Dr. Jon Eckert explains how letting kids fail builds resilient kids

Welcome back. The pressure to be happy is leaving a generation feeling more anxious and more isolated. That's the thought of Baylor professor Dr. John Eckert. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. You have a new book called The Happiness Crisis. How can it be a crisis to be happy? Well, I think the data is telling us the kids aren't really happy. Right. And I think it's the way they're defining happiness as part of the problem. So us as parents now have a big task on our hands. I will tell you, this is something with a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old I think I struggle with daily because it's hard to see your kids either fail at something or not get something right. I mean, we're fixed. We're parents. We want to fix. We want them to be happy. And that's the hard part, right? That's right. And so often we come in and we've stopped being helicopter parents. We've become lawnmower parents. Helicopters hovered. Lawnmowers just mow that down in front of them. And when we do that, we rob kids of a chance to experience the joy that comes on the back side of struggle. Ah, I see. When we talk with our kids, I remember I was listening to a podcast and it said, it was Mel Brown, I think. Oh, yeah. Or maybe it was Brené Brown, who said you have to sit with them in the darkness. Yes. And it hit me because I was like, sit with them in the darkness. I don't want them to be in the dark. No, that's right. But that's hard. Well, but if your kid's in middle school, you know there's darkness. You know there's darkness, right. You don't have to go looking for adversity. It's there. But how do you sit with them and allow them to do as much as they can? Because it's not that we want our kids to get backbones. They already have backbones. Right. It's how do they develop the muscles around the backbones that allow them to carry hard things. And that's different for a 10-year-old than it is for a 13-year-old. And you have to know as a parent when to step back and let them carry those hard things because that's how they're going to carry hard things into the future. so if you don't want to raise a basement dwelling adult you have to let them go through some of those things and it's hard to watch because it makes us uncomfortable and you're saying like even like let them fail a class let i mean like but don't you worry about the like ramifications of that like well particularly failing if they're you know for example there might be happiness if chat gpt writes a paper for you well but there's no joy in that and if your kid gets called out for that it's better to learn that when you're 13 than when you're in medical school exactly yeah let them learn it young um and also i think you know just becoming curious too right like let them try to figure out like how you know and i also i think it's interesting to say okay instead of me trying to fix the problem how are you now going to fix this problem so like you have a and someone i can't remember who told me like okay they have a test on thursday that you should go to them and say so how are you going to prepare yourself for this test on thursday not me saying okay so two Tuesday and Wednesday, we're going to be studying. Right, right. No, that's so good. Like, kind of give them the power to decide? That's right. Is that? So in the book, we talk about the ABCs of joy, that adversity leads to belonging, and then cultivates curiosity. So if you think about who your best friends are as an adult or as a 13-year-old, it's the people that show up when things are hard. So you've got to let them go through things that are hard so that they know who their friends are. And when they do that- Friendships are hard. Then they know they matter, and then they're more likely to be curious about others. we live in an increasingly incurious world where if we disagree with someone we dismiss them and that's the last thing we should be, and we can't model that for our kids and we have to help them see that there is curiosity is an antidote to not feeling like you belong what's your take on social media really quickly so yeah so i think social media has a lot of amazing capabilities i think for kids it's become a really tough thing because they compare their happiness to what they see online which is curated not real filtered and so you're never going to measure up to that and so the research says over and over again for adults and kids that's not really a great recipe for happiness much less joy delay delay delay if you can right that's what i'm saying and with others if you can get other families to do that with you it makes it a lot easier than being the one family trying to hold off yeah no doubt okay the book is called the happiness crisis i am going to be reading it now. Dr. John Eckert, thank you so much for your advice. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Parenting is tough, no doubt.