According to studies, happy children are more likely to enjoy success in their adult life than unhappy children. It is surely every parent’s wish for their child to be happy. While the definition of happiness can vary from one parent to another, every parent delights in making the children feel loved and allow them to love others. This helps them to be strong when faced with life’s challenges. As a parent, it is possible to do a few things to ensure your child ito be happy.

How to Raise Happy Children

1. Keep Yourself Happy

According to extensive research, there is a substantial link between parents’ mood and their children’s. Children have the ability to absorb a lot of things from their parents, including moods. By attending to your own emotional well-being, you ensure that your child’s emotions remain positive. You can cater for your emotional needs by setting apart time for resting, relaxing and even nurturing your relationship with your spouse with a romantic night.

2. Cultivate Healthy Lifestyle

It is important for every human being to enjoy sleep, exercise and a healthy diet, and for happy children, it is more important. Toddlers are exercisers by nature and thus you should give the child ample time and space to play and remain active. Also, ensure you pay attention to your child’s need for schedules. While most kids will enjoy any random schedules, most kids prefer a set schedule which allows them to know what is coming next.

It is also important to pay close attention to the connection between certain foods and your child’s moods. For some kids, sugar not only gives them energy boosts, but it can also affect their moods and even cause aggressive behavior. Food sensitivities and allergies also play a major role in the child’s moods and behavior.

3. Praise Your Children Often

While you cannot always praise your child for everything, you need to praise them for the right stuff. Do not make them feel as though they have to accomplish something to gain your approval. The goal of parenting is to help your child to foster a growth mind-set. You should make the child believe achievement is attained when one works hard and through practice. Happy children who have cultivated a growth mind-set have the ability to do better in life and are likely to enjoy life as they are not too worried about what others will think.

4. Keep Close Connections with Your Children

It is very important to make your child feel connected to both the parents and other family members. A connected childhood fosters happiness in the child’s life. Connectedness is the feeling of being loved, understood, acknowledged and wanted. When these needs are met, your child will be free from emotional distress, risky behaviors and suicidal thoughts. Offer your child love unconditional and ensure they feel it and they are happy. You can increase your connection by holding the child as much as possible, responding to cries with empathy, reading aloud to them, laughing together, etc.

5. Cultivate the Right Attitude Towards Success and Failure

If you really want to build your child’s self-esteem, try to compliment them less and focus more on offering opportunities that allow them to learn new skills. Mastery, not praise, is the right foundation to build your child’s self-esteem. Building self-esteem for kids under the age of four is quite easy since everything they do is a chance to master a new skill. It is difficulty for parents to see their children doing too much, but you cannot let them do little since very few skills are mastered perfectly in the first try. In the process of whether they fail or succeed at an activity, they can master the skill, learn to practice and cultivate right attitude toward failure and success.

6. Let the Child Feel Needed

The happiness of your children and even yourself as an individual depends mostly on the feeling of being needed. Without the feeling, humans fear that they may be excluded and forgotten. Human beings have an innate need of belonging and feeling needed. Make your children feel a part of the family and make them know that they play a big role in the family from an early age. Give them a responsibility that they can be accountable for the house chores and demonstrate the need for them. This gives them a sense of belonging, responsibility and also happiness.

7. Cultivate an Attitude of Gratitude

According to studies, happiness is strongly linked to the feeling of gratitude which leads to emotional well-being. Studies have also shown that individuals who keep daily and weekly gratitude journals are more optimistic and make progress towards their goals. While it is unrealistic for a child to keep a journal, it is important for parents to make it a habit each day to teach their kids to be grateful for something that has happened during the day. You need to set time for gratitude sessions and make it a habit for your child.

8. Cultivate an Optimistic Attitude

It is important to teach your children to be optimistic from an early age. This saves you, as the parent, a lot of stress when they become teenagers as they are unlikely to become surly. According to statistics, teenagers who grow up being taught how to look at issues from a positive angle are less likely to fall into depression. Optimism is related to happiness, the more optimistic your kids are, the happier they will be. Besides, optimists are more successful in school, more satisfied in their marriages and less likely to deal with anxiety and depression.

9. Teach Your Children to Be Hard Working

It is important for parents to avoid seeking perfection from their children and to focus more on raising hard-working children. Parents who overemphasize on the need for achievements and perfection are more likely to have depressed children instead of happy children. Anxiety and substance abuse are also commonly linked with the need to become perfect. Parents should praise effort instead of achievement. In this way, your child will not be too scared to make mistakes and will be more willing to learn new experiences through making mistakes along the way.

10. Give Children Playtime

Giving your children more time to play is equal to meditation and mindfulness for grownups. Playtime makes it possible for kids to learn and grow. There is really no need to follow when it comes to offering kids playtime. All you need to do is find the ideal time for your kids to enjoy play and be happy.

If you find that your children are not happy, here is a cartoon video that is really funny and interesting: