The One Lesson we Usually Forget to Teach Our Kids

Before reading any further, know this: I am not making a generalization but rather an observation - there's a difference. I can absolutely say this with confidence because, I, myself, as a parent, forget to teach this to my child very often.

Most of the time, we forget to teach our children the most important lesson in life which is to be happy.

POST LUNCH PLAYTIME

My story starts here.

Every weekend, my family and I would go to the Farmer's Market near Golden Fields to have lunch with my parents. They have a spot there selling juice, desserts and native Filipino foods. We're glad to go because, aside from getting tons of free taste samples from neighboring vendors, we get to spend time as a family.

This is what we would do ever since I was little: spend time with each other, catch up, talk about nonsense while eating. Doing this is like the hallmark for my side of the family because, as a child, we would linger at the dinner table just to talk and eat - myself, my mom, my aunts and my cousins (the adult males in my family did not care much for this tradition). This was my happiness as a child.

MY REALIZATION

One weekend afternoon, my son decided to play football after eating lunch. The market has an open field with a ball and a net to play with. His dad joined him shortly after I took this photo. I decided to document the whole thing.

While watching my son fix the net, I remembered a video I watched on YouTube. It was a TEDx Talks video with Logan LaPlante (a very cool kid). He was talking about hackschooling - happiness and education - in the video which, for a mom with a son, was both interesting and insightful. Among the things that he talked about, one thing struck me the most:

"Much of education is oriented, for better or worse, towards making a living rather than making a life."

I agree with that 100% but I didn't think much of the whole educational system in the Philippines. Rather, as I was watching my son kick the ball around with his dad, I thought to myself: Am I teaching my child to make a life? Am I teaching my child to be happy?

My honest answer is: Not all the time, which shouldn't be so. I get wrapped up with working, checking off items in my to-do list, doing errands, cleaning, sleeping, Facebook-ing and so on that I don't always teach him this valuable lesson.

WHAT IS HAPPINESS?

I started asking myself what happiness meant. For my son, it meant playing Mine Craft, spending time outdoors, being with mom and dad and just doing stuff together (I asked him myself). While I am not about to let my son play Mine Craft 24-7 for the sake of his happiness, the next 3 things he mentioned were not bad ideas at all.

You see, happiness could be subjective but, most of the time, it can be fundamentally broken down into items. If you watched the video with Logan LaPlante, it comes down to 8 things. As a family, we really needed to work on a couple of things from among the 8 and I made the conscious decision to do so.

MORE PLAY

We'll be doing more of play time, quality time or nature time for sure because, while our life is pretty good as it is, it could be better, it could be happier, especially for my son. I want him to have a life - a happy one, that's not all about making money and spending money. I want him to have tons of happy childhood memories similar to my memories of my family around the dinner table.

I always say that things have to change - like less malls, less phones, less TV and so on. This time, I really mean it having seen how happy my son was playing a quick game of football with his dad.

It's ironic because it's actually the little things that we think nothing of that have the highest potential of making us the happiest.