This is How Happiness Is Passed Down in Families

In today's world, it's becoming increasingly important to find happiness through the pursuit of materialistic items. We all want to be happy and feel good, so we spend a lot of time looking for ways to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, this search has led us down a path of debt and consumerism. It's made us lose sight of how much happier life could be if we focused on more meaningful pursuits, like helping others.


It starts at home.

In order to become better parents, we need to start making our families our first priority. As parents, we naturally focus a lot of our attention on our children and what they need from us. It's natural, and it's essential for raising well-rounded adults, but it can also be exhausting. So we try to squeeze everything else out in favor of this one area of our lives. We tell ourselves that we have to prioritize family time above all else, including exercise and self-care.

This leads to a cycle of burnout and unhappiness that's passed down from one generation to another.

There's an alternate approach.

We can make sure that our families get the happiness that we wish to pass down to them.

This means prioritizing their happiness over our own. We start by recognizing that we cannot be happy if we are unhappy with our spouses, our children, or ourselves. We then need to make sure that we prioritize their happiness, no matter what we need ourselves.

Our children need our love and care. They need us to be available for them. They need our attention and our presence. This is where it gets tricky.

Because the pursuit of material happiness has made us feel disconnected from them, we often end up trying to force them to behave in the same manner we want to live. We tell them what we want from them, instead of listening to them. This isn't a solution.

Instead of forcing them to become who we want them to be, we need to learn to accept them as they are. We need to let them live and be themselves without fear of judgment or criticism. This is something that many parents struggle with when it comes to their children, and it's something that most kids struggle with when it comes to their parents.

It begins with our relationship with our spouse.

We are the only one who truly knows us and has our best interests in mind. We can learn to accept our spouse, flaws and all.

When we become accepting of ourselves, we can begin to accept our partners.

Our spouse can't make us happy, but they can certainly teach us how to find happiness and learn to share it with others. The same is true of our children.

Children don't deserve to have parents that force them to be someone they're not. Instead, we need to learn how to accept them for who they are, and love them for who they are.

We can't make them be who we want them to be, but we can