How To Have A Happy Family

1) It's Important to Eat Dinner Together

Children who eat supper with their family do better in almost every parameter.

Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More: The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More:

Children who eat supper with their family are less likely to drink, smoke, use drugs, become pregnant, or develop eating issues, according to new study. Children who enjoy family dinners have greater vocabularies, better manners, healthier diets, and more self-esteem, according to additional studies. The most comprehensive study on the subject, a University of Michigan report that looked at how American children spent their time between 1981 and 1997, found that the amount of time children spent eating meals at home was the single most important predictor of better academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems. Mealtime had a greater impact than school, studying, attending religious events, or participating in sports.

Doesn’t work for your family’s schedule? It doesn’t have to be dinner. And it doesn’t have to be every night.

Via The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More:

Many of the benefits of family mealtime can be enjoyed without sitting down together every night. Even the folks at Columbia University’s center on addiction, the ones responsible for a lot of the research on family dinner, say having joint meals as infrequently as once a week makes a difference.

2) Pass On Your Family's History

Children who are familiar with the stories of their forefathers and mothers have stronger self-esteem and a greater sense of control over their life.

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In the summer of 2001, Marshall and Robyn asked those questions to four dozen families and documented some of their dinner table talks. They then matched the results of the children's examinations to a battery of psychological tests and came to some shocking findings. The greater their sense of control over their life, the better their self-esteem, and the more successfully they felt their families functioned, the more youngsters understood about their family's past.

I've talked about the power of story before. Children benefit greatly from having a family story.

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"The most wholesome story," Marshall said, "...The fluctuating family narrative is what it's called. 'Dear, let me tell you, our family has had its ups and downs. We established a family-owned firm. Your granddad was a community leader. Your mother served on the hospital's board of directors. We did, however, experience some obstacles. You have an uncle who was arrested at one point. A home burned down in our neighborhood. Your father was laid off. But, no matter what occurred, we always remained a family.'

Marshall and Robyn believe that children who have the most balance and self-confidence in their life have a strong "intergenerational self." They understand that they are a part of something larger than themselves.

3) Reduce Stress

It's not simple, I know, but it's the most important thing that children desire from their parents.

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Ellen Galinsky, the president of the Families and Work Institute and the author of Mind in the Making, asked children in a poll of a thousand families, "If you were allowed one wish about your parents, what would it be?" Most parents expected their children to answer they wanted to spend more time with them. They were mistaken. The children's top request was for their parents to be less exhausted and anxious.

...Research has found that parental stress affects children's brains, depletes their immune systems, and raises their chances of obesity, mental disease, diabetes, allergies, and even tooth decay.

Here’s how to reduce stress.

4) Be a part of a larger group

Religious households are happier, according to a slew of studies. What is the reason behind this?

Further research has revealed that it is the friends that a religious group gives that are important. Families are happiest when they have a group of 10 supporting mates.

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The most extensive study on the subject, published in 2010, sheds some light on why this could be. Chaeyoon Lin and Robert Putnam discovered that whether religion you follow or how close you feel to God makes no effect in your overall life happiness after analyzing surveys of over three thousand persons. It's the quantity of friends you have in your religious group that counts. The magic number is ten; if you have that many, you will be content. In other words, religious individuals are happy because they are part of a community of like-minded people.

5) Make Use Of Checklists

I’ve posted before about the amazing power of a simple checklist, as described in Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

Bruce Feiler applies the same research to helping families.

1. Create different lists for different times in the process. “Checklists have to be linked in time and space,” Pronovost said. “So I have a checklist for ICU admissions, and another for blood transfusions. You should have a checklist for one week before the trip. Then two days before you’ll likely need another. Then one more for when you’re walking out the door. But you always need time to recover, so if you have one for when you’re at the airport, it’s too late.”

2. Make it specific. “A checklist should take less than a minute to complete,” he said. “Each item should be a very specific behavior. Avoid vague language.”

3. Killer items only. “Target your checklist on things that commonly go wrong,” he told me. “If you put down things you don’t fail at, you’ll drive people crazy. This has been borne out in aviation, where accidents have been caused by checklist fatigue.”

4. The rule of seven. “I have a rule that checklists can be only seven items,” Pronovost said. “It’s the same reason our telephone numbers are seven digits. Otherwise, people will take shortcuts and items will get missed.”

5. Include the kids. “I would sit down with them and say, ‘Hey, girls, I’m trying to improve how we travel, so I made a checklist. Does this make sense to you? What else can you add?’ ”

6) Empower the youngsters!

Parental despotism must end! When children establish their own plans or at least have a say in them, they do better.

You should even give them the option of choosing their own penalties. It increases the desire to follow the rules.

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Children who organize their own time, set weekly objectives, and evaluate their own work have their prefrontal cortex and other portions of the brain strengthened, allowing them to exert better cognitive control over their life, according to researchers at the University of California and others. These so-called executive abilities help kids with self-control, avoiding distractions, and balancing the benefits and drawbacks of their options.

By picking their own punishments, children become more internally driven to avoid them. By choosing their own rewards, children become more intrinsically motivated to achieve them. Let your kids take a greater role in raising themselves.