240125 What I learned in my studies this morning 4

Today's Meditation(s):

Two quotes from Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic and Daily Dad today, both about raising kids with emotional resilience. (edited for length, emphasis added)

As Dr. Becky Kennedy writes in her wonderful book Good Inside, if you want to raise happy kids, you don’t try to make them happy. You try to make them resilient and self-aware. She writes, speaking of both kids and parents, “The wider the range of feelings we can regulate—if we can manage the frustration, disappointment, envy and sadness—the more space we have to cultivate happiness. Regulating our emotions essentially develops a cushion around those feelings, softening them and preventing them from consuming the entire jar. Regulation first, happiness second.”

This is great advice. The ability to deal with frustration, to not be ruled by our temper, to catch ourselves when we’re comparing, to stop ourselves when we start to spiral, these don’t seem like happy things. But that’s the point: By dealing with them, we make happiness possible.

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So really what we have to teach our kids . . . is how to differentiate urge from action. “Having the urge to bite is okay,” she explains, “biting a person is not. Having the urge to hit is okay; hitting a person is not okay.” We know this to be true in our adult lives—that there’s a big difference between being angry and then doing something rash or irresponsible or hurtful out of anger....

“Parents often have the goal of getting rid of the urge,” Dr. Becky writes. What’s wrong with you? Why would you want to hurt someone? But it’s better if we can try “humanizing the urge and then shifting where we allow a child to discharge it,” because “it allows the child to gain regulation and, over time, make better decisions.”

Instead of shaming them for the feeling—which is not in their control—empower them about their actions—which are much more in their control. Our job is to teach them about regulation, about redirection, about our ability to realize we’re going down a bad road, stop and turn around. It’s also to teach them about the responsibility to evaluate after we’ve lost control, apologize, repair and learn from what happened.

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That's a Stoic principle I've repeated to my kids: practicing Stoic ideas produces better results.

Because they are learning to identify passions when they arise, to acknowledge them but put them on hold for a moment, and to make their decisions from a position of calm acceptance, this will naturally make those decisions better than they would be were they to have been made under the duress of instinctive impulses.

This leads to happiness.