three strategies that strengthen your child's capacity to experience joy

We all want the same things for our kids. We want them to grow up to love and be loved, to follow their dreams, to find success. Mostly, though, we want them to be happy. What can you do to create a home where your child's happiness will flourish? Read on for three strategies that will strengthen your child's capacity to experience joy.

Foster Connections

The surest way to promote your child's lifelong emotional well-being is to help him feel connected—to you, other family members, friends, neighbors, daycare providers, even to pets.

Don't Try to Make Your Child Happy

It sounds counterintuitive, but the best thing you can do for your child's long-term happiness may be to stop trying to keep her happy in the short-term.

To keep from overcoddling, recognize that you are not responsible for your child's happiness, Harris urges. children who never learn to deal with negative emotions are in danger of being crushed by them as adolescents and adults.

Once you accept that you can't make your child feel happiness (or any other emotion for that matter), you'll be less inclined to try to "fix" her feelings—and more likely to step back and allow her to develop the coping skills and resilience she'll need to bounce back from life's inevitable setbacks.

Nurture Your Happiness

While we can't control our children's happiness, we are responsible for our own. And because children absorb everything from us, our moods matter. Happy parents are likely to have happy kids, while children of depressed parents suffer twice the average rate of depression, Murray observes. Consequently, one of the best things you can do for your child's emotional well-being is to attend to yours: carve out time for rest, relaxation, and, perhaps most important, romance. Nurture your relationship with your spouse. "If parents have a really good, committed relationship," Murray says, "the child's happiness often naturally follows."