Pursuing Children’s Happiness: Impacts of Parents’ Happiness Parenting Goals on Child, Parent, and Relational Well-Being

• In Event: Contextualizing Parental Belief Systems: Informing Traditional Models with Contemporary Questions

Abstract

Parents often prioritize and pursue their children’s happiness over their own. Despite the ubiquity of parents’ goals to promote their children’s happiness, little is known about how these goals may be beneficial or costly for the family system. It is possible that parents’ happiness goals may benefit children’s and parents’ well-being, thus bolstering parent-child relationships. Happiness parenting goals may help children feel loved and supported, subsequently fostering children’s well-being and relationships. Additionally, promoting positive outcomes for one’s child—like happiness—is associated with greater parent well-being. Conversely, intensely valuing happiness may be costly for child, parent, and relationship well-being. Parents’ pursuit of their children’s happiness may backfire and lead children to feel emotionally invalidated or parents to feel burnt out. Thus, these goals may erode parent-child relationship satisfaction over time. The COVID-19 pandemic—which led to many parents spending more time at home with their children—has increased parents’ concern for their children’s well-being, including their happiness, presenting a salient context for examining parents’ happiness goals.

We examined potential benefits and costs of happiness parenting goals for child, parent, and relationship well-being across three diverse samples, both within and outside of the pandemic context. Parents in Study 1 (N=280) and Study 2 (N=118) participated in pre-pandemic daily diary studies. Study 3 (N=206) was a five-wave longitudinal study of parents across the first year and a half of the pandemic. Comparable measures of key variables were collected across studies (Table 1).

Happiness parenting goals were indeed common, with 35% of parents in Study 2 (pre-pandemic) reporting that their children’s happiness was an extremely important goal for daily caregiving and 56% of parents in Study 3 (during the pandemic) reporting that their child’s happiness was extremely important to them within the past week. Multivariate multilevel models (with days nested within participants) were used to analyze both daily diary studies. In Study 1, ranking children’s happiness as the number one priority for their future at baseline was not significantly associated with well-being outcomes across the nine-day daily diary (Table 2). However, in Study 2, parents who strived for their children’s happiness more, both on a given day (as compared to their own average) and more than other participants across the ten-day daily diary, reported greater parent and child positive emotion and relationship satisfaction, and less parent and child negative emotion. Regression analyses of Study 3 (wave 1) revealed that greater happiness goal endorsement was linked to greater parent and child positive emotion, greater parent-child relationship satisfaction, lower parent and child negative emotion, and lower parent-child relationship conflict during the pandemic (April 2020). Longitudinal analyses are ongoing and will reveal whether within- and between-person effects persist over longer periods of time.

Collectively, these results suggest that endorsing children’s happiness as the most important goal for their future may not predict more proximal outcomes, and may possibly represent more extreme and potentially ineffective happiness goal pursuit. However, endorsing children’s happiness more broadly as an important everyday parenting pursuit may promote parent, child, and relationship well-being.

Authors

• Natalie M. Sisson, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Bonnie M. Le, University of Rochester

• Katherine Nelson-Coffey, Arizona State University

• John K. Coffey, Arizona State University

• Brett Ford, University of Toronto

• Emily A Impett, University of Toronto Mississauga