Here is a list of Happiness Matters Podcasts you may have missed in May:

Is Divorce Always Bad for Kids?
Rona and I are both divorced; we’ve both considered the issue deeply both personally and professionally. When is divorce better for kids than staying together?

Forgive and Forget?
Is the old adage “forgive and forget” still good advice? Rona and I talk about the relationship between forgiveness and happiness, and we suggest some things we can do with kids that will help teach them the skills they need to forgive and move on.

Gratitude v. Entitlement
Want to know what my #1 strategy for raising happy children is? It is the conscious practice of gratitude.  Learn how and why to raise kids who are more grateful than entitled.

Is Happiness Selfish?
Do happy people focus on being more selfless than selfish? Rona and I discuss how self-love and self-compassion differ from selfishness, and how kids’ natural self-centeredness can detract from their happiness.

Does Your Child Have “Problems”?
Teachers often come to parents when their children have problems, but sometimes this framing can lead kids to believe that they can’t do something, or that they are failing. Are problems better framed as opportunities and challenges?

Check out my podcast Happiness Matters with Rona Renner either here on the Greater Good website, or here on iTunes.  Happy listening!

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Can Facebook make your child happy—or will it just lead to loneliness, as this Atlantic article-gone-viral suggests?

According to some interesting research, social media arguably can make us feel more connected and less lonely. Alternately, it can make us feel more isolated and depressed, and for kids, lead to what Erik Erikson posed as the critical psychological danger in pre-adolescence: “an excessive feeling of inadequacy and inferiority,” a risk for tweeners heightened by social media exposure. (For more about this theory as it relates to Facebook, see Diana Graber’s excellent CyberCivics post on the subject.)

As I wrote last week, children need to be taught explicitly how to use social media, just as we would teach them to drive a car. In particular, we need to teach them how their online presence reflects three things:

1. how they want to be perceived
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2. who they want to be
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3. their influence on the world

This post from my Greater Good blog explains these three lessons in more detail, and how they can lead to greater happiness for our children (and ourselves!).

 

Like a lot of parents, I’ve been struck by how active—though not savvy—my kids and their friends are with social media.

It’s a little like we’ve given our kids keys to a new car and said, “Have fun! Be safe!” without actually teaching them to drive.

Will they crash? My kids’ friends have Instagram accounts that let them post pictures of themselves and their friends—which they do, innocently—all over the Internet. These photos are often geotagged, making it easier for creepy pedophiles to locate them in the real world.

The FBI estimates that there are a half million pedophiles online everyday—predators who are sophisticated about “grooming” children and teens: forming online relationships before they start soliciting personal or sexual information, or before they try to initiate a meeting. They often pose as kids the same age.

There are risks to kids’ social media use even beyond the threat of pedophiles. To name just a few: cyberbullying, either as a victim or perpetrator; socially inappropriate posts that could later be humiliating to themselves or their friends; exposure to media that frightens or otherwise harms them; and the time they lose online—when they would gain more by reading, playing outside, or deepening their relationships in real-life.

All children need online social skills training. We may not be able to teach our children the ins-and-outs of Instagram, but we do need to guide them through the basics of interacting online—even if that means we need to learn the basics ourselves, first.

Which is exactly what I’m trying to do: Teach myself enough to stay just ahead, or at least stay aware, of what my children are doing. While we parents might not know exactly how every new social media app works, we do have better judgement than our children about the appropriate use of these awesome technologies.

This post from my Greater Good blog and the one that will follow next week offer parents guidance in keeping their kids happy and safe online. To get started, here are five principles to keep in mind.