The Three Secrets to Raising Great Kids

Being a parent is one of the most meaningful things you can do with your life, and one of the easiest things to worry about getting wrong. Most of us ultimately want the same things for our children: for them to grow up to be good people and have a good life. But how much influence do parents actually have over those outcomes? In this episode of Office Hours, I explore what the research can teach us about raising happy, well-adjusted kids, including how much of our children’s personalities are inherited, where we as parents really can make a difference, and why what we model often matters more than what we say. — Brought to you by: • Noble Mobile https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks—With Noble, there is only one plan: The No-Bull Plan. It’s simple. It’s transparent. And if you use less data, you get cash back. Get an exclusive offer at https://noblemobile.com/arthurbrooks • LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/Arthur—A science-backed electrolyte drink mix that helps you feel and perform your best, without sugar, artificial ingredients, or gimmicks. Get a free sample pack at DrinkLMNT.com/Arthur http://drinklmnt.com/Arthur ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ http://drinklmnt.com/Arthur— Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • In-person Retreats: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://retreats.arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://retreats.arthurbrooks.com/ • Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (05:04) What most parents want for their kids (09:29) What the research has revealed about nature vs. nurture (17:00) How parenting impacts personality (29:12) Parenting principle #1: Even a hot mess can be a great parent (32:52) Parenting principle #2: Be warm and loving (34:29) Parenting principle #3: Be an actor (38:42) Q&A: Overcoming bad habits learned from your parents (40:50) Q&A: How to support a child with a toxic partner (42:49) Q&A: Teaching children the discipline of happiness — Referenced: • The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-of-your-life • Meaning Membership:https://hub.arthurbrooks.com/the-meaning-membership • Arthur’s newsletter:https://www.arthurbrooks.com/newsletter • The Happiness Scale:https://learn.arthurbrooks.com/the-happiness-scale • The Pursuit of Happiness with Arthur Brooks:https://www.thefp.com/s/the-pursuit-of-happiness-with-arthur • Parenting in America Today: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/01/24/parenting-in-america-today • OCEAN: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1635039/ • Heritability of the big five personality dimensions and their facets: a twin study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8776880 • Longitudinal associations between parenting and child Big Five personality traits: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-24205-001 • ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Arthur Brooks?

  I want to talk today about one of the greatest sources of both happiness and unhappiness for many, perhaps most people, and that's being a parent. What are the kinds of things that you think that you need to do so you can have good and happy kids? Should you be lax? Should you be strict or easy? Should you yell at them a lot? You should have a lot of rules or not so many? Should they be free range? What are the different styles of parenting? How should you behave? Does it matter at all what I do? And that's really the nature versus nurture debate. How much of a child's development is due to their genes rather than their upbringing? It turns out that there are certain things about parenting that not everybody takes into consideration that are really important that most people don't know about.

• 0:43Arthur Brooks?

  And if you do these parenting things, it'll matter a lot.

• 0:54Arthur Brooks?

  Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness, more specifically about the science of love and happiness. How you can use the best that has been thought and said in neuroscience, behavioral science, philosophy, wisdom traditions, put it all together to create a strategy to live a better life and to help other people live a better life as well. This is my personal mission and I'm so happy and so gratified that you've chosen to spend a little time on this journey with me. I want you to use this in your life, but also to pass it on to other people. That's why I'm doing this show and why I'm so grateful to you for spending this time with me. I hope that you're enjoying the show so far. If you are a repeat listener, please, if you are, pass the show on to other people.

• 1:37Arthur Brooks?

  Give people the link, share the ideas that you're actually getting from it. Look at the show notes, do the reading if you like, and pass that on to other people as well. This is actually how we create our movement. This is how we together create a happier world. If you have any ideas, any criticisms, any feedback, any questions, please write to me at [email protected]. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple or Spotify and do subscribe on the platform of your choice. If you want to go deeper on these ideas, I strongly recommend that you subscribe to my newsletter. You can get it on my website, arthurbrooks.com/newsletter. It'll be delivered to your inbox every Friday morning. That has ideas that are not always in this podcast, as a matter of fact,

• 2:19Arthur Brooks?

  and they go a little bit deeper in certain areas, about 300 to 500 words. So you can get through it really quickly and pass it on to your friends if you like. If you want to get together in person with me and other people that are interested in these things, we have a series of retreats that we're offering. You can find those on my website at retreats. Arthurbrooks.com. And as always, please go to the website for all kinds of cool resources, things that you can read, things that you can listen to, ways that you can get actually engaged in our movement. Right now, you're like Neo in The Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now.

• 3:02Arthur Brooks?

  You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system, just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings, you're addicted. You don't like it and I don't either, but I can't just tell you to stop doing it. That's hard. If you want to break free from the system, you need an incentive. Here's one. Why don't you join a phone company that pays you not to use your phone? If you want to reduce brain rot, get Noble Mobile. It pays you to use less data. It gives you an incentive to unplug. Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back.

• 3:43Arthur Brooks?

  And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life and you're going to like how it feels. I want to talk today about one of the greatest sources of both happiness and unhappiness for many, perhaps most people, and that's being a parent, being a mother or father. Most people will talk about the joys that that brings, the frustrations that that brings, the fear that that brings is being a parent. And I want to talk about that because I have two questions that I want to ask empirically and that I want to help you craft a life strategy around. If you have kids, are gonna have kids, contemplating having kids at some point in the future. Number one, how to be a great and happier parent? And number two, how to raise great kids and indeed happier kids? What do the data say?

• 4:27Arthur Brooks?

  It's not all chance, as it turns out. Now, of course, this is a huge topic. We could dedicate many episodes to it. We could dedicate a whole podcast to this, and in fact, people have. If you like this episode, please tell me and I will do more on this subject. Parenting is something that I feel very deeply about, is a very personal issue as a parent and grandparent. It's something I've done a lot of research on and in conjunction with romantic partnerships, marriage. These are some of the most important things that we can do. This is really how we live forever in our way. So please let me know if you want to hear more about this. This is just the opening act if it will be according to you. Now, what do parents care about? What do parents most care about? And this is a question that empirical researchers have asked over the years.

• 5:10Arthur Brooks?

  If you have children or plan to have them, what do you want? What do you care about the most? What are you most worried about? That was actually asked in a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, which is one of the most robust and best research organizations for survey-based research. It ranked in order what people most want for their kids and what people are most worried about for their kids. Number one in what they want, the desire of most parents. This is 94% of parents say that they want their kids to be honest and ethical. Interesting, right? Not having a good old time, not being all cheerful. Number one, 94% say this outranked everything else is I want honest and ethical kids. Number two is what are they most worried about?

• 5:55Arthur Brooks?

  I should say, what's the number one thing on the worry list? This is 76% of parents in the number one slot, is that they're worried that their kids might struggle with depression or anxiety. Now, that probably wouldn't have been the case 50 years ago because depression has about tripled among adolescents and anxiety has about doubled when we talk clinically, when this is diagnosed actually as psychiatric conditions, mood disorders. So they wouldn't have talked about it in this way, but they would have talked about being worried about their kids not being happy, which kind of amounts to the same thing. So all together, what these data tell us, and once again, I'll put this survey in the show notes so you can go look at it yourself, is that what most people want overwhelmingly is their kids to be good people and happy people or relatively happy people.

• 6:37Arthur Brooks?

  That's what most parents want, but in that order, by the way, good people who are also happy. And those two things are obviously really related. So this is what we're really worried about as parents is what we can do to give our kids the highest odds of being good people and happy people. And I know exactly how this feels in those two categories. You know, I have three kids. Those of you who follow my work, might know that I have three, they're all adults, 28, 26, and 23 at this point. And you know, 10 years ago, they were all teenagers, which was a super fun walk in the park, as you can imagine, having three teenagers at home. And they were all challenging in their own way. They were all difficult in their own way and they, oh, they worried Esther and me in their own way.

• 7:20Arthur Brooks?

  One of my kids, when he was in middle school, he was particularly difficult at one period. They all go through their periods of particular difficulty. And I remember haranguing him constantly about his homework and his grades, which had become a real problem, not because he didn't understand, but because he sort of lacked motivation, wasn't living up to his potential. You know, classic, you know, get calls from the school that, you know, he was getting bad grades or he might fail a class or, you know, he didn't show up for his exams. Or finally Esther's like, at least we know he's not cheating, you know, she's an optimist. But one night after an especially bad day, I was taking stock of the situation and I came to this realization. I didn't actually care about his grades. I was haranguing him about something I didn't care about.

• 8:03Arthur Brooks?

  I was using his performance in school as a proxy for what I really cared about was him becoming a responsible, ethical, faithful, well-adjusted man. In other words, I wanted him to be good and happy, exactly the qualities that the Pew Research team have found in their survey-based data. And that led me as a behavioral scientist to start studying how to do that. So not just hoping and not just using intuition and not using sort of pop psychology and not just Googling it, I started to do some real no fool in research. It's one of the great things about being a behavioral scientist is because it's not research, it's me search and it's my family search, as it were. And so I started doing real work on this. And I want to tell you a little bit about what I've found over the years

• 8:47Arthur Brooks?

  that subsequently I've been able to verify with respect to the, what I see in the data, what I see in the studies and also what I've experienced as I've worked with families in my everyday work. What are the kinds of things that you think that you need to do so you can have good and happy kids? Should you be lax? Should you be? Strict or easy? Should you yell at them a lot? You should have a lot of rules or not so many? Should they be free range? What are the different styles of parenting? How should you behave? How should you treat them? That's what I looked into. But here's where my research really started. How much does it matter? You know, because this is kind of the baseline of what you would do as a behavioral scientist. You want to know, is like, does it matter at all what I do?

• 9:31Arthur Brooks?

  And that's really the nature versus nurture debate. How much of a child's development and an adolescent's development is due to their genes rather than their upbringing? Okay, now, now, when I was a kid, the psychology literature suggested that nurture was a lot more important than nature. And this has kind of gone back and forth over the years. But there was this blank slate kind of theory that we were tabula rasa or nearly so. And that parenting is what really mattered to mold who they will become as adults. Lots and lots and lots of books came out about that. There's a lot of parenting and child rearing books. I mean, the famous Benjamin Spock book about, about how to raise children, babies and children,

• 10:12Arthur Brooks?

  was really a lot about how to treat them in a particular way so that they will grow up, depending entirely on how you treat them and what you say to them and how you act to become happy and good, good and happy, like we talked about before. And I was sort of interested in this to begin with because I didn't know. I didn't know what the current state of the literature was. And, and by the way, the nature nurture thing is really interesting because our kids vary with respect to how much nature and nurture are going to work. Let me explain. As I explained in a past episode, two of my kids are biological and one is adopted. And so this is like a social scientist's dream, right? I mean, we didn't do it so that I could get data. I promise you, I'm not that weird. But, but I wanted to know how the similarities and differences and, and how they responded

• 10:55Arthur Brooks?

  to different kinds of parenting stimuli would differ with respect to nature versus nurture. Now, it's interesting because my three kids, my two older sons are biological. My daughter's adopted, my youngest, she's now 23. But they, they all are like me and my wife, but in different ways. So my oldest son is 28. He thinks just like me. We have complete cognitive similarity. He and I make the same jokes. We have the same sense of humor and, and, and many of the same ways of solving problems. So we're cognitively really similar to each other. My middle son, we have the same appetites, good and bad. We're attracted to the same kind of stuff, right? You mean, the, you know, the exploding fireworks and you know, that, that whatever it is.

• 11:39Arthur Brooks?

  I mean, we have the same tendency to be attracted and averse to the same kind of stimuli, with the same appetites, what it comes down to. And my youngest daughter, who is adopted, here's where it gets really weird. We have exactly the same interests. We're interested in the same stuff. She specialized in, in college. She majored, you don't call it specializations, majoring for Pete's sake. I'm a 30 year academic, I should know this. She majored in, in psychology with an emphasis on neuroscience. I mean, yeah. And why? Because ever since she was a little girl, we'd have these intense conversations about the stuff that I talk about on this show and the stuff that I write about. She's really, really interested in that. And she's not technically biologically related to me. So I, I want to know how much of all of these things are nature and how much of all of these things are nurture?

• 12:22Arthur Brooks?

  Now, again, the old thinking is it's all nurture and no nature. But that turns out to be quite wrong. And how do we know this? Because modern research has been able to use quasi-experimental methods on twins, identical twins, those who are especially those who were separated at birth into, into separate families. And then given personality tests later on in life. That's not a diabolical experiment. It just kind of happened naturally in the way that, that adoptions were undertaken, especially between the 1930s and the 1960s in the United States. And, and they're, they're voluntarily reunited. There's nothing, there's no ethical problems with the surveys with these, with these experiments, as a matter of fact. And, and you can see some of these, these meetings for the first time on, on YouTube. They're beautiful and funny and really lovely.

• 13:06Arthur Brooks?

  Imagine you're 40 and you find out for the first time you have an identical twin. How weird that would be. And, and you know, seeing people understanding this for the first time and the thrill they took in it. It's just really, it's actually really, really inspirational. The early studies on this, on these twins were coming in the late 1990s. And so that's just when the thinking started to change, which was really my time coming out as a, as a behavioral scientist. I finished my PhD in 1998. So the first big study that asked nature versus nurture with respect to personality came out in 1996 in the Journal of Personality. So really an apex journal in psychology. And they were looking at these, 123 pairs of identical twins, which have identical DNA,

• 13:51Arthur Brooks?

  and 127 pairs of fraternal twins, which share 50% of their genetic material. So they're, they have 50% in common in their genetic profile. And then they looked across the personality profile. Now, those of you who have been following this work for a while, you know that we study personality with respect to five dimensions. And, and the five dimensions are remembered in terms of the acronym OCEAN. This is how you remember it when you're first learning it for the first time in school. O is openness to experience or openness to personality. It's a neophilia is another way to say it. You like new stuff. C is conscientiousness. You live, you know, true to your word. E is extroversion versus introversion. That was the first of the personality characteristics.

• 14:36Arthur Brooks?

  Believe it or not, that was sort of popularized by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist in the early part of the 20th century. So that was the first of these. A is agreeableness. You know, that's agreeableness, going out of your way not to be disagreeable and to be agreeable with other people. And N is neuroticism, which largely is correlated with sort of melancholy and anxiety, depression and anxiety today. Those particular mood disorders are, and that's a Freudian term is neuroticism. But we keep that in there for the N. So how much of these five personality dimensions are inherited? O openness, 61% inherited. If you have parents who are open to experience, that's going to explain 61% of the variance

• 15:17Arthur Brooks?

  across the population in, in openness to experience for, among children, right? C conscientiousness, 44% of your conscientiousness is basically inherited or the, the variance is explained by, by parenting. E extroversion, 53%. A agreeableness, 41%. And neuroticism, 41% as well. That's a lot. And so it's somewhere between 40, between low 40s and low 60s. So let's just say 50% of your personality is explained by genetics by, and, and the rest is, the other 50% is not genetics, is what it comes down to. That's a lot, right?

• 16:01Arthur Brooks?

  And that's, and what that means is that old nurture is, is not right. At least that we're not blank slates. Okay, you say, all right, great. So it's 50% genetic. That, that turns out not to be bad news, by the way. Because if you turn out to have a personality you don't like very much, don't just say, it's true, my mother did make me unhappy biologically. It just means you need to do more work to work on your personality than somebody who has a personality they like or a personality that's more pleasant, right? There's nothing wrong, but you have to know, if you know your genetic tendency, you can tailor your habits. That's everything that we often do about happiness. If you have a genetic tendency to be gloomy, you need better happiness hygiene.

• 16:44Arthur Brooks?

  People who are just bubbly and a bully and all the time don't need to do that. But the same thing is true with, with the genetics of your personality. You need to know it and it's not bad news. I've talked about this in newer shows about how you can change that. And I'll talk about that a little bit later here today. Okay, now, the other half, however, you're going to say, okay, fine. I only have half with my, with parenting. It turns out that's not right either. Because it's probably more experience, the individual experience that people have over the course of their lives, which has a lot to do with a lot of things besides parenting. And parenting per se, in the way that, that children are parented, doesn't make up very much of the other half at all. So this is not from the same set of studies, but here's what really kind of sums it up.

• 17:27Arthur Brooks?

  This is a important article that I'll put in the show notes from 2021 from Collaborate Psychology, also a really, really good psychology journal, that, that showed that parenting has about as much, on average, explains about as much of the variance in personality as does birth order. So you've seen some of the birth order studies, the first child, the second child, the third child. It's real, but it's actually not that big a deal. It just, it, it, you kind of see it, but it's really, I mean, I know a lot of people where the first kid is one way, where the first kid is a second way. Everybody knows that the middle child's a problem. Well, not always. Sometimes the middle child is the most responsible of the children. There's, there's, there's stereotypes about this, but they don't really carry very much weight.

• 18:11Arthur Brooks?

  They just tend to be kind of true, truthy. And, and the same is true with respect to parenting. It, it kind of, on average, approaches 0% of the explanatory value of the variance in personality. Okay, so the rest is just the individual experiences that people have, notwithstanding the effect that parents are having over them. And, and now you're saying, well, man, that's ridiculous. That doesn't make sense at all, or it's, at least it's really unfair that no matter what I do, that it doesn't matter. That's wrong. That's a wrong interpretation. That's the wrong statistical interpretation. But it's also wrong in the following way. These are averages. It turns out that there are certain things about parenting that not everybody takes into consideration

• 18:56Arthur Brooks?

  that are really important, that most people don't know about. And if you do these parenting things, it'll matter a lot. Now, it rounds out across the population to not mattering very much because most people don't do these things that I'm about to talk about. Okay, so, so that's what I'm thinking about. Think about it this way. I have a lot of studies that also show, because you know that I'm very interested in the biology of how we build better lives, that, that dietary supplements, which everybody's talking about, everybody's thinking about, that dietary supplements are very marginal in the way that they affect muscle protein synthesis and hypertrophy, for example. That doesn't mean that no supplements work. It just means that bundles of supplements on average that people are taking, many of which have a very marginal impact on what we do.

• 19:41Arthur Brooks?

  Some supplements really matter a lot. For example, people who take relatively high doses of creatine monohydrate, but have a really, really good effect, both cognitively and muscle protein synthesis. It's just that on average, not everybody does that. And, and that's the same thing with respect to parenting. Okay, on average, parenting doesn't have a big effect. But certain things about parenting, if you do them, will. And that's what I really want to focus on because that's what gets us to the, the core of what we're trying to get in this episode today. Now here, let me give you some clues on what the parenting really is. A bunch of pretty interesting patterns emerge from the data. With respect to personality, once again, and then we'll go on to happiness and virtue, et cetera. Big finding in literature.

• 20:25Arthur Brooks?

  Children are more conscientious when their parents were more involved in their lives and worked to provide cultural stimulation, such as them taking them to museums. Okay, that's one piece of evidence there, right? Okay, so that's not just genetics. That has to do with particular parenting actions, that's something that the parents were doing. There's nothing to do with what the parents were saying and only to do with the parents were doing with their kids that affected their conscientiousness. Second, children are more agreeable, significantly more agreeable, when their parents raise them with structure and goals. Once again, that's not just saying be nice, that's raising them with particular structure and goals. They tend to be more agreeable. And that's a pretty big conclusion, by the way.

• 21:09Arthur Brooks?

  That means that we're gonna do these things together, we're gonna have particular goals, there's gonna be rewards for the goals, we're gonna have a structure in the way that you eat, the way that you sleep, when you get up, when you exercise, when you go to school, showing up on time, that that actually leads to people becoming more agreeable. And once again, those are the actions modeled by parents, not just what they're telling their kids. This is also true with happiness, for example. One really interesting study of both fraternal and identical twins, found that the genetic component from ratings of happiness, largely, I mean, a lot of it is somewhere between 44 and 52% genetic, you know, your happiness is 44 to 52% genetic, a lot like your like your personality.

• 21:51Arthur Brooks?

  But there are certain things that parents do, that parents model, that have a lot to do with the parenting per se on the later happiness of kids. Most notably parental warmth and affection. When parents are really warm and affectionate with each other, and really warm and affectionate with their kids, that tends to highly, highly associate later in life with happiness, and it seems to be really causal. By the way, that's most important from the father. It turns out that the father being warm and affectionate is even more important than the mother being warm and affectionate. And and this is one of the reasons that you'll often hear, and I've often said this myself,

• 22:31Arthur Brooks?

  I've given this advice to dads, the number one thing that you can do on your worst day is for your kids is love their mom overtly and clearly, and then go love them. Let's start with their mom. I mean, you got, you kind of got one job, guys, is what it comes down to. But part of the reason is because that has this big association with the subsequent happiness of children. If you're like me, you gotta be drinking when you're in the gym, and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories, that will actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's Element, L-M-N-T. Probably knew that already. It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy ingredients that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks.

• 23:15Arthur Brooks?

  No sugar, no junk, just electrolytes that actually work. Give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed, it's made for athletes, fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me, anyone who sweats. So, how do I use it? I use it in the morning, 4:45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything, it peps me up, because I like to be real clear, and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase at drink element. That's drink, just like it sounds, L-M-N-T.com/Arthur. Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions asked, but you're gonna like it. Okay, now, these are clues.

• 23:59Arthur Brooks?

  Now, once again, the data say that on average, across the whole population, a variance in parenting doesn't explain very much at all of variance in personality or happiness, except in these particular kinds of cases. So what do they have in common, these cases? The answer is, it doesn't matter what you say, all that matters is what you do. You wanna be a good parent, you want your kids to be good and virtuous and kind and honest and upright and happy, or as happy as they can be. Model what you want to see. That's really what it comes down to. Words are less important than actions. It's almost the case, by the way, when you look at the literature, that you could talk

• 24:42Arthur Brooks?

  to your kids in a foreign language, but what they see is actually what is gonna rub off and have a really big effect on them. That's why parents who say, do what I say and not what I do, are doing it exactly wrong. It should be do what I do and not what I say, because the saying part, they don't really listen, goes in one ear and out the other. Modeling is so important in the literature. There's a really important study, actually, from 2001, in the journal Sociological Focus, about how to pass on religious behavior. So a lot of people who are religious, a lot of parents who are really religious, they worry a lot in a secularizing world. What do I do so that my kids go to church, go to synagogue, go to mosque, practice their faith, you know, in all different faiths?

• 25:25Arthur Brooks?

  I've been asked this question by Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists, and they're worried about the quickly secularizing world, and they see so many of their friends' kids fall away from the faith, and they know that their faith is such a gift to them, and they want their kids to practice. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? So this study actually kind of answers that. This study actually shows that when kids see their father in prayer and practicing the faith, that has an enormous predictive value on what they do when they grow up. Now, why is that? Also, the mother, but the father much more so, as it turns out, in intact families, obviously, is what I'm talking about. It probably, and this is speculation at this point, it probably is the case that when

• 26:08Arthur Brooks?

  you're really little, seeing the physically most imposing human being doing something has a big cognitive impact. It is a big cognitive imprinting impact on the child. And I remember this, by the way, I remember this. So as a kid, my mom and my dad, me and my brother, and my dad was six foot two. I mean, he, to me, he was like, like Goliath, he was in, he was like a giant, right? And super strong. And I remember asking my brother Jeff, do you think dad's strong enough to lift the house? It was like the corner of the house. My dad was a mathematics professor, he could not. But he was huge, right? And he was strong. And by the way, he was a proud man.

• 26:51Arthur Brooks?

  He would not have been on his knee before any other man. No way, right? But every night, before I went to sleep, I saw my father on his knees, next to my bed. We would say our prayers. That's what we did. We were a serious, religious, Christian family, and my father prayed on his knees. And what did that mean to me? That my father was in the presence of something more powerful than him? I mean, that's, that's a big deal to a little dude. And it still is, because when I was a kid, I said, that's what it means to be a big, strong man. Right? Now, you can say, how naive, how silly, I get it, and people have said that to me in

• 27:35Arthur Brooks?

  the past, but that made me who I am now, and I made sure that my kids saw it as well. So, and that's the example that I'm talking about here. I'm not making the case that this is how you need to live. I am making the case that if you want great kids, you need to model great behavior. That's the bottom line of what this comes down to. Okay, I can give you the advice, have good genes, unhelpful, right? But you can do that other half, and that other half is all the things that you're actually doing. Do you want your kids to be honest? Yeah, I mean, I got 94% of the parents are saying, I want my kids to be honest and ethical. What do you do? Be honest and ethical, be impeccable to your word, be admirable.

• 28:19Arthur Brooks?

  That's what it comes down to. That's the reason, that's the standard to which you're held, publicly and privately. If your dad and mom is actually being truly admirable in all of these moral ways, and having your kids actually see that, having your kids seeing when you could have kept the extra change that they're giving you, when your kids see that you could have cut that ethical corner, when you could have told that lie and gotten away with it and gotten a better price from the car dealer, whatever that happens to be, and your kids are in on it, and they saw you not taking the money, not cutting the corner, not being angry or mean when you had, were justified in doing so, and that will speak louder than any words you could ever speak in front of your kids, that might just change their lives.

• 29:04Arthur Brooks?

  As a matter of fact, it's the only thing you can do that probably ever will. So here are three things to keep in mind. Here are three lessons I want you to keep in mind on the basis of all of this. And once again, we go deeper, we could dig us, we could dig a hole in any other part of this and go to the center of the earth. These things are so deep, and they're so rich, and there's so much literature, and I'd love to talk about this, so let me know if you want me to do more. And specifically, what do you want to know more about? By the way, the questions that are coming are all about this, and we'll get into some of these things in a minute from you. Three things to keep in mind. Number one, a lot of people today say, I can't have kids because I'm a mess. Yes, you can. I have the data. Even a hot mess can be a really great parent. Why? Because we can be self-governing individuals.

• 29:49Arthur Brooks?

  There's a wonderful body of literature in psychology that comes from the British psychologist Richard Wiseman, called the On the As-if Principle. It's actually, goes back to the work of William James, the father of modern psychology, who talked about the fact that he purported that he hypothesized that people will become something that they're pretending to be, right? And that's because you, it's not manifestation, it's just like, it's role-playing until it becomes realistic in your own life. You live up to the fiction that you're trying to create. That was what he believed in, and Richard Wiseman has shown in his work that it's absolutely the case, called the As-if Principle. Act as if you were that particular person. If you wanna be happier, pretend you're happier.

• 30:34Arthur Brooks?

  I've got all these interesting studies, I probably mentioned them before on the show, that if you actually figure out a way to simulate a Duchenne smile, which is physiologically the smile that's uniquely associated with happiness, that involves the orbicularis oculi and zygomaticus major muscles, and your face, nothing to do with the mouth, all having to do with the eyes, that if you can simulate that, that it will fool your brain into thinking you're actually happier, and you will be happier. Now, the way to do that is in the morning, to take your pencil, a pencil, and clamp it between your molars.

• 31:09Arthur Brooks?

  See what happened? It actually exerted the muscles that I'm talking about right there. And you feel happier immediately. If you do that for about a minute, you'll feel happier for about an hour. As a matter of fact, give it a try, but that's the as if principle. Act as if you were the particular person. You're a hot mess. Well, welcome to the world of hot messes, man. Act like the person you want to be around your children. You will become that person and so will they. Well, is it harder for some people than others? Yeah, totally. But here's the point. We are self governing. You know, we have this big needy prefrontal cortex, a sixth of your brain by weight. No, wrong. Thirty percent of your brain by weight. I got that wrong. I got the math wrong. I know you're holding me to that. You're going to write into the comments. You said a sixth, that's thirty percent.

• 31:53Arthur Brooks?

  And, and what that allows us to do is to not choose our animal impulses. It allows us to live in our space of our moral aspirations. The executive center of our brain says the limbic system isn't in charge. I am the conscious me. Allows me to be the person that I want to be. If I'm a mess and I'm, and I have a difficult emotional profile, if I'm suffering from mood disorders, will I, will I find it harder than other people to do the right thing and say the right thing and model the right behavior? Yeah, but all of us can do this. You know, actions are more important than feelings for self governing individuals. And this is one of the reasons, by the way, that most people are better people once they have kids. Because they're so much more dedicated to self governance, to self management.

• 32:38Arthur Brooks?

  And it improves their lives because they start to live this as if principle. Even if you're a mess, you can be a great parent. And that's principle one that I want you to remember. Principle number two, when you don't know what to do. You got teenagers or little kids or toddlers that are, you know, waking up at two o'clock in the morning with croup and you haven't slept in a week. When you don't know what to do, here's your go to. Be warm and loving. I don't care if you feel it or not, because the as if principle, be warm and loving. Love them more. You know, and, and I remember that when one of our kids was being particularly difficult and you know, we just threw up our hands. And my wife said, I'm completely resigned. I guess all we, all we can do at this point is love him. Right?

• 33:23Arthur Brooks?

  In other words, bring it in. This is what great families and, and, and really good couples, by the way, they have in common. Is when they, they, they feel avoidance, like no. They practice approach, bring it in. It's one of the things I try to do in my marriage. I don't know, is succeed. It's when I'm feeling avoidance, I'm feeling aversion because I'm annoyed. I say, bring it in, bring it in. Because what, what are you doing? You're using the opposite signal strategy, using the as a principle. And the ultimate rebellion against the self, and especially in the moments of greatest desperation, is warmth and love. Warmth and love. When you don't know what to do as a parent, warmth and love. What if they're being a brat?

• 34:02Arthur Brooks?

  Especially then, they need your love the most when they deserve your love the least is what it comes down to. That is the modeling behavior that will truly change their lives. I remember that my parents loved me when I didn't deserve it. And that's what helped me to love my kids when they deserved it the least. I'm trying to do that with my grandkids, although I have to tell you about my grandkids. They're never bad. They're always good. I don't know what it is about grandkids, but they're just great all the time. Okay, number three, be an actor. Um, and, and this is related to the first two, of course. But imagine that you are playing in a play, the adult version of your kid. Okay, it's like your kid. And, and again, there's a lot of literature on this, but I don't have to give you the literature on this.

• 34:47Arthur Brooks?

  It makes perfect sense, given all we've talked about before. Pretend if you're, you know, forty years old and you've got a kid, you've got a kid at home was ten. Pretend that you are the forty year old version of your son or daughter. Behaving in a particular way that you'd find good and happy. Because those are the two standards, good and happy. Right? What are they doing? What are they saying? How are they behaving? How are they reacting? How are they treating other people? How are they treating themselves? What are their habits? Think about that, okay? I'm, I'm so, you know, right now I'm sixty two years old and, and, and my son Joaquin is, is twenty eight years old. I'm sixty two year old Joaquin. Right now, he's sort of past the age where I'm really, really worried about this so very much. But guess what?

• 35:32Arthur Brooks?

  You know, he lives right next to me and he's paying attention to me now too. Because he wants to know what it's like to be kind of old. And he's going to model a lot of his behavior, conscious or not on that. So I'm sixty two year old Joaquin. What do I want to see him doing to be both good and happy? And, and when we do that, kids actually see that and that creates this imprinting behavior. And that, that theater production itself will almost never steer you wrong. You're not going to say, you know, my sixty two year old son, what do I want to see him doing? Let's say, I want to see him, I want to see him being mean to his wife. Yeah, I want to see him actually behaving workaholically and not paying attention to his kids and grandkids. Yeah, that's a really good idea. That's what I want him to do.

• 36:14Arthur Brooks?

  You know, I want to see my sixty two year old son being a drunk. That's what I want. No, no, it's not what I want. And it's even more important when I was earlier in life, when I was forty years old. What I want, what I want the forty and the thirty year old version of my kids to, to look like. Okay, one last note before we go to questions. Um, as a parent, you're going to make a ton of mistakes. And, and, and here's the thing, it doesn't matter. It mostly doesn't matter. Most mistakes that you make, they seem really heavy and they seem really grave. They're not, as a, as a matter of fact, I can think back on my selfishness and my blunders as a dad and, and, and all the things that I did wrong. All the boring sports games that I missed because I was, you know, so important at work.

• 36:58Arthur Brooks?

  Um, birthdays and things that I, you know, it's just, I got it. You know, I, I'm, I'm a troubled soul and I've made a lot of wrong decisions in my life. And, and, and on some sleepless nights, those instances roll around in my head and fill me with regret. They really do. Those aren't the big sources of regret. I have other regrets that are much bigger than that. Maybe someday on the show, we'll talk about them, but, but then I look at my sons and my daughter. And, um, how did it all work out? I mean, I, I, I started the show talking about my son when he was struggling in school. Actually, the problem was he wasn't struggling in school. We were struggling with the fact that he wasn't struggling and didn't seem to care and all that. And, and, and how did all my hectoring about grades and, and, and values work out?

• 37:43Arthur Brooks?

  It didn't matter in the end, the fact that I made those mistakes and the fact that I, I ultimately went to doing this stuff that I really cared about, which was trying to be an upright man, so that he would be upright as well. And it worked out. Was he a big scholar in college? No, he skipped scol, he skipped college as a matter of fact, with my full blessing and the blessing of his mother. He worked on a farm for a year. And then he joined the Marine Corps where he spent four years as a mortarman. And then as a scout sniper, which is an elite part of the Marine Corps and a very scary job. Just the training is dangerous, as a matter of fact. But he came out at twenty three, married with a son. And now he's twenty six and has two sons and he's happily married and he loves me. And he loves his wife and he loves his kids. He loves his mom. And I love him.

• 38:28Arthur Brooks?

  And we talk every single day. And despite the fact that I'm a complete screw up, he turned out just fine. And so will your child. So let's take some questions. Anonymous, we got a lot of anonymous this week, right? Um, anonymous writes in to [email protected]. How do you overcome bad habits that come from having an emotionally distant father? Hmm, so we're now, we're not talking about this from the point of view of the father. We're talking about this from the point of view of the adult child, which is an interesting question, one that I hear quite frequently. What really happens in the brain is someone healing from wounds of their parents. I had a great dad and my parents loved each other. And I didn't have this experience. My wife came from a broken home where her father left when she was a little girl, as a matter of fact.

• 39:13Arthur Brooks?

  And she, she did have this experience. And, and, and I've seen the studies and I talked to my wife. And so what do we know? Knowledge is power. You're not programmed into any particular behavior, notwithstanding the bad behavior of your parents. It can be a problem. The modeling is a problem per se, but if the modeling is great, great. If the modeling is poor, then it actually becomes incumbent upon the adult child to get beyond that. And what we know is that the executive center of the brain actually absolutely can get beyond that. That means that we have to act according to our aspirations. And frequently, one of the ways that we do that, by the way, and I've talked about this with a lot of people that had a bad family background. They'll say, I think about what I would like to do right now.

• 39:58Arthur Brooks?

  I think about what my father would do right now, and I do the opposite. That's the opposite signal strategy. So if you had an absent father or an abusive father, or a father was really troubled, that might be the way that you do it. I'm not sure, you have to decide that for yourself. But the truth is also that a lot of people who had absent fathers, they do just fine because they find a good role model, even as an adult. Um, it's interesting, you know, as a, as a Catholic, one of the things that's often recommended is that to, to go to St. Joseph, you know, the foster father of Jesus. And, and, and to have him as a role model in some way, shape or form. Is that too diffuse? Is that too abstract for you? Maybe, but it's actually been helpful for a lot of people. And find somebody in real life or not in real life, who can actually be a role model for you.

• 40:43Arthur Brooks?

  And don't let your background or your, your history actually dictate your future. Second, again, from anonymous, different anonymous. Um, how to parent our oldest son, nineteen years old, who's dating someone who's pretty toxic and causes division in the family? We try to be welcoming, but their communications are bad and our son gets thrown into the middle to advocate and fight for his girlfriend. I don't know how to parent at this stage. Okay, hectoring won't help. This I can tell you. What's going to help is loving him unconditionally. But that's the best insurance policy against really catastrophic things happening. Now, we have this wild situation in our country and probably around the world where we have

• 41:22Arthur Brooks?

  a no contact movement where people are, every manipulative activist appears to be telling people or therapist appears to be telling young adults that your family's toxic, you gotta have, gotta go no contact with them. Some no doubt are from abandonment or abuse, but it has just become so excessive on what's actually going on. And what you want to stay away from is doing something that creates a whole lot of ongoing bitterness that will give an opening to your son's partner to go no contact with you. And so the way to deal with that is unconditional love. If you're religious, I strongly recommend a lot of prayer on this and make your values clear, even if, you know, if they're living in a particular way that you don't, that

• 42:04Arthur Brooks?

  you don't agree with, making your values clear without condemning his or hers for that matter. One of the big points in the research that I found again and again and again, and I've taught this for years, is that you can actually have behavioral differences, but if you don't have values condemnation, you tend not to have generational schism. So live your life and live your life in the way that's appropriate. Love unconditionally your son. And if they're behaving in a particular way that you disagree with, love him nonetheless, making your own values clear, but not condemning his values because he will interpret that as condemning him. And that will be an opportunity for a no contact situation. And that's the worst thing. And that's the thing to avoid.

• 42:46Arthur Brooks?

  Uh, last, not anonymous, this is from Nadia, writes into the website. How can we help 12 year olds build discipline of happiness? Build a discipline of happiness in a way that feels motivating rather than forced. Uh, you know what I'm going to say because that's what I talked about this whole episode. Model it. Don't tell them to go do happy things like write your gratitude list, you know? Model it, write your gratitude list, behave in a way that shows that you're working to become a happier person, notwithstanding your feelings, that you're a self-governing individual. Talk about what you're actually doing to struggle to make that so. Ask for suggestions from your 12 year old on how you can model it better. Bring your 12 year old into your own personal challenges, your own adventure in the, in

• 43:31Arthur Brooks?

  the science of happiness. And that's what's actually going to do it. Now that, that said, a couple of other things, just practical matters. If you want to build a discipline of happiness, you need rules around screen time. Right? That's a very practical thing. I've talked about it again and again and again. There are unmitigated, unlimited use of screens will destroy your child's happiness. Sure as I'm sitting here, that's the case. It will suck the happiness out of your child's life. It will lead to depression and anxiety and loneliness and all kinds of problems, meaning that beyond your modeling happiness, which by the way means modeling good screen behavior on your own part, it means that you need rules around that. Okay. Second is, um, I recommend, what do you do with all that time you're not spending behind screens?

• 44:15Arthur Brooks?

  I recommend time in sports, in the arts and in outside. That's what I recommend. If you read the meaning of your life, my last book, you'll know all of the reasons neurophysiologically why I recommend those things, but they really, really, really work. And that means you need to model it by getting interested in those things and doing them with your kid. If you follow these particular rules, um, you're going to be doing about as much as you possibly can. So Nadia, let me know how it goes. Um, let me know any of your thoughts at the email address, [email protected]. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, leave a comment. I promise I'll read it, even if it's negative, it's great. I want to know what you think about this and we want to make the show better and better and better because we're doing it for you so that you can actually teach this material as well.

• 45:00Arthur Brooks?

  Please follow me on the socia's. Uh, let's redeem the socia's. Let's make them a good source of love and happiness. And that's what I'm trying to do. I know you are as well. Uh, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms, order the meaning of your life, go get the newsletter, go to the website, take the, take the surveys, um, and keep the conversation going. Share these ideas with other people, share them with your kids, love them unconditionally and have a great week.