I just finished Katrina Alcorn’s gripping memoir, Maxed Out, about her nervous breakdown. Although it is an absorbing, can’t-put-it-down kind of a book, her breakdown—harrowing as it was—struck me as ordinary.

Ordinary in that her experience seems so common. Working parents are stressed. Women in particular are really suffering: They report record-high use of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. By some reputable reports, nearly a quarter of American woman use a prescription medication for depression or anxiety. ¹ (Men tend to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs, and report higher rates of addiction and alcohol.²)

Here’s how Katrina tells it:

I was a 37-year-old mother of three and somehow, my kids, my marriage, and my career were all thriving.

Then, one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2009, while driving to Target to buy diapers, I broke down. Not my car. Me.

I pulled over to the side of the road, my hands shaking, barely able to breathe. I called my husband and sobbed, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Thus ended my career, and thus began a journey into crippling depression, anxiety, and insomnia; medication, meditation, and therapy. As I learned to heal my body and my mind, I searched for answers to one question: What the hell happened to me?

I first met Katrina at a woman-led tech firm (which was recently bought-up by Facebook). Ironically, I was there as a consultant working on a happiness app for the iPhone. Katrina was successfully leading a team of hipsters doing cutting edge work—and slowly but surely having a full-on nervous breakdown.

She ended up in bed for a year, crushed by burn-out so thorough and unexpected that her friends had to bring her family food and drive her kids to day care while she recovered.

As she recovered, Katrina had a realization that was shocking to her:

Working and raising kids pretty much sucks in America.

FACT: The typical American family worked 11 hours more per week in 2006 than in 1979.

FACT: Only the United States lacks paid maternity-leave laws among the 30 industrialized democracies.

FACT: Fully 90 percent of American mothers and 95 percent of American fathers report work-family conflict. ³

Most of us feel pretty lucky and very grateful to be Americans. Dysfunctional as it may sometimes be, our government remains the world’s oldest and arguably its most stable democracy. The majority of Americans experience material wealth and abundance unknown in many parts of the world. And those of us in California and many other parts of the country are blessed with natural beauty and national parks so stunning that they inspire awe and wonder in all but only the most hardened among us.

But our policies for working families are shameful.

It isn’t that working sucks—if we are lucky, like Katrina Alcorn, we love our work. Most parents want to do meaningful work outside of our homes. It’s just that our workplaces aren’t set up to allow us enough time to take care of ourselves (say, by getting enough sleep) and raise our children and work outside the home.

This Time Bind, artfully described by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the 1990s in her book of that title, is a problem that we won’t solve by “leaning in” to our work (as Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg advises us to do in her book about the problems that plague women in the workforce today).

Despite the publicity around a recent study that supposedly shows that working less doesn’t make people happier—more on that next week—I believe that we are still grappling with Hochschild’s time bind, all these years and technological advances later.

But what are we to do if we are feeling MAXED OUT? The owner of Alcorn’s company, a mother of three herself, advised her to hire a “mother’s helper,” to assist with homework and dinnertime. Sandberg has a team of paid folks helping her with household and child-related tasks. But hiring more help isn’t a feasible, or even desirable, solution for most of us. Would working less make us happier?

Next week I’ll look more closely at some new research related to this question.

—————————-
1. Bindley, Katherine. “Women And Prescription Drugs: One In Four Takes Mental Health Meds.” Huffington Post. 2011.
2. Kessler, Ronald C., et al. “Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication.” Archives of General Psychiatry 62.6 (2005): 617.
3. Joan C. Williams of the Center for Work Life Law and Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress called “The Three Faces of Work-family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle.” Published January 2010. – See more at: https://www.workingmomsbreak.com/just-the-facts/#sthash.4G1K4JM9.dpuf

An open letter to my brother and his wife, who are expecting their first baby—a boy!!!—this fall.

Dear Timmy and Sammy,

As I know you know, our family could not be more thrilled about the prospect of having an infant in the Carter clan again. We’ve been doling out advice about strollers and birth plans like there’s no tomorrow; although it is probably really annoying, you are taking it with great grace. (Just this morning, I sent you an article about circumcision. I imagine there are huge disadvantages to having a sister like me.)

It isn’t that we think you need advice—clearly you two are extremely intelligent and compassionate people, with great judgement and solid intuition. Just the same, I can’t seem to help myself from offering you a near-constant stream of tips. Please forgive me.

People keep asking me what advice I’m giving you, so I thought I’d actually give it some thought and write it down. Here are the three things I think are most important in the first year of a baby’s life.

1) Take care of your own happiness first

Take the advice of the airlines and put on your own oxygen masks first; remember that should you become faint from lack of oxygen, you won’t be much good to anyone at all.

When you take care of your own happiness, you dramatically increase the quality of your parenting and the happiness of your baby. Children imitate their parents’ emotions as early as six days old; it is one of the primary ways that they learn and grow. And because research shows that people’s emotions tend to converge—we become more similar emotionally the more we are together—it follows that the happier you are, the happier your baby will be.

There are two critical places that this take-care-of-yourself business goes amiss for new parents: in the romance department, and with sleep. New parents are famously tired, trying to care for a baby that wakes them up to be fed every few hours or so. We joke with them about the bags under their eyes and their delirious, far-away gazes, but this is actually no laughing matter.

“Sleep affects almost every tissue in our bodies,” says Dr. Michael J. Twery, a sleep specialist at the National Institutes of Health. Sleep affects our heart and other major organs, like our lungs and kidneys. It impacts our appetite and metabolism and therefore how much we weigh. It determines our health by tweaking our immune function. Sleep influences how sensitive we are to pain. Lack of sleep slows our reaction times. And as anyone who has ever pulled an all-nighter knows, sleep has a dramatic impact on our mood. Lack of sleep increases the probability of postpartum depression and anxiety.

We cannot be truly happy or healthy if we are exhausted. New babies get about 16 hours of sleep; you’ll need to get horizontal yourself for at least half of that time. Make a specific plan now (it will increase the odds that you will follow through) for how you’ll enable yourself to get the deep sleep you need. (Hint: Schedule at least five 90-minute blocks of sleep for every 24 hour period. This will be harder than it sounds. Let me know how I can help.)

Second, little is more important for your happiness than your relationship with each other, but many relationships suffer when a very demanding new family member takes over. If you’ve relied on connecting with each other by, say, going on vacations and out to romantic dinners, by lounging around in bed on Sunday mornings with the paper, by doing the no-pants-dance consistently, and by going on long, peaceful hikes on Saturday afternoons…well, then, you’ll have to find new ways to connect, because it may well be a decade (or two) before you can get back to those habits.

How will you connect with each other when the new baby comes? How will you nurture your relationship? Make time for a weekly date-night you can count on. (I’ll baby-sit!) Add a gratitude ritual that you can do at the end of your day, even if you are exhausted. Make a pact to put your relationship first, as it will be a critical factor for the health and happiness of your baby.

2) Whenever possible, hold your baby (knowing it isn’t always possible!)

As your house fills up with plastic bucket-like devices in which to deposit your little guy—strollers and carseats and bouncy-things—remember that babies have historically had physical contact with their mothers nearly 24 hours a day. Only in the last few hundred years have industrialized societies begun to separate babies physically from their parents for so much time.

Babies tend to cry when they are separated from their parents; they usually stop crying when reunited. This may seem like the science of the blazingly obvious, but when Fiona and Molly were infants and they’d start to cry, I’d often try moving them from one bouncy seat or swing to another. I wish I’d realized that there are neurological benefits for the baby that come from being held. I didn’t know that infants cry less in uber-nurturing societies—where parents respond more quickly to their baby’s crying, where they let them nurse frequently, and where they have lots of physical contact with their infants throughout the day and night.

Caveat: When tips 1 and 2 conflict, tip 1 wins. When you’re feeling exhausted and burned out from endlessly carrying, rocking, swaddling, shushing, and cooing to your little bundle of joy, give yourself permission to take a break.

The main point here is that you shouldn’t feel compelled to rein in your nurturing impulses—you can’t spoil a baby with too much love and affection. But you should also heed your impulses to take a rest, give yourself a break, and recharge.

(3) Don’t worry if you aren’t perfect

Shoot to be good-enough parents. Perfectionism is a particular form of unhappiness; it is a life driven by the fear of not being enough. The best parents allow themselves, perhaps with some humor, to be messy, mistake-making parents who love life and their children with an open heart.

I made a lot of mistakes when my kids were babies, both large and small. I clearly didn’t nurture my romantic relationship with my husband enough. And once, I dropped Fiona on her head. Another time, Molly got bit by a dog at a park—which, guilt-stricken, I found a way to blame myself for (even though I wasn’t there).

I used to worry a lot that the mistakes I was making would have repercussions that would last the rest of my children’s lives. But the thing is, no matter how hard we try, we all make a ton of mistakes. Here’s the good news: My kids have turned out fine, and yours will, too!

I think the most important thing that I’ve learned over the last decade is that if you take care of your own happiness and are engaged in the needs of your baby—which I know that you will!—everyone turns out to be joyful and successful in their own way.

Lots of love,
(Soon to be Aunt!!!) Christy

Don’t squander your summer at work or at summer school — you’ll miss all the best benefits

There are a lot of great things about summertime, but for kids and adults alike I think the best part is all the potential downtime to just hang out and play.

Unless, of course, you are one of those people, as I sometimes am, that feels guilty not working all the time. Then downtime can be a little stressful. If that’s you, think of it this way: Play is actually productive. It makes us more creative. And for kids especially, the benefits social and emotional benefits are HUGE.

Kids today spend less time just playing than they did in previous generations, both indoors and out. All told, children have lost 8 hours per week of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play over the last two decades.

Researchers believe that this dramatic drop in unstructured play time is in part responsible for slowing kids’ cognitive and emotional development. Children’s capacity for self-regulation—their ability to control their emotions and behavior and to resist impulses—is much worse today than it was 60 years ago. In one study, today’s 5-year-olds had the self-regulation capability of a 3-year-old in the 1940s; the critical factor seems to have been not discipline, but play.

The benefits of play are great — more far-reaching than just helping kids blow off steam or get a little physical exercise. In addition to helping kids learn to self-regulate, studies show that child-led, unstructured play (with or without adults) promotes intellectual, physical, social, and emotional well-being. Unstructured play helps children learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, to regulate their emotions and behavior, and to speak-up for themselves.

“Neuroscientists, developmental biologists, psychologists, social scientists, and researchers from every point of the scientific compass now know that play is a profound biological process,” says Stuart Brown, a leading play researcher. Play “shapes the brain and makes animals smarter and more adaptable,” he says. It fosters empathy in kids, and lies at the very heart of creativity and innovation. And the ability to play has a profound effect on our happiness.

The good news is that while children do need time and space to “practice playing,” they know innately how to play. Grown-ups need to respect kids’ play as a built-in mechanism for becoming more socially intelligent, more creative—and happier. Here are three things to keep in mind when playing with your kids:

• Let kids lead. When we find ourselves saying things like “I like the game you are playing, but why don’t you let Sarah be the girl and you be the daddy?”, we are probably dominating too much. Don’t correct your kids when they are playing unless they are being unkind.
• Don’t play with your kids in ways that bore you. Spend time doing things that you enjoy (while still letting them lead). I love to rough-house with my children, but I don’t enjoy participating in their pretend play as much—so I mostly skip doing that part to avoid sending the message that they shouldn’t like it either. It is perfectly fine for parents to back-off a little and let children play on their own or with other children, especially once they are 4 or 5 years old. Kids learn to entertain themselves this way, and to get along with other children.
  
• Pretend play is particularly beneficial, so make sure kids have ample time for it. Projecting personalities and having make-believe interactions with stuffies, toys, or imaginary companions is a healthy way for kids to develop the skills they need to focus their attention and get along with other children. Dramatic pretend play with two or more children stimulates social and intellectual growth, which in turn affects the child’s success in school.

The more complex the imaginative play, the better. Make sure that kids have enough time: a half hour is the minimum. Play that lasts several hours is better. Encourage kids to use symbolic props rather than prefab toys – sticks for fairy wands and boxes for cars or houses. Older children can be encouraged to participate in drama classes and clubs. But remember: ballet camp isn’t the same as making up a dance with friends in the backyard.
Selected references:

Brown, Stuart, and Christopher Vaughan. “Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul”. New York: Avery, 2009.

Burdette, H.L., Whitaker, R.C. “Resurrecting Free Play in Young Children: Looking Beyond Fitness and Fatness to Attention, Affiliation, and Affect”. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine 159, (2005): 5.

Hofferth, Sandra L., and John F. Sandberg. “Changes in American Children’s Time 1981-1997.“Advances in Life Course Research (2000): 1-49.

Smirnova, E.O., and O.V. Gudareva. “Igra I Proizvol’nost’ U Sovremennyh Doshkol’nikov [Play and Intentionality in Today’s Preschoolers] ” Voprosy psihologii 1, (2004): 91-103.

This year, they’ll be away for THREE weeks. I’m heartbroken and kidsick already.

Last week, my kids went off to sleepaway summer camp again in the high Sierras—their third year in a row at Gold Arrow Camp.

I will never, not ever, forget the first time I dropped my kids off at camp.

The drop-off didn’t go very well.

When I was a kid, I begged and begged to go to sleepaway camp with my best friend, Rory. I did extra chores to earn it, and I counted the days until I got there. I don’t remember being homesick, or sad at the drop-off. I remember feeling wild and free. I loved the horses and the outdoors and ceramics. I got postcards from my teachers. It was awesome.

My kids had mixed feelings about going to camp that first year: They were excited, but also scared. “TWO WEEKS!?” my youngest cried when I told her what, to me, was great news: They were going to summer camp! “They have horses!” I said cheerfully, trying to drum up excitement. “And sailing!  I’ve never been sailing myself,” I mourned. “You’ll get to do it before I do!”

I said this knowing full well that sailing is actually not on my daughters’ bucket list. It’s on mine.

The kids spent the last few weeks readying for camp and making serious sister pacts to stick together. My younger daughter, Molly, was particularly concerned about what would happen if her older sister made friends first. Would Fiona and she still pick the same activities? Could Molly join Fiona with her new friends? Pinky-swears of allegiance were traded, plans to sneak into each other’s cabins made.

Molly had a plan: Fiona would take care of her. She was nervous, but also excited.

Fiona was calm, reassuring.

That is, until about an hour before we arrived at camp. At which point Fiona became more clammy than cool and collected. She developed vague “not feeling well” symptoms. She was too carsick to eat lunch.  When we arrived, she was faintly green.

Altitude sick, I declared. “Drink some water,” I insisted. “Take deep breaths,” I said, taking them myself. “Think good thoughts, Fiona. Find two things to be excited about.”

Frankly, I was feeling faint myself.

But the thing is, I believe that it is important to challenge kids. To get them truly outside of their comfort zones so that they can grow. Hence two weeks instead of a mini-camp. My desire to challenge my kids was reinforced in an Atlantic article about “Why the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods.” The gist of this article is that “kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems.” And the article is right—they don’t.

The article reminded me that happiness—an often fleeting emotion—in and of itself is not the goal. That comfort—my own or my children’s—is not the goal. Instead, all of this is about how to lead a happy life. And while it’s true that a happy life comes from positive emotions (like gratitude and compassion, for example), it also comes from having the tools we need to cope with life’s inevitable difficulties and painful moments.

My kids have had their difficulties—my divorce, a move away from a beloved school and neighborhood, a humbling medical situation—and they’ve risen to each challenge, though not without pain.

(I’d like to pause to acknowledge that even with those difficulties, my kids have a pretty cushy life. We don’t have to worry about where the next meal is coming from or where we will sleep tonight. That said, the fear the kids had anticipating me leaving them at camp was very real to all of us.)

At any rate, by sending my kids to camp, I was sending them the message that I believe that they can manage loneliness, and homesickness, and anxiety. I believed that they could, at the tender ages of 8 and 10, handle these difficult emotions themselves, without me standing over their shoulders telling them to breathe. As awful as it sometimes feels to me, they simply don’t always need me there, telling them what to do and what to think.

Continue this post on my Greater Good blog for more about why I want to my kids to unplug from electronics and me and embrace a little discomfort every summer.

 

Creating strong children and cohesive families through the stories we tell.

This fall, my main squeeze and I are getting married. We’ve been dating for almost four years, and we’ve been engaged for so long people think we are dragging our (probably cold) feet. “What’s the hold up?” our friends ask. “Are you or aren’t you getting married?”

Our hesitation is about the children, of course. My guy lives with his two children in a different county from me and my two children. All four kids are happy in their schools and their communities—not to mention living near their other parents.

My children and I are not planning on moving to Marin; he and his children are not planning on moving to Berkeley. It’s a logistical puzzle with some unique pieces, but I believe at its center is a question nagging many of us today: How do we build a happy family?

That’s the question Bruce Feiler poses in his recent book, The Secrets of Happy Families, and in his wildly popular New York Times article, published earlier this spring.

It turns out that a large part of constructing a happy family is about creating a particular type of narrative about our family history, one that demonstrates that members of our family have been through both good and bad times together, but through it all we’ve stuck together. This is a way of modeling your family’s grit and growth mindset.

Researcher Marshall Duke calls this the “oscillating family narrative,” and he and his colleagues have found that that when kids internalize it, they emerge more confident, with an “intergenerational [sense of] self.” That is a jargony way of saying that kids who know a lot about their family history—the parts that they didn’t experience themselves, but that were passed down to them through stories—feel that they are a part of something much larger than themselves.

When we give kids this sense of being part of something bigger than just themselves, they reap enormous emotional benefits, according to Duke and fellow researchers Amber Lazarus and Robyn Fivush, in a study made famous by Feiler. These benefits include:

-a greater sense of control over their lives;
-higher self-esteem;
-better family functioning;
-greater family cohesiveness;
-lower levels of anxiety;
-fewer behavior problems.

In fact, in Duke, Lazarus, and Fivush’s research, knowledge of family narrative was more strongly associated with children’s emotional well-being than any other factor.

To learn more about the benefits of sharing family stories with your children, including resilience, better adjustment, and improved chances educational outcomes, continue reading this post on my Greater Good blog.

And what all heroes have in common.

“The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles.”—Garth Stein

What quality does the Buddha share with Luke Skywalker and Joan of Arc? What links Harriet Tubman with Harry Potter?

It has nothing to do with enlightenment or magic. It has to do with struggle.

These heroes share a key quality: GRIT.

There has been some discussion in the media recently about grit, but many people, especially parents, have been asking me what the term actually means.

I think the best way to describe grit is by starting with Joseph Campbell and his classic analysis of the “hero’s journey.” Campbell explains how the journey always begins when the hero leaves home and all that is familiar and predictable. After that, Campbell writes, “Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed—again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land.”

It is grit that makes our heroes face down their dragons and persist in the face of difficulty, setbacks, failure, and fear. They fall down and get back up again. They try their hardest, only to fail miserably. But instead of giving up, they try again and again and again.

And it isn’t just historical or fictional heroes who need to be gritty to rise to the top. Recent psychological research has found that grit is one of the best predictors of elite performance, whether in the classroom or in the workforce. Defined by researchers as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” grit gives us the strength to cope with a run-of-the-mill bad day (or week or season) as well as with trauma or crisis.

It turns out that grit predicts performance better than IQ or innate talent. Grit makes us productive and successful because it allows us to reach our long-term goals despite life’s inevitable setbacks. This ability to overcome challenges makes us stronger and more masterful at our tasks. Moreover, the ability to cope with difficulty—or to be resilient after tragedy—paves the way for our long-term happiness.

Grit is not really a personality trait as much as it is a facet of a person’s character that is developed like any other skill. Babies are not born with grit any more than they are born with the ability to speak their mother’s native language. We humans develop grit by encountering difficulty and learning to cope with it.

And with that in mind, here’s some perverse “good” news: No life is free from challenges or difficulties—in other words, we’ll all have plenty of opportunities to develop grit.  I discuss ways to maximize those opportunities in the continuation of this post on my Greater Good blog.  

This article was originally posted on my Greater Good blog.

My friends and family know what’s coming when we’re out to dinner and they see a little packet of white squares come out of my purse, held together with a rubber band. It’s a pile of carefully selected Table Topics — little cards printed with questions — usually from the “Family Gatherings” collection. (Though on date night, I like the “Couples” collection.)

I’ve been structuring our family’s conversations for nearly a decade. For a while, I tended to focus the discussion on what everyone is grateful for. But in the last year or so I’ve been partial to those Table Topics, which are sold as “questions to start great conversations.” The questions can be much harder to answer, but in my experience, after all the groaning and eye-rolling dissipates, everyone starts to grab for the cards and we end up laughing and having a good time.

I instigate these conversations for fun, of course, but also because I know that they help my family bond and help my kids experience themselves as a part of something larger than themselves—which, in turn, could make them more resilient, better adjusted, and more successful in school (as I wrote about here).

Below are 20 questions that would be good to have your children ask their dad or grandpa on Sunday (even if you are phoning or Skyping someone far away). One tip: See if you can get the dads to weave their answers into a narrative demonstrating that your family members have been through both good and bad times together, but through it all, you’ve stuck together. This is a way of modeling your family’s grit and growth mindset.

The exact content of Dad’s answers isn’t crucial. Research suggests that the most important thing is to make time for conversations like these—and Father’s Day seems like as good a day as any to start!

1. What do you remember about the houses you lived in as a kid? Which one did you like the best?

2. What did you have as a child that kids today don’t have?

3. Has anything ever happened at a family wedding that you’ll never forget?

4. Think of some relatives that have passed away in the last few years. What would they be doing right now if they were with you?

5. Which family member has been your greatest coach in life? How have they coached you? What has made them good at it?

6. When you were a teenager, which family member did you go to for advice? Looking back, was it good advice?

7. What was your favorite movie or book when you were my age?

8. Tell me a story about a family reunion or family party that you remember attending as a child.

9. What was the hardest thing you went through as a child? How did you overcome it?

10. What are your favorite stories that grandpa/grandma told (or still tells)?

11. If you could know anything about our family history or about a relative who has passed away, what would you want to know?

12. What is the most embarrassing thing your mother or father ever did to you?

13. What are your best memories of holidays or family gatherings as a child?

14. What three adjectives would your grandparents use to describe you?

15. Did your parents or grandparents ever lose their jobs? What happened? How did they start over?

16. What is the best thing that your grandparents ever cooked? What about your parents?

17. How did your parents change after they retired?

18. If you could go back to one day in your childhood, which day would that be? Why?

19. How are you most different from your parents and grandparents? How are you the same?

20. What did your grandparents do with you that you loved? What did they do that you didn’t enjoy so much?

Happy Father’s Day to all those great Dads and Grampa’s out there (especially our own “Dadu”)!

Many of these questions were adapted from the “Family Gathering” edition of Table Topics.

Hint: Don’t just turn the other cheek.

You, with your switching sides,
And your walk by lies and your humiliation
You, have pointed out my flaws again,
As if I don’t already see them.
I walk with my head down,
Trying to block you out cause I’ll never impress you…”
—Taylor Swift, “Mean”

“Why you gotta be so meeaann?” Taylor Swift croons in my car, accompanied rather loudly by five kids who are singing their hearts out. The song resonates with me, too, so much so that I find myself madly rummaging through my purse for my sunglasses, not wanting the carpool to see me choked up.

(Honestly, I’m not sure why I cry when I hear that song. I think I’m moved because it tells of a kid succeeding despite difficulty. If you haven’t heard it, listen here. I particularly like the end of this version.)

Anyway, one of the girls in my car (let’s call her Sally) has just revealed that she was once again the butt of a mean comment in PE. Everyone in the car feels her pain; unfortunately we’ve all been there.

Most of us use avoidance as our chief strategy for dealing with unkindness, steering clear of the mean person at all costs. But this strategy is neither practical nor effective, as it is often impossible to avoid a person completely and usually leaves us cowering in fear.

Fortunately, there is a better approach. From research on social and emotional well-being, here’s what I’ve learned about how to cope when someone gets nasty.

First, remember that you can control your response when someone does or says something mean. We may not be able to control much about our life circumstances, but with practice we can control how we respond to those circumstances.

I once got a horrible voicemail from a neighbor. In it, she called me a fraud and my blog a joke, and told me to stay away from her children. Though she seemed high-functioning to the outside world, she seemed pretty unstable to me.

My instinct was to fight back—to expose her craziness to the world, to tell everyone how insanely mean she was.

Sally had the opposite instinct around the girl who teased her in PE. She let this particular mean girl boss her around, hoping against hope that she would eventually relent.

Neither of these responses — attacking back or becoming a spineless doormat — are constructive ways to cope. The most effective response to meanness is compassion. Where there is meanness, there is often a lot of pain, both in the unkind person and for the person on the receiving end of a mean joke, comment, or email.

Take care of your own pain first. When I got the crazy-neighbor voicemail, I was shocked, and hurt (I cared what she thought of me), and, frankly, scared. Researcher Brene Brown, in her fantastic book Daring Greatly, advocates a response to a situation like this that I’ve been using instinctively since I was a kid: Before you attack back, let yourself feel what is going on. You can simply repeat to yourself, “Pain, pain, pain,” and breathe. Sometimes I have to say it out loud.

The key is not to deny what we are feeling, but rather to accept it. Take a moment to be mindful and narrate your emotions: This embarrassment is excruciating. I am so frightened right now. Hang in there with unpleasant feelings at least long enough to acknowledge them.

Often we don’t want to admit we are hurt by another person’s meanness; we want to let it go without letting it get to us. If you can do this, more power to you. But if you can’t, that’s okay, too. You will survive the discomfort of your hurt feelings. It is perfectly normal to feel bad when someone wounds you.

I offer two more strategies for dealing with nasty individuals in your life on this this post on my Greater Good blog.

How we’re turning it into a kindness scavenger hunt.

I hate to admit this, but I’ve come to feel entitled to breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day (complete with gifts and a clean kitchen afterwards), a family hike (no whining, everyone remembers their water bottles and packs their own snack, remembering one for me), and a little downtime with a good book before dinner.
But truth be told, I rarely get all, if any, of these Mother’s Day treats. I know this shouldn’t surprise me, and it shouldn’t irritate me… but it kinda does, or it has in the past. It’s a horrible confession for someone like me to make, but I’m rarely as cranky as I can be on Mother’s Day.

I know I’m not the only one feeling blue on on the second Sunday in May. In fact, I’m bracing myself for a series of phone calls from disgruntled friends again this year. “All I wanted was to picnic on the beach with the kids,” one friend lamented last year. Her often-charming but rarely-helpful-with-the-kids husband couldn’t get it together—the waves were looking good, and he thought he’d sneak a quick surf into the schedule, right when he should have been securing picnic supplies. Her kids, two of whom were old enough to take the day into their own hands, didn’t rally either. She felt abandoned, and taken for granted.

I know how she felt. One year my kids didn’t do anything for me but make very, um, hasty, cards on scrap paper, an effort so effortless it brought tears to my eyes.

Not the happy kind of tears.

The problem isn’t the kids, though. It is my focus on myself and what I’m entitled to. Even though I really do believe that we moms deserve a day to be treated like goddesses—at least one day!—I don’t think it sets us up for the happiest of Mother’s Days when we expect this to happen.

Although we think that indulging ourselves is going to make us happy, it generally doesn’t: Studies show that we’re happier after spending money on others than after spending on ourselves — yet when people are asked, they expect the opposite will be true.

I see this play out on Mother’s Day (for myself, and some of my friends). After we spend so much time caring for those around us — our kids, our partners, our parents — we think that a quick ticket to a happy Mother’s Day will come from being pampered. But we’re inevitably disappointed when we find that focusing on ourselves is not always, or even usually, a sure route to happiness.

The solution to this sticky-wicket is deceptively simple: We can set ourselves up to be happy on Mother’s Day — to feel gratitude and awe and deep love instead of frustration and disappointment — by simply helping other people. People who help others tend to be less stressed, more joyful, and healthier; less stress, more joy, and greater health all sound good to me this Mother’s Day.

So this year, even though I often long for a break from caring for others, I will make Mother’s Day all about other people. (I know that this strategy isn’t for everyone; those of you suffering from caregiver or compassion fatigue won’t want to try this from home.)

We’ll celebrate the grandmothers in our family, of course, with a big brunch or a fun family dinner (or both, for both sides of the family). But for months, I’ve been wanting to try what this guy does for his birthday: spend a day or two doing dozens of little good deeds—and bring my kids along for the ride.

We’re finally going to do it — for Mother’s Day instead of my birthday — as a way to honor my own mother, Sylvia. She just turned 70 and is as beautiful and vibrant as ever. We’d like to help one person for each year that she has been a mother (41 years). Since her mother, my Oma, passed away this year (at the amazing age of 104!) we’d also like to honor her by helping at least one person for each year Oma was a mother (71 years). Silly math, but we’re aiming to do kind acts for 112 or more people.

We started our “kindness scavenger hunt” this weekend, but to be honest, we didn’t get as far with it as I’d hoped. Personally, I could have powered through the whole list, but my kids fatigued after checking just a few things off the list. We agreed we’d do some more on Mother’s Day, and each week thereafter, until we think we’ve helped more than a hundred people.

Here’s our “Kindness Scavenger Hunt” list:

1. Pick the lemons from our elderly neighbor’s tree, make lemonade, and deliver it to her.
2. Bring food to the food bank.
3. Do a loving-kindness meditation for all those that we love and are concerned about—and also for those that bother us.
4. Leave flowers for a widow who is grieving the man she was married to for 59 years.
5. Give vegetables from our garden to neighbors.
6. Pick up trash in our local park.
7. Stop for everyone looking to cross the street or merge.
8. Make a larger-than-comfortable donation to Tipping Point, a group that is striving to eradicate poverty in our area.
9. Fill a thred up bag full of like-new clothing to benefit Teach for America.
10. Give out extra hugs to the grandmothers in our lives, who really appreciate them.
11. Write a thank-you note to the kids’ preschool teacher: one of those “other mothers” that really made a difference in their lives.
12. Make and deliver “care-kits” to as many homeless people in Berkeley as we can, and give the extras to our friends and family to distribute in their travels.
13. Send someone a book I think they will enjoy, totally randomly.
14. Send all the pregnant women I know some of my favorite parenting books.
15. Write a letter our beat cop thanking him for all he does for our neighborhood.
16. Help a friend with some work on Sunday morning (instead of sleeping in).
17. Visit people at the old age home where my father-in-law used to live (and bring the dog, who despite also being quite old, tends to light up their day).
18. Babysit for the neighbors that have little kids, so that they can have a date-night.
19. Deliver Challahs to temple congregants who are grieving or ill.
20. Serve dinner to homeless and hungry people in San Francisco’s tenderloin neighborhood (Glide Memorial allows kids to volunteer).

What do you think we should add to our list? Please add your suggestions as a comment below!

Happy Mother’s Day, all. Cheers to all the work you and the mothers you love are doing to raise happiness.