Dr. Justin Coulson: 3 Principles For Happier Families

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Dr. Justin Coulson outlines three easy ways we can have happier families.

Transcript

00:00If you watch parents in public with their children, they don't do this much.

00:07They just don't smile. We are so happy when our children are born. We look at one another and say,

00:13my goodness, it doesn't get any better than this. Well, then they turn 16 and our happiness levels

00:18are about here and they go like that and they kind of stay there until the kids move out of

00:23home and the research says that then we feel happy again. That doesn't sound like the kind

00:29of family that I want to have. I want to have a happier family. So my positive psychology PhD was

00:34really all about discovering what makes families work and what doesn't. And I think that if you

00:38want to make your family happier, these three things can change everything. The first thing

00:44is love. To a child, love is spelled T-I-M-E. I worked with a family some years ago and we

00:54agreed that if they could just stop at meal time, be together as a family and talk about

00:59things that they were thankful for, things that they'd appreciated, could that help their family

01:03be happier? They said, well, we've tried this, we've tried this, we've tried that, we did all these things

01:07you said, but the one thing that's made the most difference is that stopping and looking and

01:11listening when our kids talk to us, especially at dinner time. We were at dinner one night

01:16and as we sat and talked to the kids, one child in particular didn't want to tell us what she

01:21was grateful for. The rest of the family spoke and then finally we said to her, well,

01:26would you like to share with us now what are you grateful for? She shook her head, well, what makes

01:30you happy? She looked at them and she said, right now. Right now is the thing that has made me

01:37happiest today. Sometimes our kids just need us to stop, look and listen. They need us to take time.

01:46As we do so, they feel our love. The second is limits. My 13-year-old daughter says to me one day,

01:54dad, dad, dad, can I please have Snapchat? I'm the only kid in my grade that doesn't have Snapchat.

02:00Have you noticed that they're always the only one? See, in my mind, you can already talk to all of

02:05your friends on Facebook. She said, dad, you telling me to talk to all my friends on Facebook

02:11while they're on Snapchat is like you telling me to go play at the park while all my friends

02:18are at the beach. Oh, but hang on a second. At the beach, there are syringes in the sand

02:23and glass bottles and there's jellyfish and there's sharks, there's perverts.

02:30And she looked at me, rolled her eyes and said, dad, have you been to the park lately?

02:37Smart kid. So we had this wonderful, empowering conversation. I said,

02:41what would you do in my situation? Where would you go from here? She essentially said to me,

02:45hey, dad, if I promise to go to the beach and wear a hat and a sun shirt and sunscreen and

02:52not talk to any strangers, do you think that you'd let me go to the beach then?

02:58I said, that's a pretty cool deal. I like that. Let's try it. Let's see if you can go to the

03:03beach safely. So when we spend the time and we show that we love them, when we set limits,

03:09we get much better results than saying it's my way or the highway.

03:13It tends not to reflect a whole lot of love. It just doesn't work.

03:18Now, the last thing that I want to talk to you about is this third principle, the principle of

03:22laughter. The kids were already in the pool. I dipped my toe in. It was freezing. It was like

03:27ice. I decided I wouldn't have a swim. I turned around to Dave, my 42-year-old friend with no

03:32children, bachelor. And as I started to say to him, I think it's a bit too cold to get in the pool.

03:38I felt this pain, this icy pain in the small of my back. And as I turned around, I noticed one of

03:45my children in the pool with a super soaker. And I was thinking of all the things that I might say

03:49to her as a parenting expert. Nothing came immediately. And as I was trying to work out

03:53how to respond to her, she picked the super soaker out of the pool again. She aimed it at Dave's chest

04:00and in slow motion, and the water... And I thought, I'm going to have to take one for the team.

04:10I'm about to dive into the pool. I realized the water had already gone past me. It was

04:13going to hit him anyway. The water hit Dave in the chest. And here's what he did.

04:23And he splashed into the pool. And the kids swam over to him and they jumped on him. And in that

04:27moment, I thought to myself, my goodness, Justin, you have forgotten how to have fun.

04:31You have forgotten how to laugh. You're the parenting expert who just gets cranky at the kids

04:35all the time because they're not quite perfect yet. Wouldn't it be great if we could just laugh

04:38a little more? If we could be a little more relaxed around the kids? Can we find some

04:45opportunities to laugh? Can we put on accents? Perhaps you might give them the opportunity to

04:50play music loudly in the house and you might even dance with them and play around. They need three

04:54things. They need love. They need limits. And they need laughter. My suspicion is if we can do that,

05:02we will make our families happier.

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