"Abundance can be had simply by consciously receiving what has already been given." -- Sufi Saying

As a "happiness expert" (as I'm sometimes called), people often ask me, "If you had to pick just one thing that could make me happier right now, what would it be?"

I'm always tempted...

Stress is the trash of modern life - we all generate it but if you don't dispose of it properly, it will pile up and overtake your life. --Danzae Pace

I've met very few parents who don't complain about how stressful life is; just getting out the door in the...

Every time I  watch this hilarious video of a little girl cheering herself on, I think: Her parents must be pretty happy people. I don't know for sure, of course, but my guess is that they model happiness and confidence and gratitude on a daily basis, and she's simply copying them.

So whenever I see research which shows that parents are, on average, less happy than their childless counterparts, my heart sinks. Equally devastating to me is the research that reveals how my generation of women is unhappier than previous generations. If we aren't happy, our children aren't likely to be happy, either.

Many parents today are unhappy, but they assume that their stress and anxiety and even depression are all just part of being a parent today.

Researchers know a lot about why parents, particularly women, are less happy today than they have been in previous generations, and we have a pretty good idea how to fix it.  The new science of happiness gives us a clear roadmap -- a guide to those activities, skills, and beliefs that are highly likely to raise our happiness.

Happiness is a Property of Groups

Although we usually think of happiness as being an individual trait or a function of our personal experience, it isn't just those things. It is also a property of our social groups!

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler explain how:

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends -- that is, to people well beyond their social horizon... And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9 percent.

Emotions spread so rapidly that your happiness can affect not just your children, spouse and close friends, but 258 people in a single day. According to Christakis and Fowler, every time you feel an emotion -- whether it is hope or anger, gratitude or fear -- it spreads to six people you know: family and friends, neighbors and coworkers. Then it spreads AGAIN, to six people each of them know, and AGAIN, to 6 people each of THOSE people know.  By the end of the day? Your emotion has touched 258 others.

This means that the best way to raise happy children is to be happy ourselves, and to spread happiness in our communities.

Please join our movement of parents who spread happiness by practicing simple skills that bring more joy into their own lives and into the lives of their children.

To join, all you need to do is sign this little pledge to do one little thing that will make you a happier person. Why sign a pledge committing to so little?

Because your intention matters. And making a public commitment to your intention makes it more likely that your intention will become your practice, and perhaps even your daily reality.

Your belief in the cause supports our work, and your participation helps us spread happiness.

For today, that's all you need to do: just sign the pledge! Putting your intention out there to raise happiness is an important first step. From there, I will send you other simple and fun ideas for extending your "happiness practice."

(If you've already signed the pledge, thank you!! Are you looking for more ways to raise your own happiness or to raise happy kids? This page will give you some ideas.)

Learn more about how to spread happiness in your community.

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Yesterday, I dropped my kids off at a rustic sleep-a-way camp in the high Sierras, where they will be for the next two weeks.

The drop-off didn't go very well.

When I was a kid, I begged and begged to go to sleep-a-way camp...

The research on dads this year may not be as salacious as, say, the theories about why dad-to-be Anthony Weiner would risk his career and marriage by sending narcissistic and semi-nude photos of himself to women. But the kind of post I'm tempted to write about that (e.g.,...

Believe it or not, optimism is a controversial value for some people. When I give talks, people frequently question me about why optimism is something they should want for their children.

I can see how fostering optimism could be mistaken for fostering a Polyannaish, La-La-Land mentality in our children, which,...

Perhaps because I'm divorced, I wonder a lot about whether I'd be happier if I were married.

Admittedly, I'm already a very happy person; I pretty much max out most happiness scales (like these, here). But I've made a career out of becoming an ever-happier person --...

If your kids are feeling sad, should you tell them to "put on a happy face" despite it all?

Faking happiness often makes us feel worse, as I reported recently and in another post "Fake It Till You Make It."...

"What do you do when you feel sad?" people often ask me. (Some even ask, "Do you ever get sad?")

Yes, of course my kids and I both feel sadness, anger, anxiety -- sometimes downright misery -- just like everyone else. Leading a joyful life does not mean always trying...

Let me preface this post by saying that I know that writing that the crisis in Japan could be a way, ironically, to boost our own personal feelings of gratitude or happiness risks seeming insensitive, or worse, just callous. I would rather that we all feel grateful for other reasons,...

Yesterday, two things happened:

• I had two separate conversations with new parents about how having a baby can be like a wrecking-ball to a marriage, especially in the first year.
• Three different people asked me what tips I'd give parents who want to raise empathetic children.

These conversations are related.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, love, belonging, creativity, and faith.
--Brene Brown

Last week, a friend told me that she thinks her kids will probably have a hard time getting into an independent high school in their area because they "aren't really good at...

Hello, "Raising Happiness" readers!

During this month of love, I've been writing about the research related to happy relationships. What does a happy romantic relationship have to do with raising happy kids, after all?

We know intuitively that how happy we are -- in a relationship or otherwise -- affects...

Lucky us: We live in a world where many of us have an abundance of choices: where to live, what to do for a living, and, of course, who to marry--or whether to get married at all.

All these choices give us certain freedoms, but they don't necessarily make us...

Last summer, when my brother was getting married, I inundated him with the science of happily married couples. I wanted to give him a guide to not making the mistakes I had made. My "best woman" toast was very nearly a litany of advice.

It was a bit much...

Scientific research usually isn't that sexy, but here's a big exception: neuroscience is uncovering some secrets to long-lasting passion.

The good news is that the sexual spark doesn't have to go out just because you've been together for, you know, ages. In fact, statistics show that married people do the...

Chances are, your kids spent at least some time recently talking about the civil rights movement in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I've been quizzing the kids in my life about what they know and what they've learned about Dr. King. And what they say is a little...

One of my goals after any longish school break is always to re-establish our family routines -- to recalibrate, so that our trains once again run on time, so to speak.

My natural tendency is toward messiness and disorganization -- toward, dare I admit, household chaos. I'm not so different...

The media is abuzz about Amy Chua's book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" (see this excerpt from The Wall Street Journal). Chua argues that "Chinese" mothers "are superior" because they demand absolute perfection and won't refrain from berating, threatening, and even starving their kids until they're satisfied....

The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running.
--Author unknown

Like 44 percent of the population, I will make New Year's resolutions this year, and I'm starting to think about them already. As we celebrate Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and Christmas -- holidays...