Wednesday, 3 July 2013

The Fairy Tale - Happy Ever After

Did you grow up with fairy tales that taught you that your knight in shining armour would rescue you and you would live happy ever after?  I did and I was sadly disappointed when my knight came riding in and my life didn’t have the ending I was expecting. 

It concerns me when I hear girls say, I just need to find the “right” guy and then I will be happy.  We seem to be teaching our children to place their happiness in someone else’s hands.  What a responsibility to hand over to someone else.  How does someone else “make” you happy when you have no idea for yourself what makes you happy?
Have you ever been that person trying to make someone else happy?  Were you stressed from jumping through hoops trying to work out what the other person wanted and needed?

We are bombard with advertising and television shows suggesting if we have this or do that we will then be happy.  We all seem to be in pursuit of "happiness".
Happiness is a personal thing, so if you teach our child to think and feel for themselves they will have a better sense of what is right for them and what makes them happy. It will empower them to realise that they are responsible for their own happiness and it is not the responsibility of someone else to "make them happy".

The key is to teach kids to acknowledge their feelings.  When we are disconnected from our emotions it is really hard to find the happiness that resides in all of us, so we tend to go looking for happiness outside of ourselves.
How do you embrace happiness in your life?

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