Parental Well-Being, Part Two: How Can We Think About Our Happiness?
Emotional time traveling and different ways we define well-being
Parenting is hard. As I previously discussed, parents tend to be happier when we can prioritize positive feelings about ourselves and our children and find purpose and meaning in this special role in our lives. Let’s first examine different ways researchers study emotional experiences and then discuss how we can use this knowledge to help us feel more fulfilled as parents.
Emotional Time Travel: The Temporal Experience of Emotions
Humans beings are special because we are emotional time travelers. We can feel happy, excited, sad, and angry when something happens to us, but we also experience these feelings by simply remembering or anticipating something happening. We even experience emotions about things that have never happened to us. While this sounds simple, it’s actually an incredibly sophisticated thing for a brain to be able to have feelings and thoughts about something that only exists within itself. If I feel proud of my toddler for sharing a toy, I can relive that same feeling of pride by remembering the last time he shared a toy as well as looking forward to the next time he will have the opportunity to share a toy. Scientists sometimes refer to this emotional time travel as the temporal experience of emotions. This process helps us do so many things, from planning what we are going to do tomorrow to helping us have a coherent sense of self.
Having feelings about the past, present, and future has many benefits, but it also comes with some downsides. Just like I can feel pride about my toddler multiple times, I can also beat myself up for mistakes I’ve made as a parent over and over again or stay awake at night worrying about things that may never happen. Catastrophizing is when we expect the worst case scenario when there is no evidence that this will happen, while rumination involves repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative things from our past. These thinking styles and other biases in how we remember or anticipate future emotional events are related to mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. Generally speaking, we are not great at predicting how we will feel in the future. Research shows that we tend to overestimate the intensity of how some things will feel (impact bias), underestimate the impact of external events outside of our control on how we will feel (focalism), and underestimate our abilities to cope when things go poorly.
Eudaimonic and Hedonic Well-Being
Researchers have also found that people differ in how they define their own sense of well-being. People who prioritize eudaimonic well-being focus on values such as authenticity (e.g., desire to do what one believes in), meaning (e.g., desire to contribute to others/the surrounding world), personal excellence (e.g., striving for a personal ideal), and growth (e.g., wanting to gain insight or learn a new skill). People who prioritize hedonic well-being, on the other hand, focus more on personal pleasure and comfort. For example, eating a delicious cupcake may be hedonically pleasurable, but it may not fulfill one’s desire for meaning or authenticity.1 Alternatively, running a marathon or giving birth to your children may provide you with an abundance of pride and fulfillment while being far from comfortable. Generally, prioritizing either type of well-being is associated with more life satisfaction, though people who focus more on eudaimonic well-being tend to have more self-control and higher rates of prosocial attitudes.
A study by Gosselin and colleagues (2022, Applied Research in Quality of Life) found that both eudaimonic and hedonic orientations were related to a stronger relationship between being a parent, life satisfaction, and more positive emotion. In other words, regardless of whether one focuses on eudaimonic or hedonic aspects of well-being, either may help promote positive emotion as a parent. Interestingly, the researchers also found that eudaimonic well-being may be specifically beneficial for fathers: When fathers reported more eudaimonic well-being, they also reported more meaning in their lives, more experiences of what the authors called “elevation” (including experiences of feeling inspired and part of something greater than oneself), “vitality” (such as looking forward to each new day and reporting more energy), and closeness with others.
So How Can I Be a Happier Parent?
Remember that we’re bad fortune tellers about our feelings
Let’s go back to emotional time travel. It can be helpful to remind ourselves that we can’t just look into a crystal ball and know how we will feel in the future. For example, I recently went on my first plane ride with two kids and I was dreading it. Rather than assuming that my baby would spend the entire flight crying or that my toddler would be a tantrumming mess (catastrophizing), it would have been helpful to try to counteract my biases and remind myself:
There’s no evidence that this will actually happen!
Even if it happens, it probably won’t feel as bad as I am imagining (addressing impact bias)
Other things that I’m not considering will most likely happen that will make me feel better, such as my spouse distracting our toddler or that the plane will be full of babies, so even if my baby is crying, it will just be in a sea of other babies (addressing focalism)
I am more resilient than I think I am and will probably forget about how my kids behaved once I’m having fun at our destination
Savor positive experiences, both past and present
Additionally, we can spend time pausing and reflecting on past and present positive experiences as a means of improving our well-being. Savoring, or the active prolonging of positive emotions, is a strategy that promotes positive and reduces negative emotions. This is true for both adults generally and parents specifically. Journaling about a positive experience, sharing it with a loved one, or simply taking time to feel grateful for something positive happening are all ways we can pause in our emotional time traveling and savor an enjoyable experience. It can also help us look forward to future similar experiences and possibly improve our abilities to accurately predict how something will feel later on.
Focus on different aspects of well-being
Parenting might be the definitive example of an experience that brings so much eudaimonic happiness while testing our ability at times to find hedonic pleasure. Reflecting on which type of well-being you are focusing on in any given moment and adjusting accordingly may help you feel more balanced. Flying with two kids was not the most materially pleasant experience, but I reminded myself that I was traveling to see my parents. Watching my children interact with my family brings me so much fulfillment and joy despite the inconvenient travel methods. Focusing on my eudaimonic well-being helped dampen the negative aspects of my traveling experience, made me feel grateful for my ability to spend time with my parents, and made me feel proud of accomplishing the parenting milestone of flying with two kids for the first time.
At the same time, it can be taxing to only focus on big-picture aspects of our happiness. On days when parenting gets really tough, I need moments of pure hedonic pleasure to feel restored. This can include doing things by myself, like taking a long bath or having a meandering phone call with a good friend, but it can also involve focusing on fun activities with my kids. My husband and I like having “yes” days with our toddler where we put him in contexts where the majority of the time we can say “yes” to things he wants to do. That can mean going on an outdoor hike, running around a mall and grabbing a new toy and a vanilla milkshake2, or watching a marathon of The Magic School Bus Rides Again. This is not to say that having fun with my kids only brings hedonic pleasure, but being able to prioritize this aspect of my well-being is just as important for my happiness as focusing on the more existential aspects of being a parent.
It’s a joke with my parent friends that we look forward to the evenings after our kids go to bed, and yet we inevitably find ourselves scrolling through photos of them or reminiscing about cute things they did throughout the day. I think this habit has many benefits: We are savoring previous positive experiences to help us look forward to future ones, and we are reminding ourselves of both the immediate and long-term pleasures of being parents. We may not be the best at knowing how we will feel in the future, but we have a lot of control over how we can feel happier as parents right now. Luckily, we’re not alone. Even laughing about these silly parenting routines with my friends is another way that I feel happier as a parent.
Depending on the cupcake, I suppose!
My toddler does not know that milkshakes can be made at home; he believes they can only be found at restaurants. Please, please, PLEASE do not tell him otherwise.