personal reflection by Worship Associate Dawn Huebner Aug 27, 2023

(Rev. Lucy’s sermon on The Pursuit of Happiness can be found here. )

When my son, Eli, was little, I wanted him to be happy. I think that’s pretty common.

I was a child psychologist, and you might think that would give me a leg up on parenting, but you’d be wrong. I wasn’t parented with kindness or empathy, and other than not repeating my parents’ flagrant mistakes, I didn’t really know what it took to be a good parent.

I decided that Eli’s happiness would be a measure of how I was doing as a parent. If he was happy, that would mean I was on the right track, giving him what he needed.

I got kind of tangled up, though, because I assumed that what he wanted and what he needed were the same thing. You can guess where this is going: homemade burritos for breakfast, even on days that I was rushing to get to work; immediate enrollment in any activity he expressed interest in, no matter how expensive or inconvenient; bins of Lego and Playmobil lining the walls of his playroom. We didn’t wait for birthdays to buy him things because I had this idea that if I was generous with him, he would be happy and – bonus! – he’d learn to be generous with others. That isn’t exactly what happened.

The more we gave him, the more he wanted. The more I chased happiness (on his behalf), the more elusive it became.

He got to be, maybe, 9 years old, and I knew things weren’t going the way I wanted them to go, but it wasn’t until I went to a conference called something like The Entitled Child – the psychopathology of that, and how to treat it, which (spoiler alert) is more about working with parents than with kids – and I ended up sobbing in the bathroom, sure that I had ruined my child – it wasn’t until that conference that I realized we needed a major re-set.

The re-set came from that same conference. My goal, I learned, was misguided. I couldn’t choreograph ongoing happiness for Eli, nor should I try to do that. What I needed to work on, instead, was teaching him how to live with his feelings, all of them.

Nowadays this is referred to as emotional regulation, the ability to feel a feeling, whatever it is, and to manage it – not run away from it, not try to stamp it out, just kind of sit with it, tolerate it, learn to move through it. Children learn emotional regulation from their parents, and especially their parents’ ability to stay calm and empathically connected in the face of big feelings – both the parent’s feelings and the child’s.

So, that’s what I started working on. That’s what I tried to do.

And it quickly became apparent that happiness can’t exist, or exist in a meaningful way, without the ability to also feel sad, and jealous, and frustrated, and impatient, and all the other things we feel as we live our complex lives. Happiness can’t be the goal. Really, it’s more of a byproduct.

And Eli, who is now 32, is he happy? Sure. Sometimes. But that isn’t the yardstick I use, for him or for me. I’m more interested in whether he – and I – am living a full life. A meaningful life. A life that includes other people and a purpose bigger than our own needs. I think we’re both doing okay.