I Told My Daughter To Be Happy

Before we can exist for the glory of God, we need to first believe that we can exist for any other purpose than to make ourselves happy.

My daughter Abby has been going through some kind of funk lately. She used to love going to day care, but ever since she graduated from the "Tumbling Teddies" (ages 0-2yr) and entered the "Dancing Dolphins", she's lost her joy. Every morning (of the three days we put her in daycare), she will cry as we put on our shoes, cry as we pull into the parking lot, and lose it as we walk through the door.

I am a weak dad. I have a tender heart for her, and I'm always tempted to give her the day off and let her muck around the house while I work from home. But I steel myself, and I try to offer words of comfort through her tears.

"It's okay, sweetie! You'll love playing with your friends!"

"You're gonna learn lots! You love your teachers!"

"You're gonna have so much fun!"

It's that last one I go back to over and over again. I find myself repeating it like a mantra, just hoping it will somehow get through to her so I won't have to hear her cries of anguish. I just want to appease her, soothe her, make her discomfort go away. I just want her to stop being in pain, and just be happy.

The triumph of “you’re gonna have fun!”

In his book The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self, Christian historian Carl Trueman makes the argument that the Western world is going through a unique epoch of human history where the vision of human flourishing is individual self-satisfaction. The greatest moral good for each person is to find and be whatever makes them the most personally happy. He argues that the foundation for this worldview is the belief that the fundamental unit of existence is the "psychological self". What he means is that we primarily see being human as being isolated, individual atoms ruled by inner conviction, rather than parts of a community ruled by social order. And therefore the chief purpose of existence isn’t to be at harmony with the world outside of myself, but to live a life that is as personally meaningful and satisfying as possible.

"...each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or political authority." (Trueman, quoting Charles Taylor, pg 43)

In a nutshell, because the essence of being human is to be a free individual, the goal of being human is to express our unique individuality. This is why we’re fond of saying to each other:

“You do you”

But also, because we now have freedom to pursue whatever we want in order to achieve self-fulfillment, ironically we all end up pursuing the same thing, which is personal satisfaction. This is why we’re also fond of saying to each other:

“Do what makes you happy” or,

“Live your best life”

Trueman argues that every single one of us, no matter who we are, live in a world where this is the dominant worldview. It’s our default core belief. It’s written into the very foundations of modern society. This means that whether we like it or not, it’s the air that we breathe. How immersive is this view of seeing the world? That question deserves its own post, but my own story is an illustration of its all-pervasiveness.

Live your best life, Abby

Abby doesn’t want to go to day care. She wants to stay home, watch Bluey, do laundry with mom, and eat chicken nuggets at the park with dad. But she has to go to daycare. Forgetting for now that she’s only just a little over two, what are the possible reasons I can give her to do the hard, unpleasant thing?

“You will make friends and develop social awareness beyond your immediate family”

“You will learn things that your parents don’t have the capacity to teach you”

“You being in daycare frees up your mother to work part time providing health services to the needy”

“Bad feelings are not something to avoid at all costs. It’s something that you can work through and learn to tolerate. It will make you stronger and more complete as a human being”

Cards on the table, that last one is a real important lesson that I learned at an embarrassingly late point in life. Apparently in child psychology, teaching your kid to cope with negative emotions is tremendously important for healthy personal and social development. I didn’t get it when I was younger, and I’ve screwed up a lot of things in my life because I didn’t know what to do when I was feeling bad (stories for another time). I don’t want Abby to suffer the same way I did; I want her to be stronger and smarter and more mature, better equipped to navigate life when her heart is a tempest.

But the funny thing here is, that last one is pretty much the opposite of what the rest of the world is telling us at all times. Embracing unpleasant feelings is indispensable to being a healthy, whole human, and yet we’re always being told that happiness is the most important thing to life.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
We fought for these ideals, we shouldn’t settle for less

This morning, I caught myself unconsciously affirming the tenets of our psychological, therapeutic age. My instinctive strategy for preparing my daughter for daycare is to assure her that she’ll have fun! It seems so innocent, but what I’m unintentionally teaching her is that the measure for a thing’s worth is how much satisfaction it will bring you. How happy it will make you.

You might think I’m reading too much into one moment, but I assure you that I am not. This is the reason why these beliefs are the air we breathe. From the moment our children begin their existence, we reinforce the idol of self-fulfillment, because it’s alien to conceive of anything else. Believe me, I tried. This morning, instead of saying, “you’ll have fun!” I tried some alternatives:

“This will be good for you!”

“This is necessary for you to find your place in the social order”

“Conforming to the transcendent sacred is the highest moral calling of any individual”

The first one just rang hollow, like the empty promise of a parent who just wants you to do what he wants. The second one just sounds offensive to our modern ears. “Why is it MY business for me to fit into YOUR stupid social order??” And the third one… well Abby hasn’t read the book yet so that doesn’t really make sense to her.

Conclusion

My point (actually Carl Trueman’s point) is that we live in a psychological, therapeutic age. Psychological meaning that we place our inner feelings and convictions at the center of life’s meaning. And therapeutic meaning that we make happiness, self-fulfillment, and all-around feeling good our ultimate pursuits. We start catechizing our children with this worldview from the moment they take their first breath. We don’t do it on purpose, it’s just very, very hard to do anything else.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. One of the indispensable beliefs in the Christian faith is that we don’t exist solely for ourselves, we exist for the glory of God. If we truly want to make that a pillar of our lives, we need to first do the hard work of knocking down the crappier, knock-off belief. And that means catching our unconscious messages and trying our best to teach a different, superior message.