Hurry! One week left before class starts! Use coupon code “SpringHappiness” to take $20 off when you sign up for any 10-week Raising Happiness online class. THIS WEEK ONLY!

Wondering what a Raising Happiness Online Class is? Here is more information:

Foundations I

What You Will Get From This Class:

• Greater happiness yourself–both as a parent and an individual
• The best ways to create a new routine (and break bad habits).
• Ways to raise children’s emotional intelligence and school performance
• Why perfectionism is a particular form of unhappiness-and how to combat it
• How to foster grit and resilience in kids

Learn more here.

 

Spring Cleaning for The Soul

What You Will Get From This Class:

• Tools for combating materialism
• TV guidelines: How much is too much?
• Mental health stats of college-bound kids (the picture is not rosy) and the solution to these daunting statistics
• Tips for how to raise siblings who are friends
• Why holding a grudge is not a happiness habit–and how to raise forgiving kids
• Tips for feeling happier when you (or your kids) are feeling bad
• A go-to list of techniques to feel happier instantly
• Four skills you can teach your children to make them luckier
• Three easy ways to promote confidence and optimism in your children
• Ways to raise kind children

Learn more here.

 

The title of this post is misleading: Divorce is difficult and painful for everyone involved, especially kids. I’ve never known anyone to have a “good” divorce, in that way you have a good meal or good sex—even when divorce was the right thing to do for everyone, including the kids.

Divorce is horrible. It is the hardest, most painful thing I’ve ever done. And I had a “good” divorce.

Still, divorce is often better for kids than a deeply flawed marriage, and some divorces are better than others. Divorce can be done well, in a mature way that puts the kids’ needs first. There is a lot of research examining what makes divorce more beneficial—or at least less damaging—for kids.

Twenty percent of kids are damaged by divorce. Read this post from my Greater Good blog and find out how to make kids part of the other 80 percent.

 

Get a FREE copy of Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents when you sign up for any Foundations I

What You Will Get From This Class:

• Greater happiness yourself-both as a parent and an individual
• The best ways to create a new routine (and break bad habits).
• Ways to raise children’s emotional intelligence and school performance
• Why perfectionism is a particular form of unhappiness-and how to combat it
• How to foster grit and resilience in kids

Learn more here.

Spring Cleaning for The Soul

What You Will Get From This Class:

• Tools for combating materialism
• TV guidelines: How much is too much?
• Mental health stats of college-bound kids (the picture is not rosy) and the solution to these daunting statistics
• Tips for how to raise siblings who are friends
• Why holding a grudge is not a happiness habit–and how to raise forgiving kids
• Tips for feeling happier when you (or your kids) are feeling bad
• A go-to list of techniques to feel happier instantly
• Four skills you can teach your children to make them luckier
• Three easy ways to promote confidence and optimism in your children
• Ways to raise kind children

Learn more here.

Last week, the best-selling author and popular blogger Penelope Trunk declared divorce “immature and selfish.” She claimed divorce is “nearly always terrible for kids” (and “your case is not the exception”); that it is a sign of mental illness (specifically, of Borderline Personality Disorder); and that it is something that “dumb people” do at higher rates than well-educated ones.

Trunk tends to base most of her writing, for her blog and for national media outlets like CNN, on pretty solid scientific research, so I was surprised by this post. That said, she’s most famous for blogging about highly personal and controversial topics, and so this might be, in part, a publicity stunt.

Unfortunately, her post is freaking out thousands of people who are doing their best to raise happy and well-adjusted children. My former husband even asked me, in a panicky whisper outside of our teacher conference, if our own much-deliberated and highly-agonized-over divorce could have damaged our kids in ways we were not yet seeing several years out.

Is Trunk correct? Is it usually better for kids to have unhappily married parents who stay together? Or, are there some cases where divorce is actually better for kids than remaining married? Read this post to find out.