Jan. 13, 2026
What is happiness and success when it comes to our kids?
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Ask Rachel anything We all want our kids to be happy and successful but what does that mean? In today's episode, I'm joined by Giselle Goodwin, author of Can Women Really Have it All? to talk about our definitions of success and happiness, and how they impact the way we parent. In this changing landscape where what we inherit can mean more than how hard we work what expectations should we have, and what message should we be giving our kids about their future if we want them to be happy?...
We all want our kids to be happy and successful but what does that mean? In today's episode, I'm joined by Giselle Goodwin, author of Can Women Really Have it All? to talk about our definitions of success and happiness, and how they impact the way we parent.
In this changing landscape where what we inherit can mean more than how hard we work what expectations should we have, and what message should we be giving our kids about their future if we want them to be happy? Do we have much of impact anyway?
Eldest daughter syndrome:
https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/eldest-daughter-syndrome-and-the-trouble-with-parentification/
The Family Dynamic and the Role of our Community in our Success:
https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/141-success-what-nobody-tells-us-about-the-role-of-siblings-are-parents-that-important/
Inheritcocracy: How Society has Changed the Rules of Success
https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/136-society-has-changed-are-education-and-hard-work-less-important-now-than-parents/
Dr David Yeager: 10 to 25 'Status and Respect'
https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/motivation-how-to-motivate-your-teenager-and-why-blame-and-shame-doesnt-work/
Perfectionism:
https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/perfectionism-help-your-teen-and-yourself-overcome-the-need-to-be-perfect/
High expectations episode and blog:
Episode: https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/standards-setting-high-expectations-without-the-pressure/
Blog: https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/blog/setting-expectations-without-piling-on-the-pressure/
Why mothers aren't happy:
https://www.teenagersuntangled.com/motherhood-and-careers-can-women-really-have-it-all/
Giselle Goodwin:
@gisellegoodwinwrites on Instagram and YouTube
https://substack.com/@gisellegoodwin
teenagersuntangled.substack.com
Please hit the follow button if you like the podcast, and share it with anyone who might benefit.
You can review us on Apple podcasts by going to the show page, scrolling down to the bottom where you can click on a star then you can leave your message.
Please don't hesitate to seek the advice of a specialist if you're not coping. When you look after yourself your entire family benefits.
My email is teenagersuntangled@gmail.com
My website has a blog, searchable episodes, and ways to contact me:
www.teenagersuntangled.com
Find me on Substack https://Teenagersuntangled.substack.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teenagersuntangled/
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/teenagersuntangled/
You can reach Susie at www.amindful-life.co.uk
04:21 - Generational and Personal Perspectives on Success
08:56 - The Evolution of Success Metrics
12:25 - Defining Happiness and Success: Academic Perspectives
15:29 - Behaviors That Enhance Well-Being
22:40 - The Role of Autonomy in Parenting
27:48 - The Impact of Intensive Parenting
39:41 - The Future of Work and Skills for Success
44:04 - Circumstances That Influence Well-Being
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Rachel, hello and welcome to teenagers untangled the audio hug for anyone helping someone going through the tween and teen years. I'm Rachel Richards, journalist, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now, what do we want for our kids? Do we tell them, I just want you to be happy? Or do we say, I wish you every success in life? What does that even mean? Well, last year, I interviewed Giselle Goodwin, who's a mother, author and recovering eldest daughter overachiever, about why mothers don't seem to be happy with their lot, and she said she'd love to talk more about what happiness and success actually means to us. So she set up a discussion that we're both sharing on our platforms, and in it, we cover how definitions of happiness and success have changed as the economics of our societies have changed. What behaviors lead to happiness, how much of it is genetic, and what we parents can be doing to help our kids flourish without burdening them with unreasonable expectations. We'd love any comments, disagreements, thoughts on the subject, because we're all learning all the time, and I don't have the answer to everything. So message teenagersuntangled@gmail.com
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and now on to the discussion. Good morning, Rachel. I am so happy to be chatting to you today. So as I know, you know, I'm like your biggest fan girl. I listen all the time to your teenagers untangled podcast. I get all my top tips from there. And we obviously recorded an episode last year all around my work in relation to women work well, being what's working, what needs to work better, etc. And I've got a whole bee in my bonnet for this year around the future of work and what that's going to look like in the digital age.
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But what I really wanted to unpick with you today, and it was inspired by some of your previous episodes, which I've loved around kind of children and success and value setting and happiness, and this idea of happiness versus success, what really is it we want for our children? What do we want for ourselves? What should it look like? So it's kind of like a proper, deep and meaningful I want to get in with you today.
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And yeah, you're kind of my ideal person to speak to about this. I love this question about happiness and success and how we define it, and I think we really should pay attention to it, because we as parents all want our kids to feel successful and happy, but we may not be giving the right information to our kids when we are talking generally about the way the world works and the way we think things work, and our kids are picking up on everything we say and we do. You know, it doesn't matter what we lecture them with everything we're talking about in our whole family will infuse our kids with a sense of what that means. So our values and our understanding of our values really, really matters. So I always urge people to really get to grips with, you know, what are your values? How do you view happiness and success and what you want for your kids, before you try and sort of convey it to them, because you may be giving the wrong messages. And the reason I say that, Well, the reason I say that is because, you know, you listen to the Eliza Philby interview, which I thought was brilliant. And Eliza Philby wrote the book in heritocracy,
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and she's a historian, and what she talked about was the way that things have changed, and we're all older, we have a view of happiness and success that is quite possibly outdated, and part of that is because, you know, the things we used to judge as successful. So having a good job, you're owning a house, you know, all those sort of work hard at school, and then you get all of these things, they don't really work anymore. You know, our wages have stalled since 2008 housing costs and rent have gone up in comparison to our wages and university because it's become much, you know, open to so many. It's not only just much more expensive, it doesn't necessarily pay off the way it used to. So we need to start thinking like, Okay, that was how I grew up thinking about it.
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But what does it mean now?
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Yeah, yeah.
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And what does it mean in general? I definitely grew up in that era. So I also think our parenting can be informed by how we were parented as well. So part of it's generational, so, like, if I think about my own personal story, so I grew up in the 80s, and we talked about this in our previous episode, didn't we this idea of having it all and, you know, and the having it all kind of success stuff was a reasonably, I guess, materialistic thing. So it was, you know, it was, there was academic success, and there was financial success, and, as you say, the House and the car and all this kind of stuff. And, yeah, I don't know whether that value set, as you say, always sets you up in the right way. A and like so if I look at my parents were teachers. And I also had, have you ever heard of this oldest girl thing that goes around?
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Of course, yes, I've done one on it. I've done an episode on on the Yes,
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it's so good. I mean, it's not an official psychological term, but oh my god, I relate like, Hello, I'm the eldest of three, as I say, grew up in the 1980s with this. My parents were teachers, so this kind of prescription, which partly came from me, I think, in terms of my position of the family and eldest daughter. But you know, success, and therefore whether you're worthwhile and whether you're valuable can be, can be, kind of linked to how successful you are, and what is it therefore that we want for our kids, and how do we parent them so that we're not necessarily setting them up with this idea that unless you do, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, therefore you're not worthwhile, you're not valuable, or whatever. And it's interesting. I look at my husband's parenting style, and he talks about the fact his his mom, his mom, was very kind of laissez faire, kind of, you know, get on with it. If you you, you know, we trust you to go and do whatever you're going to do, kind of very kind of low expectations. And therefore, his parenting style is quite like that, you know, they're going to do what they're going to do, leave them to it. None of this helicopter parenting, you know, rubbish. And his brother, though, interestingly, will say stuff like, his brother wishes he was pushed more. It's funny to get this balance. So his brother will say stuff like, Well, I wish mom and dad did push us more. Wish they had. I wish mum had made me, for instance, continue with piano lessons and not let me give them up. So it's funny how parenting, it's such a mix, isn't it, of where we've come from, our value sets growing up and kind of what we grew up in. And I suppose what I've been trying to do is make sense of all this. So this is my kind of inheritance, so to speak, for as a, you know, Gen X, growing up in the 80s with this kind of prescription, was to then spend my life investigating or then go on having sold my businesses, reach burnout, all that kind of stuff, go on to do a PhD in well being.
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So, yeah, I then had this deep dive into, really, is it about success? What does success mean?
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What's the bigger picture?
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Actually, I want to understand what happiness looks like. And you know, when we say, what do we want for our kids? Isn't that what all parents typically say?
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They just want them to be happy.
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I mean, terrible burden on that. Oh, it's a terrible burden to prolong kids. I want you to be happy. What is that? And I love that, what you say about the way that you saw your position in the family, and the way your husband and his brother saw the situation, because the truth is, not one single child in a family will be parented the same way, because you have children at different stages in your life, inevitably, and the first child will have the weight of expectations, and you'll make all your mistakes with the first child as well. And you know, as they go through quite often, the you know, like the third, fourth child, you know, they're just kind of less than hope. The dog doesn't get it, and it's just, you know you're you will be having a different relationship with those children. And my younger daughter, she has actually said, I feel like people have too low expectations of me and and this was a while ago, and I have actually adjusted my parents, my parenting as a response to that.
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And I think that getting feedback from your kids about where they see their position does really, really matter. And I think a lot of parents are very scared of getting feedback from their kids because they're not sure themselves of whether they can take it and whether the feedback will be something that breaks them. And I think that kids, we need to understand what our kids need, and the reason for that is what happiness is, because happiness and success are entirely related to your sense of autonomy and your status and respect. And I say that because there are two there were two people I interviewed.
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There's Ned Johnson, who wrote the self driven child, and then there's David Jaeger, who's one of the greatest social scientists working today, and he wrote motivation 10 to 25 how to motivate young people. And this is a great book for even in the workplace, so I highly recommend it for anyone who's running teams. And both of them talk about the critical importance of autonomy, and that from the age of 10, or, you know, pube, the onset of puberty, we need to feel like we actually giving something to our community, that we're giving something back, that we matter. And Jennifer brenney Wallace is bringing out a book this year who I'm going to interview her. Hers is all about mattering. We're also.
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Cling around this whole thing, that happiness and success is dependent on our sense of mattering and status and respect is the same. It's kind of the same thing, like, do I matter in society? And those old things I talked about the Eliza Philby stuff, where she was saying that lots of those things have gone or they're going well. Things like being able to own a house, the material, right? All these, yes, all those material, sort of markers of success, which you could argue were ephemeral anyway they, I mean, they buy you freedom to an extent, but they actually all about sort of being able to mark your position in your in your group. There are other ways that we can measure our happiness and success which are much more meaningful and much more they will last much, much longer.
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Yeah, because in the context of what Eliza Philby talks about and this idea of inheritocracy, she's basically saying the world has changed, and this kind of merit thing where we grew up, you work hard, therefore you will achieve financial success.
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And therefore that's kind of the prescription doesn't work anymore. Because just, you know, it's the economy. It's kind of not how it works nowadays. And actually, what we're finding is that people who have financial success tend to have inherited it. And the kind of drivers that we used to say in terms of, do well in school, get good grades, get a good job, then you'll be fine. That's not really the formula anymore. That's kind of her, her research and arguments, isn't it? And so, yeah. So what is it that we are saying to our kids? So this, all of what you've said there, ties back entirely to my research so this so in terms of the research, I looked at one of the professors that I quote, and again, I love his work, Professor Paul Dolan.
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If you dig deep into the literature and the academic literature around happiness and success, in terms of the definition of happiness, the academics kind of call it well being. So what are we looking for in terms of well being? But they use the term well being interchangeably with happiness, and they say that well being or happiness is defined as a combination of pleasure and purpose, and that's Dolan's definition. And there's lots of other ones that you can go into as well. And they bring different constructs in in terms of, as you say, autonomy and various other things, environmental mastery and other things. But I really like that definition of saying it's pleasure and it's purpose. And the kind of terms they use, they say the pleasure part, they say is hedonic well being. So hedonic, like we think about it, is this bit of joy. You know?
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What you get pleasure from? Is it that ice cream? Is it that walk along the beach? Is it that chat with friends? Where do you get your pleasure from? Right?
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So pleasure is important and but then there's no point chasing a life of simply pleasure, and you also need the purpose. And without that balance of pleasure and purpose. It doesn't work.
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And again, the purpose, the term for that is eudaimonia. So you have hedonia and eudaimonia. And the Eudaimonia piece of it is quite big, actually. It's not even just purpose. And it goes right back to Aristotle. And Aristotle talks about living a life. Eudaimonia is living a life that is true to your sense of self, your values, your virtues, your purpose, and that ties in, doesn't it beautifully with what we're talking about in terms of, right? What is it we want for our kids? We can't just send them off into the world to go be happy, right? Because he says, We know life doesn't work like that, but then setting them up with this idea of, go be successful and go earn a lot of money, that also is a recipe for disaster and unmet expectations and, you know, pressure and all the rest of it. So how do we get under the nuance of what is it that we want them to do? And again, what do we want for ourselves as well. So this is what they say, a life that is a life well lived, where we are thriving and flourishing. And again, there's loads of research on this. There's a guy called Martin Seligman who's a professor of positive psychology. So he's kind of the big they call him the father of positive theory, actually, isn't he? And so, like, he's got loads of these well being quizzes online, if you, if you ever look it up, and you can kind of really dig into all these different metrics around what it is we need for a good, flourishing life. And so I just found, yeah, I found that that really, really interesting. And one of the other bits that I just loved that came out of the this well being research was this idea that some of happiness is actually we're predisposed to being kind of either a little bit more optimistic or not, but some of it is around our behaviors. And there are certain behaviors. We can instill in our lives that will actually improve our happiness. So our happiness point isn't just necessarily set. We can do things that actively improve our
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lives. And I Yeah, so what sort of things would you
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Okay, so if we start with the genetic piece of it, so what's really interesting is around, depending on the study that you look at, it's between 30 to 50% so a third to half of happiness they're saying is genetic, which I thought was, whoa, yes.
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And I keep asking my kids, are you a ticker or an Eeyore? Yeah?
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Yeah, yes, you're either a little bit so there's a gene called the Five HTT gene, and you're actually predisposed to being exactly as you say, a little bit trigger, more trigger, or a little bit more Eeyore. And that's kind of fixed, but it's not fait accompli. And the wonderful bit is actually some of our happiness is around circumstances, and we can maybe talk about that in a bit as well around money and time and all these different things, and where you live, and if you're married and if you have kids, some of it circumstances, but a minority of circumstances, actually a really big chunk of it, then is around behaviors.
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And there's 10 specific behaviors, and I go into them in my book. Can women really have it all? And I talk about these behaviors, I talk about them actually in relation to working moms, interestingly, but they're generic behaviors that they've defined in positive psychology around, what can we do to increase our well being in everyday life? So there's 10 of them join me to list them.
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Yeah, yes, please. I'm desperate to hear them.
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So they're under this mnemonic, great dream. Okay, so the first one is about giving, which you alluded to earlier. So doing kind things for others, having part of a sense of community and community cohesion, doing to others and acts of kindness, there is loads of data on doing kind things for others actually reaps the benefits for ourselves. You could argue that it's almost a selfish thing to do kind of things for others. Yes, makes you feel so good yourself. So giving is the first one. The second one is relating. So connection. So we are wired for connection, as the wonderful Brene Brown always talks about and we are. This is how we've evolved. It's to do with safety.
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It's to do with community. We need other people. So positive relationships with others and actively developing them is the same thing exercising. So taking care of your body, eating well, exercising, looking after yourself physically. And again, there's really good neuro scientific evidence now that says that actually, if you make your body feel good, your mind will then feel good. So we used to think, you know, you could think yourself into better well being. And actually, sometimes that just goes round and round and round in your head.
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Actually, if you can trick your body somatically into feeling good, it gives you those endorphins, and then your head feels good as well. So exercise is really important. Mindfulness is another really big one. So they call this that's the A awareness, living life mindfully, trying out is the fifth one. So keep learning new things is really important. So again, staves off dementia, keeps us active, keeps us engaged. You get that little dopamine hit from trying something new, and that sense of kind of satisfaction and learning and achievement. So trying new things is number five. Number six is direction.
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So actually having goals to set and to look forward to, and this ties into your purpose element of well being as well. You know, we say we have the pleasure and the purpose. And the purpose bit is really important for us, and they do have to be. And again, we can go into this some more.
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But aligned goals, goals that are aligned with you, your inherent skill sets, your inherent interests and and having something to kind of give you a direction and look forward to is really, really important.
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And number seven is resilience and having the ability to bounce back. And this is something we can practice. This is something that is a learned behavior.
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Yeah. And I think that's something that, again, we can have a long conversation about children and resilience and how we instill that, because I think again, it comes back to autonomy, doesn't it as well, and some of the helicopter parenting stuff that I'm super guilty of, yeah, is not necessarily good for our kids.
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Number eight is emotions and looking for what's good, and that's about cultivating this positive mindset. Number nine is about acceptance, and I really like this one. I talk about it a lot in the book. It's around a little bit around authenticity, but just accepting yourself.
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Yes, for who you are, being kind to yourself, this idea of self compassion. And again, that's that's learned. And I don't think we always do that. That voice in your head, oh, why did I do that? How do you talk to yourself in your head? That's really
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big, and a lot of that comes from the people around us who are family, yeah, where
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did that voice come from? And why does it speak to you in that way? Yeah.
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And then the final one is meaning be part of something bigger look for kind of want the bigger purposes. And that's just about you getting really, really clear on what that is for you.
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And your stuff might not, well, won't be the same as everybody else. You know. You're a unique human being in the world. And so for me, it's about encouraging our kids to permanently look for this stuff. What is it that lights me up? What is it for me?
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And you know, it may take a lifetime of self discovering.
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It's a journey, isn't it, to find these different things, but I think what's really helpful is to have that framework of knowing these are behaviors.
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These are 10 scientifically research backed behaviors that point us in a direction that if we are mindful and aware that these 10 Things can give us increased well being, then we can go and actively practice them.
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Yeah, I mean, there's so many things I'd like to say about those points you made and, you know, just picking up on the last one, when you're talking about this sort of creatively looking for things that make us grow and and enjoy life that was in in the disengaged team, that's what Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson talked about, and that that's the missing piece of the puzzle, where, yes, our kids are in school, yes, they have to do the work, but what we can be doing, rather than simply giving them lots and lots of extra activities, is trying to help them be creative about other things, like, what, what lights your Fire outside of school, outside of your curriculum. And net Johnson talks about this in the self judgment child, that when we are given an opportunity to choose the things that we are interested in, let's say your kids obsess with a game, or they're obsessed with building things, whatever it is that they're doing, they are not wasting time. And he said that what happens when we focus on things that we genuinely are interested in that aren't to do with, say, a curriculum, we're still our brains are still doing the work of learning how to focus, how to solve tasks, how to be resilient, so it's not waste of time. So when you're looking at your kid thinking, Ah, but they're not doing their homework, no, it's fine, as long as they're doing something where they're focusing and they're actually growing, this is a positive thing.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I'd love you to expand a bit more on that idea that you said earlier about, you know, the pressure to be happy. So, you know, we talk about, well, you don't want either too much pressure for this financial metric of success, but then pressure to be happy as well, because Caitlin Moran tells this, you know, Caitlin Moran, I find it Yes, of course. Finally, she tells this story about her daughter. She's very open about, kind of, maybe some of the struggles of parenting teens and the struggles her children have been through. And she talks about this idea of her daughter going through this really tough, tough phase in the middle of her teenage years, and Caitlin being like, but I just want you to be happy, and her daughter being like, oh, like, the pressure to be happy, like, I'm meant to jazz hands it up all day, every day. Like, like, well, you
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run the risk of making your child feel like they're broken. If you're saying, Oh, wait, I just want you to be happy. And your child's thinking, Well, I don't know how to punch my way out of this situation. And the truth is, adolescence, for some, not all kids, but for most, is quite challenging, because you're going through an entire phase of becoming a sexual being, and more so are forming your identity. And this is no easy task. It's extremely challenging, and it will depend that the extent of the challenge will depend on the school that they're in, the people around them. There are lots and lots of reasons why this is challenging, and if you keep saying to your child, I just want you to be happy, you're not actually setting them up for success, because they're not going to be happy with a lot of the challenges that they're set, but they will build resilience. So one thing we have to remember is that what you know you mentioned resilience, we have a window of tolerance for difficult things, and when we go outside that window of tolerance, above it, we go hyper. So you know that might be anger or it might be distress, or below it, where we just become depressed or shut down like we fall and freeze any of those things. And you have we, our job is to help our kids grow that window of tolerance so that you know, because you can't think while you're outside your window of tolerance, you're just wherever you're in your head or and you have to get back. You have to drop back. Into it again by feeling safe, like knowing that you can actually conquer the challenge, like you can actually deal with the challenge. It's possible. I wrote about it recently, and where I had an exam, my a level English. I basically sat there and froze the minute I got into it. I just looked at it, and my brain went completely blank.
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And Rachel was it Math A level? Oh, my God,
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yes, it's but this is this happens. And the truth is, rather than saying to our kids, I want you to be happy, because right then they're going to go, I'm not happy. In fact, life is hell.
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There's something awful. I'm broken. No, you're not broken.
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It's a challenge. And actually, what happened for me was that I started flicking through a book.
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I found a poem that I'd never read. It was hilariously funny to me at the moment, and when I laughed, I came back into my window of tolerance, and the examiner shushed me, and I could work now, that's the thing. It's that by by having that experience, knowing that it doesn't last forever, knowing that it's a normal thing, we can actually then say, next time something happens, we say, oh, oh, actually, this is, this is, this is the way life works. It's okay. I can, I can get back inside that window and I can continue. So we want our kids to grow, but we're not going to help them grow if we're whole the whole time. We're just saying, I just want you to be happy. I just want you know we're clearing the path for them, trying to make sure they're never stressed, never upset.
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No power. We clear the way in front of them so they never have all done it experience. All done it. Just Yes, you want to see them, do you? You don't want to. And Michelle Obama has this brilliant little clip where she talks about the fact you you sit there and you watch your child about to literally smack into a brick wall. And you can see it coming, because you have all the kind of you. You have a lot more life experience than they do, and you're sat there going like it takes everything not to let them smack into that brick wall and learn their own, you know, their own ways of dealing with it, and their own lessons from that. It's Yes, I mean, parenting,
00:27:39.989 --> 00:28:37.408
it is hard, but I think part of this is when you come back to the things you've written about in your book, we as as as mothers or parents, we have to actually take ownership of our own feelings, on our own emotion, and understand that we're taking on more than we should. We're taking on more burden, you know, every now and then I think, Oh, I'm being a concierge, you know, my kid can do like, the question is, can my child do this yet? And if they can't do it yet, what's the path to them being able to do it? And the reason this matters, it's not just about us reducing our own stress, because personally, I think we're all putting too much of a burden on ourselves by trying to take the weight off our kids, but also our kids grow every time they are confronted with a difficult situation. The thing is, the balance. So we want to have high expectations and high support. So in other words, you know coming, for example, washing, you know, they've got dirty washing.
00:28:37.408 --> 00:30:26.469
Rather than saying, Go and do your washing and then making a mistake, all the colors running or whatever, you know, you go through the laundry with them and you say, right, this is how you separate things up. Here's what you know, what works for me. Do all your zips up, do the buttons up, blah, blah, you know. You take them through these stages. Don't expect them to get it right the very first time. But the fact is, if you just, if you either just hand them the washing or you keep doing it yourself, they're never going to grow. And each time they grow, they feel good about themselves. And I'm just going to mention an alien. So I was, I was doing an entire blog on having high expectations without, you know, piling on the pressure. And at that time, I was reading the diaries of her name, name, she's such an interesting character. And she was in World War One. She was evacuated to New York at the age of 12. In her diary, she'd written about how she had, I think was LUFU. She had a really, she was very ill, given time off school to stay at home, and then they gave her an extra week to recuperate. And instead of recuperating, her mother went down with the same illness, and so she then ended up having to take over everything in the family. And at that time, you weren't just, you know, you didn't have all the conveniences. She was literally darning socks. She was everything. And she said, I'm finally happy. I feel, you know, I can't give her the exact quote, but she was just saying, I finally have purpose. My life isn't my own, but I am doing something for other people, and I feel like I have an important role. And this comes back to what I was saying about status and respect. We, from a from a young age, are driven to need to offer something back to our community, to be able to to have a sense that we matter, and if you constantly taking away these difficult things from our kids and doing them ourselves, we're not actually allowing our kids to prove themselves as a useful human being and gain status.
00:30:27.609 --> 00:31:43.470
That's incredible. So true. It's so true. And you know, so my research talked about this idea that. And I don't know where it comes from, but we know that parents today, mothers in particular, are doing double the amount of primary caregiving activities with their children than they were 50 years ago. And when they talk about primary caregiving, they're meaning things like which is wonderful reading to your children, active play, taking them to activities, this kind of schedule, that kind of thing, not necessarily just the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry stuff, though, that happens obviously too the intensity of that. But yeah, so it's really interesting, isn't it? We've kind of, I don't know, do you know where that comes from, this idea that culturally, we're all doing it, and it's it's a difficult thing to get out of, I find because if all your kids are doing five sports activities a week, so the kids are doing netball, and it then necessitates your whole weekend, Saturday and Sunday, driving your different kids to netball or football or hockey or whatever it might be for different matches. How is it that you drop out of that, from a society perspective, when you're going well, all the kids friends are doing this, this is now how it works, is we are intensively parenting our kids.
00:31:43.829 --> 00:31:51.389
So how, like, I don't know, what tips do you have? I think what intensive parenting?
00:31:51.690 --> 00:32:41.490
So what's happened is we look around us and we gain our values and and our parenting, ideas of parenting from the people around us. And so it's a constantly, the game UPS all the time. You know, if all the other parents at the school are getting their kids to play football at the age of three, then you're looking at yourself thinking, Oh, my kids being left behind. Wow, this is horrific. And and so the pressure comes from that. And also there has been a change in the way people talk about parenting, and it's quite a dramatic change. So, you know, you and I grew up in an era where basically, kids were left in the back of the car while the parents went in the pub. You know, they'd be given a pack of chips and expected to just sit there. You know, we were latchkey kids. My parents, my parents were the extreme. But, you know, we I, my parents just did basically the bare minimum.
00:32:41.490 --> 00:34:55.849
You know, I was alive and and there was a range of parenting, but most of it was not intensive parenting. So, so because we become a lot more aware of parenting, and, you know, the gentle parenting movement, the helicopter parenting, everyone's talking about it. It's in the papers all the time. There's a lot of pressure to be a good parent, and women who have gone out to work, who are still parenting and doing the majority of it, feel this pressure to to not look like they've dropped the ball. So what I would say is I found the book by Susan Dominus, the family dynamic absolutely fascinating. She talks about people who've been immensely successful. When she talks about success, she's not talking about success as in, they got the, you know, the Merrill Lynch job, and then they got the car and they got the house. You know, this is not what we mean by success necessarily. It's that these are people lived by their values and strengths and did something really important for their community or the world, and looking at those family dynamics, it wasn't the parents who were constantly getting kids to all the activities and pushing them to do their homework all the time. And in fact, a lot of these parents were immigrants who didn't have any spare capacity. But what she realized, looking through, she interviewed, you know, very large range of people who'd done incredibly well. She interviewed so many people, and the truth was that these people, in these families, the parents weren't doing it all, the siblings had a dramatic impact. So siblings who felt that they could do things would would open the gates for the kids behind them. There was a sense in these families that people like us can do hard things. There was a sense that they had a sense of optimism, absolute belief that if they worked and they tried and they they they tried to do challenging things, they could overcome them. And I think what's really important is our belief in our kids ability to do things for themselves, not our belief in our ability to do things for our kids and be pushing them from behind, yeah, pushing them from behind kids and be pushing them from behind, yeah, pushing them from behind.
00:34:50.969 --> 00:35:31.509
We and so, yes, okay, so one of the so Jennifer brenney Wallace wrote a brilliant book called Never enough, and which relates to what you're talking about, which is this intensive parenting that happens in probably middle to upper class families, where they have a lot of resources, and because you have a lot of resources, you think, Well, I just need to feed it all into my kids. Let's say you pay for the best education, pay for the best tutors, pay for them, and she found in the research that she discovered that those kids had the same levels of stress and distress as kids coming from very poor backgrounds, because they they didn't have the coping skills.
00:35:27.789 --> 00:35:36.329
They felt enormous stress and and then they ended up on drugs.
00:35:31.509 --> 00:36:10.489
Alcoholism, they relied on all these other things to get through the stressful situations they found themselves in. So coming back to Susan Dominus book, this idea that what you had was you had parents that fundamentally believed in their kids and their ability to to do hard things, but they also allowed the community in. They allowed other people around them. They gathered people around them. So one of the families was a, I think it was a Chinese family who had a restaurant, and they were working all the time. The kids would come back and sit in the restaurant because they couldn't, they couldn't do anything else. They would have people in the community come and sit with their kids and tell them things and explain how to do things.
00:36:10.730 --> 00:37:08.989
And this is I talk about this my book as well, this idea of allo parenting. So Sarah blafer Hardy, who's this fabulous anthropologist, talks about the idea that we have evolved in community, and this is we're missing our village. We talk about this all the time, don't we, and so as you say, you describe that Chinese restaurant, but we evolved with not just one harassed kind of caregiver who was doing everything. 24/7 we evolved to have lots of caregivers, aunts and uncles and siblings, correct cousins, you know, you'd play with and you would learn your boundary setting from them, and you would gather information and skill sets from different people within your community, and that is how we've evolved, and that's what we're missing nowadays as well, is this bit where you've got one person trying to do it all, and then who
00:37:08.989 --> 00:37:12.710
has children.
00:37:08.989 --> 00:38:31.929
And I think we've got this sense that there's a right way to parent. We've somehow, we've, we've, we've got this idea. And then parents are looking at their their own parents, and thinking, Well, you can't do it because you don't know what you're doing. You know, I didn't like what you did. So you can't look after my kids. And then you're cutting off opportunities for our kids to grow because we're pulling it all. We're saying, Oh, I'm going to do it all because I read all the books, and I understand everything. And actually, when kids get into situations where they're with grandparents who aren't doing things the same way, they learn. They learn. I had very neglectful parents, but every time I went to someone else's house, which is what happens when you get into the teen years, you start going to other people's houses. You go, well, that's interesting. Oh, they do it like this here. And you you learn other techniques, you learn other ways of doing things. And this is something that's really like coming back to your kind of exploration that people would need to people want to explore there. There's no way to explore anymore. You know, everything's been taken but, but this is exploration for our kids, and allowing them out there, into the community, allowing them to go to other people's houses and witness other things is a positive. And bringing kids into our own homes. I had a girl come and stay with us for Christmas, and it was fascinating, because, you know, she does things differently in her home. And I always say to kids when they come around, what do you do?
00:38:31.929 --> 00:38:43.949
What do your parents do that's really good? What do you what do your parents do that you don't like? And then my kids hear it, and we all grew Yeah, you know, I don't, I don't know how to do everything.
00:38:44.969 --> 00:39:01.728
And it applies to so many things as well, doesn't it? Just that ability to put yourself out there in the world, learn from different people, and continually explore, I just say in terms of going back to the kind of success and well being.
00:38:56.688 --> 00:39:42.088
And it's that idea of, yeah, not just putting yourself on this one track and this one kind of metric of this is how we should do it. And it's, I think both believe very strongly that life should be this permanent exploration of different aspects of yourself and what you enjoy and what you don't enjoy, and having different experiences, and this journey of self discovery to figure out, right, what is this about and what works for me, and what have I learned from this? And and, yeah, that's, that's a lot of it, isn't it? This comes back to those things, trying things out, you know, keep learning new things, putting yourself out there and doing it within a sense of community, yes,
00:39:42.329 --> 00:40:42.269
and that's going to be different. So your sense of being creative and having control is going to be different when you're 16 and you're 30 and you're 70, you know these things, these changes we age. But I think coming back to, you know, what you've just said, and then thinking about our kids and how we look at them, we have to not take things personally. We have to let go a bit, and rather than thinking there's only one way through life, you know, there's only we have to get our kids to get good grades, and if they don't get great, good grades, it's over, because that's what society has been telling us. We're having a massive Shakedown. It's not true anymore. And actually, the kids who are able to be nimble and to be resourceful about their own skills and to look for opportunities are going to be the winners in the society that is coming up. There isn't a set path through it so and one of the most stressful things for a human being is low control.
00:40:42.389 --> 00:41:15.789
It's, it's, you know, Sonia LUFU Nuts model says what stresses us most is novelty, unpredictability, threat and a sense of low control. And we need to be giving our kids more control over their lives. So even you know you're taking your daughter to netball, that's fantastic, Lucky girl that she's getting the chance to go to netball. But what happens when she says, I don't want to do netball anymore. There are lots of parents who say, Yeah, but we've invested all this in you, and you need to keep going to netball. I've seen a lot of parents doing this about rugby.
00:41:13.057 --> 00:41:47.849
For example, no, no, no, you've got to keep playing. Well, maybe they don't want to, maybe. And you know, you said, Oh, well, your husband's brother was upset because he felt it would have been good if his parents continued to force him to play the piano. Well, we don't know whether that would have been good or not. Right. He's saying that now, but maybe at the time, he was so resistant that that wasn't the right way to go about it, forcing him that maybe there would have been a different way, which is asking him, Well, okay, you can't play that instrument, but what about something else?
00:41:48.090 --> 00:41:50.489
What about just finding some other creative outlet?
00:41:50.489 --> 00:42:41.309
Yeah, and people, they will figure out their way, won't they? That's the whole idea, isn't it? And it's setting them up. And my, my big thing at the moment is about the future of work. So I am absolutely fascinated, and this is what I've been writing a lot about currently, is what work is going to look like in the future. So we are now in a position where we're in the digital age, and AI is, I say it's on the horizon. It's not, it's here. No, it's and work is going to look very different in the next five years. And my children are now 16 and 18, and I am going to be pushing them out to university by the time they come out the other end, the world of work is going to be vastly different. I agree, you or I experienced they're saying the future of jobs report from 2025 said, Five said that around 40% of jobs are going to change.
00:42:41.670 --> 00:42:48.809
So in terms of how we set our kids up for the future, just in general, and it is those skills.
00:42:45.269 --> 00:42:48.809
This is what they're saying.
00:42:48.809 --> 00:43:52.590
It's the skills of resilience and critical thinking and lifelong learning. So the idea that we can collect different skill sets throughout our lives and be able to apply them is absolutely going to be crucial for the future of work, for the future of being successful and having well being, and all these types of things. And coming back to your point about autonomy, that also is a thread that runs the whole way through my research, and it comes up time and time again. All these models of what good work looks like is around autonomy. We need a sense of agency around the purpose element of well being. What is it that we're doing? And it's not about just even about, you know, autonomy around hours, or flexibility like that. It's autonomy over possibly what we're working on and who we're working with and what that work looks like, and all the rest of it. And work is going to have to look like that more in the future as well, because, as I say, it's changing, and we're going to have to be adaptable.
00:43:48.509 --> 00:44:57.829
So I think that is a skill that sets you up for life, adaptability and resilience. And I think, you know, if you talk about, as you say, the previous metrics of success, I think the other thing that I thought was really interesting that came out of my research were around these circumstances of well being. So we talked about the idea that, you know, what are the circumstances so does money make you happy? Does time make you happy? Just being married make you happy. Just be having children make you happy. And there's some really, you know, pretty categoric research on that as well. So in terms of setting kids up for needing a lot of money, what's really fascinating out of the research is you don't need a lot of money to be happy. You do need to not live in poverty. You do need to not live beyond your means. But there's some really interesting research. I think one of the studies, which was a European study from a few years ago, said it was something like 25,000 pounds a year is above which people's happiness increased, no further. There was an American study which is quite low, really low, in terms of what you would think it might be, I needed to be a millionaire to be happy.
00:44:58.130 --> 00:45:10.309
There was an American study about 10 years ago. I think it was like 60,000 pounds a year in general. What we're saying is kind of the level of well being.
00:45:06.529 --> 00:45:30.789
You do not need to be a millionaire. Some of these, these numbers, you can take with a slight pinch of salt, but the general premise, when you look at the data is, you know, various studies will say to you, you don't need a lot of money to be happy, and after kind of a certain level of, say, baseline income above that, happiness doesn't increase any further.
00:45:26.650 --> 00:45:44.809
What does make as much difference to happiness and as money? Though? Interestingly. Is time, and that is often what we're missing in today's society. So again, there's research that tells us that time is just as important as money for happiness.
00:45:44.809 --> 00:45:48.769
You mean having having time to do other things, or
00:45:48.889 --> 00:46:44.788
enough time having enough leisure time. So, and there's a sweet spot for this as well. So again, there is a study that said that less than two hours a day of free, time again, time to do what you want to do, makes you unhappy, but so does having more than five hours a day. Ooh, interesting, isn't it? So there's a sweet spot there between kind of being productive, but then not so harried and kind of harassed. So time is important for well being, money is important for well being. But above a certain amount, kind of it doesn't make you desperately happier. And then the other interesting things that come out as well in terms of kind of things like being married or where you live and stuff. So living rurally impacts happiness, because there tends to be a better sense of community, they say. But living in the sunshine apparently doesn't. Now, I'd probably take, you know, argument with that.
00:46:46.528 --> 00:46:48.808
Give me sunshine any day. Yeah, the
00:46:48.809 --> 00:47:14.769
rain and me don't get along. But yeah, no, apparently you'll acclimatize after after a certain period of time. So, you know, you think you're going to move to, I don't know, Australia, know, Australia, life down under, and it's all going to, yes, whatever. And it doesn't necessarily work out like that, but a sense of community is really important. So that's where, kind of where you live, impacts it. And in terms of having kids, they say that people who have children, their happiness decreases in
00:47:14.769 --> 00:47:22.389
the first few years after they have children, yeah, yeah. I saw that. I saw that in the exhibition. I'm Yeah. I pointed that to my kids.
00:47:19.389 --> 00:47:22.389
I just said, look at that,
00:47:23.289 --> 00:47:52.230
just to make sure you do realize you made me unhappy. Yeah, no. But then what they say is, actually, is children leave home at the sense of purpose. So they they find that when children are smaller, parents experience a dip in happiness. And actually, as children, kind of grow up and leave home and they find that people with children are happier than those without, because it's a sense of purpose. And again, these are, you know, generic numbers go live your life, but it's just interesting, isn't it?
00:47:49.710 --> 00:48:29.050
So I go through those things in my book as well, the different circumstances and what makes you what makes you happy and doesn't. So we can pin things down to circumstances. We can pin them down to behaviors. As I say, there's a certain baseline of Tigger and E or that we're all dealing with. But Rachel, if you were kind of going to summarize, kind of your some of your philosophies around these value sets when it comes to your wealth of experience and knowledge in terms of parenting and the types of things we should be telling our kids about happiness versus success. Kind of is there any kind of final things that you would leave our audience with? Yeah.
00:48:29.050 --> 00:49:39.509
I mean, I have two older bonus daughters, so 131's 128's as well as my 19 and 17 year olds. So I've sort of seen the arc A bit later on, too. And coming back to, I think some of the most pertinent research was David Jaeger and his 10 to 25 and the whole point that once I understood status and respect, and I understood the importance of that level of autonomy, and I handed that to my younger daughter and gave her the opportunity to make far more decisions for herself. I gave her a year out of school because she was fighting the schooling system. I lent into understanding what she wanted and making it very clear to her that she was the architect of her own life, everything changed. And I'm really dramatically mean, everything changed. And this is a neurodivergent child, so I would say so I've seen, you know, four kids growing up, and the daughter above her is at Oxford, so she's She succeeds in a an educational environment that we've got set up. You know, the academic environment suits her.
00:49:39.869 --> 00:49:50.190
The other child, it simply doesn't suit her. However, she is now fully plugged into it, really enjoying it, because she was given so much more autonomy.
00:49:46.170 --> 00:51:18.849
And I the reason I mentioned my older daughters is because they tell me that the kids they know, who were given everything when they were younger, whose parents ran around them and trying to fix things, are the unhappiest of their cohort. They Yes, and it really drives it home to me that this is not the right approach for our kids, because when they come out the other end and they have to find their way through the world, it can be extremely challenging if they haven't been set up with a sense of autonomy and the ability to go and look for things for themselves. So in summary, I think the most important thing is. Leaning into your child's ability to figure this stuff out for themselves. Every child needs someone who 100% believes in them and thinks they're the most amazing person on the planet. You know this is like this unconditional love. So you give them that it's a suit of armor. You give them a set of values that your family believes in, which is all things are possible. You could do not you can do anything you could if you applied yourself to something and allowing them to then be the masters of their own universe, rather than constantly being on their back and saying, This is how the world works, because you may not have the right idea at all for that child. That's my thinking.
00:51:19.750 --> 00:51:45.750
I think that's absolutely marvelous. And those are my two big takeouts, unconditional love and automation. Those the two big gifts that you can give your kids. Oh, Rachel, thank you so much. It's just as I say, always, always a pleasure to talk to you. Pick your brain. I love all the kind of wonderful research and information you're putting out there on your teenagers untangled and
00:51:45.750 --> 00:51:48.809
you too.
00:51:45.750 --> 00:51:49.170
Giselle, yes, all the research you're on
00:51:49.170 --> 00:51:51.570
better place, don't we? We're fixing it.
00:51:51.570 --> 00:51:54.210
We're fixing ourselves first. But yeah, yeah,
00:51:55.469 --> 00:52:01.369
we're trying to figure it all out. And yeah, Rachel, thank you so much. So so good to talk to you today.
00:52:01.429 --> 00:52:14.409
You too, take care. Bye, bye. You you.
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