Children & Happiness - Magic? What Magic?

Excerpted from
The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness: Five Steps to Help Kids Create and Sustain Lifelong Joy
By Edward M. Hallowell, M.D.

Beyond food, clothing, and shelter, the single greatest need in a child's life is for emotional security, or what I call connectedness. Connectedness creates the magic.

I borrow the word magic from Selma Fraiberg, whose classic book The Magic Years remains one of the best books on early childhood ever written.

I resist defining what I mean by magic, because it varies so widely from person to person. The magic of your childhood was not the same as the magic of mine, nor is it the same as the magic of your children's. Even among your children, the magic varies from child to child. But it almost always finds its origin, its genie's bottle, in some kind of connection, some kind of loving bond.

Childhood can be-and should be-a time of magic for all children, everywhere. Think for a moment. Close your adult, seen-it-all eyes and think back, seeing the world through the eyes of a child, when everything was new.

Remember when. Before you grew up. Before you learned what adults think about giants and gnomes and grinches and fairies. There was a time-you had it once, so did I-when days were much longer than they are for us now, and tomorrow never seemed to come, especially if you wanted it to, but that didn't matter because there was always something somewhere to look forward to or someone to get into mischief with or some cookie jar somewhere that had at least a few crumbs left in it for you to make off with.

Do you remember when your toys were all you ever needed? Or when one doll could occupy you for hours? Or when nail polish was about as exciting a substance as was ever invented? Or when a stuffed animal, or better vet an array of stuffed animals, gave you the warmth you needed when you were angry at the rest of the world? Or when your brother could turn a two-inch plastic figure he found in a drain on the street into a hero with superpowers? And when a frail, old grandma could make you feel safer and better than ten million dollars could do today?

There was a time when everything we needed could be found in a tattered, chewed-up, stained blanket or in a friend nobody liked but us or in a cozy comer with an old comic book or a Hollywood magazine. We didn't think about meeting our needs, we just tried to meet them.

But what actually were our needs? What does a child need most?

What children need is not all that complicated. What it takes to activate the magic of childhood is not all that complicated. Love activates the magic of childhood.

The magic itself is complicated-that's why I call it magic, having no idea how precisely it works-but setting it in motion is simple enough. The magic is mysterious, but getting it started is not. We know what to do. All we have to do is love. And no one is easier to love than a newborn baby. Just let the love flow. Trust in its power. That is what we parents need to do.

It is easy to forget how important emotional security and connectedness are and focus on prodding our children to achieve or simply to behave themselves. That's because, minute to minute, a parent's job is to maintain order and do what has to be done. But as much as we have to do, and as busy as we are, let us parents never, ever forget how deeply children need to feel that they are safe and that they are loved.

We grown-ups, with our education, sophistication, and distance from our own days as a child, can forget the pure joy of feeling safe and loved. If you are lucky enough to have had that when you were a child, simple moments of curl-up-in-bed-and-give-me-a-hug love, then you are blessed. If you didn't have it, then you know the ache of having missed it. One of the best ways I know to make up for having missed it is to give it to a child yourself. Suddenly that hole inside you gets filled.

Struggles and the hard knocks can be part of the magic. As long as there is unconditional love somewhere, the magic permeates and swells the seeds of adult happiness, and the seeds soon start to germinate. Love is not all that is needed, but there is little good without it. In a context of love, the struggles and hard knocks lead to growth. If trees could talk, they'd tell you about their struggles to grow tall; but since they can't talk, just ask any adult!

While in this book I describe a method for growing the childhood roots of adult happiness, I want to stress that there is no one path that the roots of happiness always follow. Indeed, there are as many root systems as there are happy adults.

One of the major mistakes good parents make is to assume that one certain root system is best. To continue my (I hope not overextended) metaphor, these parents dig up the sapling of childhood over and over again trying to rearrange the roots just so, to comply with what they've been told is the best root system for that tree. But as any farmer can tell you, such work is best left to nature.

This is a lesson we parents learn slowly. How can we let nature take its course when it comes to our children? I am not recommending that you be passive. Not at all. The whole point of this book is to show you what you can do and to offer a program of action that works. But just as the farmer picks where to plant and adds the right fertilizer and supplies water as needed and prays for good weather and pulls out the weeds but stops short of fiddling with the roots, allowing them to grow on their own, so should we parents stop short of trying to control every last detail to fit some preconceived blueprint of a happy life, right down to insisting that only one school is best, or one peanut butter, or one sport, or one friend. Children need to make some decisions for themselves.

Being a parent is like that old game of falling backward. Once you have done all you can to make sure someone will catch you, you just have to fall back and hope for the best. You can't run around yourself to catch yourself, and you can't run around to catch your child.

This is where we rely on the magic.

To illustrate what I mean, let me tell you about a little boy I once knew. This boy had a father who was put in a state mental hospital when the boy was four years old. The psychiatrists said his father was a lost cause, so two years later his mother divorced his father. After two more years, she got married again, to a man who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic. The little boy battled with his stepfather every day. His mother was unable to stop the fights or the drinking that caused them. At a loss for what to do, she sent the boy away to a boarding school when he was ten years old. Fortunately the boy found substitute parents at the boarding school, as well as friends and activities he enjoyed. Despite having learning disabilities, the boy became a good student, went on to college and medical school, became a child psychiatrist, and is now the lucky husband of a woman named Sue and the proud father of three children, Lucy, Jack, and Tucker. Yes, the same Tucker who can't control his heightness. I was that little boy. That boy has grown up to be the man who is writing this book, thanks to the magic of his-my-childhood.

If you look at what I had to contend with-a father with a chronic mental illness; parents divorcing when I was six; an alcoholic mother; an alcoholic, abusive stepfather; and two learning disabilities-you would say the outlook for me was bleak. You would say that the seeds of adult happiness were not planted well in my childhood. If anything, you would say the seeds of adult disaster were sown.

But you would be wrong.

Despite all the difficulty I had to contend with, I still found in my childhood the very ingredients that I describe in this book that lead to happiness in adult life. I learned how to deal with adversity. I learned how to create and sustain joy. I always knew my mother and father loved me, even though my dad had to leave me due to his mental illness and my mother was very often tipsy, to use the family word. While I felt that my stepfather hated me, as I hated him, I also felt, amazingly enough, that he would have loved me and I would have loved him had we had a second chance. In retrospect, I think that feeling stemmed from the fact that I knew my mother and real father loved me unconditionally, so much so that I felt deep down inside that I was good, acceptable, and OK; if someone was treating me as if I weren't, as my stepfather often did, well, there had to be some misunderstanding. I always felt love in my life, in spite of what any given day might bring. Like drunken fights. Like watching my mother get hit. Like lewd remarks I didn't understand but knew were slimy.

Still the roots of adult happiness were growing, even though my childhood was what we call a "troubled" one. I had love from both parents, however distant those parents had to be. I had friends. I was allowed to play. I found teachers who cared. I worked hard to please them. I found things I liked to do, so I did them often. I practiced. I achieved mastery. I gained recognition from my peers and teachers. This, in turn, connected me back to the healthy part of the world, away from my troubled home.

I found a way into that healthy world and a happy life, a way that, when I was ten years old, no one would have predicted I'd find. Children will do this if given half a chance.

And if all you need is half a chance, imagine how well you can do with a full chance!

There is always, always hope.