on days when they didn’t use social media but they actually found the opposite— people engaged in more face-to-face, voice, and email interaction on days that they used social media. Although further research is needed, this research suggests that you may need to take a longer break from social media to see results, if any, and that you may need to consider possible benefits that you get from social media.

Overall Translation

Happiness may feel like an elusive goal for many busy parents. However, research finds some ways that you can try to increase your happiness such as valuing time over possessions, treating the weekend like a vacation, being more social, expressing gratitude, smiling, helping others, and giving up social media for an extended period of time. Of course this research is far from perfect and further research is needed, but this line of research gives you some concrete tips that might be worth a try!