Happiness for Your 4-Year-Old

Now Is the Right Time!

As a parent or someone in a parenting role, you play a vital role in your child’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent-child relationship, and developing feelings of happiness is a fantastic 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 Three- and four-year-olds better understand themselves through interactions with you and other caregivers. They are learning their strengths and limitations, why they feel the way they do, and how they relate to others. Many of your child’s joyful experiences will occur within these critical relationships. 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 (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 and with peers
• 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, 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 builds essential life skills in your child. The same process can also be used to address other parenting issues (learn more about the process).

Children, ages three to four, are highly active and exploratory, seeking moments for imaginative play. They can now view themselves as a whole person with a body, mind, and spirit, but they are still learning to identify their big feelings. Your child is gaining skills and ability in cooperating with others and working through conflict with pretend play. Your effort to learn from your child will create empathetic interactions that promote healthy listening skills in you and your child. In becoming sensitive to the nuances of 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

• Each time there is an opportunity, ask your child, “What do you notice? How do you feel? How do you think the other child feels? What are you wondering?”
  • For example, if your child is with others feeling very happy at the park, help them notice their thoughts and reactions and those of the other children. You might even name the expressions and body language you notice. For example, “I notice a lot of children running and smiling. Do you think they feel happy?” 
  • You can also point out when your child is feeling differently from other children and that it is okay for people to react differently to the same experiences. “There are a lot of children going down the slide. They seem to be having fun. I notice that you are staying away from the slide. Your shoulders are slumped down, and you look scared. Are you feeling scared?” 
  • When reading books, look at the images of people and ask your child what they notice about their feelings. Point out ways that people may feel happiness in different ways. Ask, “How do you think that man is feeling? Does that activity make you feel happy, too?”
• If your child is unsure about how to describe feelings or how others are feeling, consider naming what you notice, leaving plenty of quiet space for them to think of some ideas. You could say, “I noticed many children seemed happy and excited when they saw the puppy. How did you feel when you saw the puppy?” 
• Each time your child expresses any big feeling, be sure to name it. “You seemed really happy when you were playing in the backyard. You had a smile on your face. Were you feeling 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.

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

• Three- to four-year-olds are beginning to understand that their body, thoughts, and feelings are their own.
• Three- to four-year-olds are growing in their imagination and allowing it to drive their play. They may take on an imaginary friend or fear imagined monsters or dangers.
• Three- to four-year-olds find that cooperating and negotiating with other children can create more interesting pretend play.
• Three- to four-year-olds talk in five- to six-word sentences, tell stories, and speak in ways others can understand.
• Three- to four-year-olds are growing in empathy for others and will attempt to comfort and show affection for them without prompting.
• Three- to four-year-olds are beginning to notice differences, including culture and race, making it critical to discuss inclusion and the essential nature of different perspectives for learning.
• Three- to four-year-olds can imagine what response might be appropriate or comforting in a particular situation.

Teaching is different than just telling. Teaching builds basic skills, grows problem-solving abilities, and prepares your child for success. Teaching also involves modeling, 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 identify the different feelings of other children, including happiness. Point out what you notice and how you can tell what each child is feeling. You might ask, “Do the children’s feelings change based on what happens in the book?”
  • Replay moments that made your child feel joy during pretend play. “Do you remember how much fun it was to play outside in the backyard yesterday? Let’s play in the living room and pretend we are at the park.” 
• 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 so hard on that painting together. It was fun to paint with you, and I feel so proud of our picture. I will hang it on the refrigerator to feel happy every time I look at it.”
• Talk aloud about how you respond to your big feelings: “Dancing to the music with you makes me feel so much happiness that I want to hug you.”
• Help your child see that emotions will change and that all feelings are important and welcome. For example, when your child uses definitive language like, “I am mad at you,” you may respond with:
• “It is okay to feel mad. Sometimes, I get mad and frustrated, too. I take a deep breath when I am mad, which helps me feel better. Would that help you?”  
• “Do you remember last time when you were frustrated? You took a deep breath, and we could work through it together.”
• “I wonder if we can do something to help us overcome this challenge?”

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 have 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.

Actions

• Provide opportunities for your child to do more challenging things than they have done 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 playing with a friend who has upset them in the past.
• Create regular routines that build your child’s relationships with others. A daily walk around the block 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 feel 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. Even if it is tough to talk about, such as not feeling happy or not liking a friend or activity that makes you happy, 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 like playing with your friend, and you asked her if she would like to play with you on the playground. 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 were the first to sit at the dinner table tonight, and you smiled a lot while we all talked. It seemed like our family dinnertime made you feel very happy.”
• “I remember last time we were at the park, you did not like being on the swings. This time, you went on the swings with your friend, and it looked like you were having fun.”

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, “You included your friend while you were playing—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, after you’ve completed your bedtime routine, snuggle and read before bed.

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.