Raising Happiness

Generally, I am suspicious of authors who claim to offer you "x" number of simple steps to achieve something, especially if "x" is a good round number. I think a round number suggests that the author focused on quantity over quality, either diffusing powerful prescriptions with weaker assertions or truncating a longer list of powerful prescriptions to withhold worthwhile insights from the reader (perhaps for a second book?). I would imagine that the author in the first scenario does something like this:

1. He/she selects a topic and generates some prescriptions or steps
2. Based on the generated number of steps, he/she then selects a quantity of total steps as the goal for the book. Unless the generated prescriptions already add up to a nice round number, the goal quantity becomes the closest higher round number.
3. The author tries to fill in the gaps with further research and brain-scratching.

Sometimes the added content is found easily; at other times it is painstakingly generated.  But if the going gets rough yet the goal doesn't change, in my opinion, the overall content quality of the book suffers. Reading a book assembled in this way, you can usually tell when the author is reaching for content by the quality of the author's logic and logical extensions, by the amount of evidentiary support, even by the length of the argument or how well it fits (or rather doesn't fit) with the rest of the book's content.

It appears to me that Christine Carter employed this method to build content for her book "Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents".

While reading the first half of the book, I couldn't have guessed that I would arrive at this conclusion. In fact, I sincerely wanted not to. I liked the opinions and motivations expressed by the author in her introduction. Her language and reasoning depicted there gave me the sense that if I were to write a book on parenting, this would be it.

The first five simple steps were solid:

1. Happy parents are a prerequisite to a happy baby and effective parenting practices.
2. Social support and spending time with good people boosts happiness.
3. Effort and enjoyment should be valued above achievement.
4. Positive pro-social emotions (gratitude, forgiveness, etc) boost happiness.
5. Emotional intelligence and empathy enhances friendships, which are essential to happiness.

Even though all of these were discussed in the other parenting books that I've read, Carter presented them in a fresh, interesting, and genuine manner, offering practical insights informed by her parenting experiments and her mother's intuition.

It seemed that Carter had insights oozing out of her ears. Going into chapter 6, I thought that she might actually be the latter type of author (who truncates her list to achieve a desired round number). Sadly, I was mistaken.

Chapter 6 is titled "Form Happiness Habits". At approach, I thought this chapter would give prescriptions for how to best encourage and facilitate the positive activities, which make kids happy. But that may have seemed too kid-centric for Carter, who instead wanted to discuss how to routinely exert control over the kids' undesired behaviors, one step at a time, so that mommy can be happier. It's about setting "turtle goals" for the kids in changing their bad habits, where the goals are so easy that the kids can't possibly fail and/or become discouraged. It's also about vigilance in goal setting and executing the agreed upon behavior modifications. While I found some of the ideas in this chapter intriguing and potentially useful in parenting, I think that Carter's proposed system for behavior modification is too rigid and cold; the interactions it forces are inauthentic. Moreover, it seems to me that, as a mother, Carter has little patience for her children's bad habits, the formation of which can usually most accurately be blamed on the parent herself.

Chapter 7 also did not live up to my expectations: it was titled "Teaching Self-Discipline," but it offered more content on disciplining your bad kids than on teaching kids, more generally, how to be self-disciplined. What little worthwhile content I found in this chapter was better presented in Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's "Nurture Shock".

Throughout the book, Carter is not shy about sharing her spiritual beliefs and practices with her audience. I personally don't have a problem with this, so long as her prescriptions are fueled by science rather than her particular form of spirituality. However, by chapter 8, Carter was slapping me in the face with Buddhist teachings and with prescriptions made for little reason besides that, which is understood by the practitioner (ie. meditate for the purpose of learning to be present). She proclaims that children should be taught to meditate, which I find to be a ridiculous statement.

By the end of chapter 8, I was mildly annoyed with the book. I thought about not finishing it, but my curiosity kept me going. I am glad it did because I found some good ideas in chapters 9 and 10. In chapter 10, I appreciated the author's suggestion to eat dinner together, particularly because of her justification: dinnertime allows for all of the happiness steps to be practiced (aids good habit formation/ bad habit deconstruction, etc). I found her examples of how one would go about taking each step at dinner to be illustrative.

Overall, I would say Christine Carter's "Raising Happiness" is okay, with a few novel ideas and a lot of anecdotes depicting her bad parenting practices, to show she is human, after all. Read it if you'd like; I think this blog post just about sums it up tho.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Hour 1)

I joined a book club organized for a group of stay at home moms in our neighborhood. The first book on the reading list is Amy Chua's controversial "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom." This author and book have received a lot of attention recently, so I figured this reading too deserves a post on my blog. Plus, it's a fascinating topic: East vs. West: who does a better job at raising their kids and why? One woman's lived experience is hardly scientifically credible; nevertheless, Chua offers a unique perspective that I think is worth understanding. 

When I checked the library website, it estimated 250 days of wait time for Chua's book. Wow! The book club meets in a month; I don't have that kind of time! And I don't want to buy the book because I'm cheap. Thankfully, Barnes & Noble grants their nook-owning customers one hour of free access to any book on the nook once per day every day in the store. What a fantastic idea... and a wonderful way to get more of my money than if I were to simply buy this book and bring it home to read at my leisure. :)

I made it into B&N this past weekend for my first free hour, read about 70 pages, spent sixty dollars on other books, and came home with a few insights (and not one of them was about how very little self-control I have in a bookstore - that one I've known for a while). I'll share my reflections here now, and I'll do this after every hour with this book, as long as I find something blog-worthy every time (which I would expect to be the case with such a controversial book).  

Reflections from Hour #1: Amy Chua's Parenting Strategy
Chua had her daughters practicing their musical instruments (piano and violin) for 3 hours per day. Instead of getting a break on lesson days, they practiced extra hours - playing both before and after the lesson. She started them on this routine early, when each of the girls was around 3 years of age. Many of the books I've read so far emphasize the importance of imaginative play and stress the need to avoid exerting performance pressure on kids during these early years. Chua mentions this too, so she's aware of the prescription, yet she's chosen to go against it. Why? For better or for worse, she's decided that creativity and fitness are not important qualities for her kids to possess; but academic performance and musical skills are.

In this regard (as with a lot of other things), I think balance is important. Like Chua, I would want to structure some of my child's time in order to ensure they experience and learn to appreciate the intrinsic rewards that dedication and continued practice bring (while they are also acquiring skills, which will serve to increase their human capital later in life). But, as I've read, imaginative play is associated with higher executive functioning, such as concentration and self-control*, which are skills that aid the learning process as well. Therefore, I would place a bit more importance on play dates than Chua did.

* The research and benefits of imaginative play are discussed by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in "Nurture Shock" and John Medina in "Brain Rules for Baby".