The Facts Behind Raising a Happy Family

Everyone wants the best for their children, it’s a natural parental instinct to care for your child in the most nurturing way you know and see fit. The best and most logical way to do that is to use the facts of science to determine the right way to parent with your own parenting skill set. Science has opened a lot of doors throughout the years, providing vital information that corresponds to parenting styles and the outcome of raising happy kids. Here are the facts:

Facts

Raising a child to be a happy and sustainable adult isn’t as hard as most people make it out to be, it is the initial memory of what is positive to your child’s development and what is negative that makes the 18 years so difficult.

As long as you brush up on some reading, obtain the essential building blocks of knowledge needed for positive parenting , and remember to analyze everything through the developmental aspect of things, then ensuring your child will grow up to be happy and functional is almost guaranteed.

Co-parent

 

A very sad but true study was done recently that concluded children lacking their biological father or just a father figure from a young age were 45% more likely to develop depression later in life than children that grew up with a mother and father figure together.

But just because a child has both roles present in their lives doesn’t always mean they are happy. Another recent study has shown the response from a child’s father to the child at a young age can shape the relationship and behavior of the child within further development in life.

Rejection being the key component of this affect, rejecting your child, especially frequently and without logical explanation, will not only cause tension in the father to child relationship, but also in the future of whether or not the child will grow up to be happy in life.

The most effective and science backed way to be the most positive consists of these pretty standard and easy basics. You need to listen to your child and respond with positivity and understanding, this way you can better suit their needs. A close relationship is needed to establish the father to child aspect of your family, as well as establish that dad is a friendly authority figure.

Once those basics are taken care of the father needs to set appropriate rules and discuss what freedoms the child has like video games or riding their bike throughout the neighborhood. The role a father plays is a big key to if your child will be a happy satisfied adult or not.

Nurturing environment

Whether a child feels nurtured at home or not can affect the size of their brain later in life. A study done on preschoolers found that children with supportive parents have on average 10% bigger brains than children with non nurturing parents.

This is because when a mother is properly nurturing her child the hippocampus in the brain is being stimulated and stressed to grow, just like a muscle in the gym. When this happens a child’s hippocampus will be properly developed by the time they are ready to start school, ensuring the proper memory and stress aspects needed to participate in school based activities.

The best way to make sure your child is feeling nurtured enough, is to make it a daily routine to nurture and love your child in ways they know is nurturing. Whether that be hugs and kisses at bed time, or tucking your child in to bed like a mummy, make sure your child knows and feels that you are correctly nurturing them to their satisfaction.

Marriage relationship

 

Another surprising study concluded that children who are exposed to divorce, domestic disputes, domestic violence, and other forms of unhealthy parenting are under the same amount of stress as an active soldier in war. This has been concluded to affect children up to the age of 12, and can have drastic recurring issues later in life, sharing the same possible side effects as an active distressed soldier in combat, most common being PTSD.

But this doesn’t just go with visible domestic violence, but also with loud arguments. Not only do children exposed to violence and domestic disputes have a chance of developing PTSD later in life, if they are experiencing this kind of behavior with large amounts of yelling that can be heard through walls and closed doors, science says that child will not only have emotional troubles, but also struggle in school, be more likely to do drugs, and have a hard time keeping relationships whether that be friendly or romance.

Out of everything science has laid out on the table that has to do with raising happy kids, none of them can compare to this devastating statistic: The average divorce rate in the United States is 50%, that means nearly half of every marriage will end in divorce.

Putting that statistic into a major perspective, if half of every marriage ends in divorce, than half of every family is being torn apart, those families are then scaring the children within the family, which will lead to possible PTSD and when those children grow up to get married the cycle will continue through the scarring of the PTSD, ending in divorce just like the parents.

This is a big problem in America, and it honestly gets worse when couples don’t want to separate to try and help their child. This doesn’t help in most cases due to the even more intense violence brought on by an extended toxic relationship.

Divorce counseling is the best way to organize a non traumatic separation that doesn’t scar a child, these are organized by professionals and they will help sort out everything needed along with ensuring the children are not left to crumble away with stress. This can be a hard topic for some to swallow, but just remember, everything is for the kids and you are the only one who can make or break your own child.

Purpose in Life

This can be on 2 levels, the child and the parent. As a parent you need to have your own time, some of us work, some of us stay home, and others do a mixture of both. You need time to relax and do what you want, that can be taking up a weekly pottery class, or just a little reward for yourself like a glass of wine.

It is important that you feel satisfied in life, if you feel you have a purpose in life you will be an easier going person almost instantly. Feeling good about life isn’t just for your own health as a parent, but it puts an impression on your children. I bet you didn’t know your child cares if you are happy or not! Yes, it’s true, the way you perceive life is almost always exactly the way your child will view their own life when they get to an old enough age to realize what life is really like.

This is important information when you look at the unemployment patterns in struggling families, an unemployed father has a 50% chance of influencing his offspring into putting off work until it is drastically needed and struggling to build their way back up. This is another sad statistic that will only continue to repeat itself unless action is taken from the source. Which leads us to the next topic, a child’s purpose in life. Believe it or not, but an 8 year old can feel if their life has purpose to them or not.

Although their idea of purpose may be a little off from what we as parents see as purpose in life, but those kids need some sort of purpose. Activities and teams are the best way to do this because you can start them as young as 2 years old. Soccer practice, gymnastics, cub scouts, dance class, after school clubs, etc., all of these are prime examples of ways to introduce purpose into your child’s life and ensure their overall happiness.

Exercise

 

Almost everyone has been told that exercise will make you a happier, more fulfilled person, even as an adult. So as a child this is even better, oftentimes exercise is confused with play and some parents try to limit playtime shorter then it needs to be.

It is important to stimulate the brain at a young age through healthy exercise, when the human body is exercising the body releases endorphins that react with the receptors in your brain triggering a positive feeling. This essential triggering helps prevent depression in children and adults. Along with proper exercise, limiting screen time can be extremely beneficial in preventing depression in your child.

A 7 year study concluded with vital evidence that each hour of screen time watched by a child can be calculated into an 8% increase in possible depression in later years. This means the longer a child watches tv, the more likely they are to be depressed.

Optimism is Key

A major curve in parenting nowadays is the lack of motivation and optimism that parents teach their children. Most children don’t know what optimism is, and those that do don’t really have an interest. This typically goes along with generosity, a child who is thought to be generous is often very open to suggestion and optimism, even at ages as young as 5.

Science has found that generosity is natural and it doesn’t matter what background you come from, everyone starts out as a caring person, that’s just human nature. When you begin to teach caring aspects to your child they are already 20% less likely to develop depression in their teen years.So when it comes to raising happy kids, most of the time it is just doing the right thing as a parent and preventing the harsh things that are not needed. If you are on top of your parenting and keep an eye out for all the possible disasters, you should have no problem raising a happy and healthy child, using the correct information and practices of course!