I enjoy adventurer and freedomist Dr. Jack Wheeler's To The Point News, and Dr. Joel Wade's exclusive columns on "Learned Happiness" are especially good. Aristotle maintained that happiness is not, as most believe, a passive state of consciousness, but an activity (in Greek, anenergeia) we can learn. "The purpose of my column...[is] to give people practical tools they can use to develop the skill of learning to be happy." Thanks to a Winds arrangement with TTPN, some of those columns are becoming free access so you can see what his weekly stuff is like.
Teach Your Kids Optimism
From Dr. Joel Wade's TTPN series "The Virtue of Happiness"
Today I want to put Learned Optimism in a form that you can teach to your kids. For more detail on this, I recommend The Optimistic Child, by Martin Seligman. The information in today’s column is drawn from that excellent book.
Before you do this, take some time to explore your own internal dialogue. You are modeling optimism or pessimism for your kids all the time, and the best way for you to teach them optimism is to embody it yourself a lot of the time (perfection is not necessary). See my past columns on learned optimism – What You Say To Yourself Matters, and Know Your ABC's -- and play with the suggestions here as well. Once you are comfortable with the principles, here’s what to do to begin teaching your kids....
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