Happiness for Your 1-Year-Old

Now Is the Right Time!

As a parent or someone in a parenting role, you play an essential role in your child’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent-child relationship, and developing feelings of happiness is a great way to do it.

Happiness, or a sense of joy or well-being, comes through our connection with others and a sense of meaning or purpose in our lives.¹ One-year-olds rely heavily on your guidance and reassurance as they explore their world. Many of your child’s joyful experiences will occur through loving interactions with you. Happiness also comes when children feel a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. This comes through play and learning in the earliest years, which is critical to your child’s development. Parents and those in a parenting role share in this learning and exploration.

Yet, we all face challenges. Feeling joy all of the time is not realistic or beneficial. Doing so would limit your child’s experiences with a wide range of important feelings that play a role in their development. Rather than focusing on helping your child be happy every moment, helping them build healthy relationships with others and engaging in meaningful activities and play can grow happiness.

Further, growing happiness in children begins with parents who recognize and attend to their own needs for self-care, like eating healthy foods, exercising regularly, connecting with friends, and engaging in enjoyable activities. It may feel like you rarely have time to care for yourself because you are focused on caring for your child. But not taking time for yourself can get in the way of the joy and connection you feel with your child. Even small amounts of time (like taking a walk or calling a friend) can make a big difference for you and your child.

The steps below include specific and practical strategies for developing happiness and building a relationship with your child, including reliable and unconditional support and love.

Why Happiness?

Your child’s connections with you and others and their ability to engage in meaningful learning and play are essential to developing lifelong happiness. Today, in the short term, growing happiness can create

• more significant opportunities for connection, cooperation, and enjoyment
• a sense of belonging as a member of your family
• a sense of optimism and well-being

Tomorrow, in the long term, helping your child grow happiness

• develops a sense of fulfillment
• strengthens their immune system and physical health
• builds skills that foster resilience
• builds skills in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making
• deepens family trust and intimacy

Five Steps for Growing Happiness

This five-step process helps you and your child develop feelings of joy and connection to one another. It also lays the foundation for essential life skills in your child. The same process can also be used to address other parenting issues (learn more about the process).

One-year-olds are starting to verbalize their needs by babbling, crying, and starting to use single words. Despite your child’s emerging ability to use words, continue to pay close attention to their facial expressions, movements, and sounds to work on understanding what they are trying to communicate. Your efforts to learn from your child build trust, create empathetic interactions that promote happiness, and let them know you are interested in their thoughts. In becoming sensitive to your child’s verbal and nonverbal expressions, you

• are responding to their needs
• are growing their trust in you, sense of safety, and sense of healthy relationships
• are improving your ability to communicate with one another
• are growing your own and their self-control (to calm down when upset and focus their attention)
• are modeling empathy and problem-solving skills

Actions

• Consider how your child reacts when they are happy or excited. How do they show you? Children at this age clap their hands, imitate others, smile, squeal, and laugh when they are happy or excited.
• Consider how your child reacts when they are scared. How do they show you? Children at this age are more aware of their surroundings, which can make them afraid of new things or sounds. They may cry, withdraw, or hide.
• Consider how your child reacts when upset, angry, or frustrated.
  • How do they show you? Children this age may cry, yell, hit, bite, or throw things. They can still be soothed by cuddling and rocking and learn to self-soothe when upset.
  • If a child cries, offer to hold them or provide comfort items like a favorite teddy bear or a blanket. Do not attempt to talk anything through when a child is distraught. Focus on calming down first.
  • If a child hits or bites in anger or frustration, stop and say, “Ouch. That hurts my arm, and it makes me feel sad,” or “I see you are frustrated.”
• Each time your child expresses any big feeling, be sure to name it. “You have a smile on your face. You seem happy.” This builds their feelings vocabulary and adds to their self-awareness and ability to manage their feelings. This includes describing and naming the joy they may feel when they have fun with you and the pride they feel when they can do something for the first time. Pointing out how they can experience happiness will help them notice it and know what experiences bring them joy.
• When reading books, look at the images of people and point out what you notice about the character’s feelings.  “I think that character feels happy because he likes playing with friends. Does playing with your friends make you feel happy, too?”

As a parent or someone in a parenting role, there is much to learn about understanding your child’s rhythms, temperaments, and needs. Because of all this learning, you will make mistakes and even poor choices. How you handle those moments can determine how you help grow your child’s happiness. Offering yourself the grace and permission not to be perfect can ease your anxiety in responding to your child’s needs. Learning about developmental milestones can help you better understand what your child is going through.²

• 12-18-month-olds respond to their name and may use 5 to 10 words. They are starting to combine words with gestures, follow simple directions, and remember recent events and actions. They may feel uneasy when separated from their loved ones.
• 12-18-month-olds are beginning to walk independently, stack blocks, and point to objects of interest.
• 18-24-month-olds can understand ten times more than they can speak, are starting to respond to questions, point to familiar objects and people in pictures, and follow two-step directions. They are also beginning to want to try things on their own.
• 18-24-month-olds can throw and attempt to catch a ball without losing their balance, enjoy playing with new toys in varying ways, and usually get dressed without becoming upset.

Teaching is different than just telling. Teaching builds basic skills, grows problem-solving abilities, and prepares your child for success. Teaching also involves modeling and practicing the positive behaviors you want to see, promoting skills, and preventing problems.

Actions

• Read and “pretend play” together.
  • During reading time, select a book with faces to help your child learn to identify different feelings. Point out how you can tell each face’s feelings and practice recreating those cues with your child.
  • After reading a story together, act out the story and use feeling words and expressions to match how the characters are feeling throughout the story. This expands their feelings vocabulary and teaches them how to recognize a wide range of perspectives and emotions they might not encounter in daily interactions with others.
  • Replay moments that made your child feel joy during pretend play. “Do you remember how much fun it was to play hide-and-seek yesterday? Do you want to play again?” 
• Make your thinking and feelings explicit. Talk about what you notice, how you feel, why you feel it, and what signs you are giving. “We worked hard to build that block tower. It was fun! It made me smile like this.”
• Talk aloud about how you respond to your big feelings: “Playing together with toys makes me feel so happy. I want to give you a big hug.”

Your daily routines allow you and your child to practice new vital skills if you seize those chances. With practice, your child will build relationships with others and engage in meaningful play that will bring you both joy and happiness. Practice grows vital new brain connections that strengthen (and eventually form habits) each time your child works hard toward a goal or demonstrates belief in themselves.

Practice also provides essential opportunities to grow self-efficacy (a child’s sense that they can do a task successfully). This leads to confidence. It helps them understand that mistakes and failures are part of learning.

To develop happiness, it is essential to practice noticing feelings, engaging in just-right-sized challenges, noticing the trusted adults who are always there to help, and noticing the child’s strengths that can help them feel joy.

Actions

• Provide opportunities for your child to do more challenging things than before. The goal is to create experiences beyond what they are comfortable with so they can experience working hard and mastering a new skill. This may be a challenging social situation, like waving hello to a neighbor who they felt too shy to wave to in the past.
• Create regular routines that build your child’s relationships with others. Even a daily walk to get the mail with a parent can become a cherished, comforting, connecting, and joyful routine.
• Use your child’s dolls or stuffed animals to act out moments of happiness so that they become part of your child’s stories and memories. This is an excellent way to relive special moments and remind your child about family members’ and friends’ roles in their happiness.

At this point, you are developing your child’s skills to notice what makes them happy. You are helping them notice that other children may react differently to the same situations and teaching them that all feelings are important and welcome. You are allowing them to practice to learn how to handle their feelings independently.

You can offer support when needed by reteaching, monitoring, and coaching. This support reinforces your parent-child relationship and helps your child know you support them when they experience feelings. Parents and those in a parenting role naturally offer support as they see their child fumble with a situation in which they need help. This is no different.

Actions

• Recognize effort using “I notice…” statements like: “I noticed that you could put your clothes into the basket as we practiced. We were both smiling. I love seeing that.”
• On days with extra challenges, when you can see your child is not feeling particularly happy, let them know that it is ok not to feel happy sometimes and that they are likely to feel happy again soon. In a gentle, non-public way, you can whisper in your child’s ear, “We thought this would be fun, but it is ok if you don’t like it.”
• Actively reflect on how your child feels when doing something that brings them joy. You can offer reflections like: “You smiled a lot while we played with the bucket of water in the backyard. It seemed like you felt happy.”

No matter how old your child is, your positive reinforcement and encouragement have a significant impact.

If your child is working to grow their skills – even in small ways – it will be worthwhile to recognize it. Your recognition can go a long way in promoting positive behaviors and expanding your child’s confidence. Your recognition also promotes safe, secure, and nurturing relationships — a foundation for strong communication and a healthy relationship with you as they grow.

There are many ways to reinforce your child’s efforts. It is essential to distinguish between three types of reinforcement: recognition, rewards, and bribes. These three distinct parenting behaviors have different impacts on your child’s behavior.

Recognition occurs after you observe the desired behavior in your child. Noticing and naming the specific behavior you want to reinforce is key to promoting more of it. For example, “I notice you have much more energy to play and have fun since we took a nap earlier—I love seeing that!”  Recognition can include nonverbal acknowledgment, such as a hug.

Rewards can be helpful in certain situations by providing a concrete, timely, and positive incentive for doing a good job.  A reward is determined beforehand so the child knows what to expect, like “If you behave in the store, you will get a treat on the drive home.” (If you XX, then I’ll XX.) It stops any negotiations in the heat of the moment.  A reward could be used to teach positive behavior or break a bad habit. The goal should be to help your child progress to a time when the reward will no longer be needed. If used too often, rewards can decrease a child’s internal motivation.

Unlike a reward, bribes aren’t planned ahead of time and generally happen when a parent or someone in a parenting role is in the middle of a crisis (like in the grocery store checkout line and a child is having a tantrum. To avoid disaster, a parent offers to buy a sucker if the child will stop the tantrum). While bribes can be helpful in the short term to manage stressful situations, they will not grow lasting motivation or behavior change and should be avoided.

Actions

• Recognize and call out when things are going well. It may seem obvious, but it’s easy not to notice when everything moves smoothly. Noticing and naming the behavior provides the necessary reinforcement that you see and value your child’s choice.
• Recognize small steps along the way. Don’t wait for significant accomplishments—like the whole bedtime routine going smoothly—to recognize effort. Remember that your recognition can work as a tool to promote more positive behaviors. Find small ways your child is making an effort and let them know you see them.
• Build celebrations into your routine. For example, snuggle and read before bed after getting through your bedtime routine.

Closing

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that will strengthen your skills as an effective parent or someone in a parenting role on many other issues and develop essential skills that will last a lifetime for your child. Through this tool, children can become more self-aware, deepen their social awareness, exercise their self-management skills, work on their relationship skills, and demonstrate and practice responsible decision-making.