Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Guilt.

It can be quite powerful in regards to keeping us from finding happiness.

But after helping people for 30 years deal with guilt. I think one of the strongest ways guilt can

manifest is through parenting. I have one sister who's a year older than me and I remember my father telling me that when he was younger and my sister was born,

he felt such a responsibility and change in his life

because now he had someone that was completely dependent upon him and his actions and behaviors affected us, his children.

And the one thing I've seen over the years that really gets most people, not all but most people, is all the responsibility

and potential guilt that can come from being a parent.

Because when our children mess up, we feel guilty, or at least we have the potential to feel guilty.

So I want to talk about that because a lot of people struggle when their kids are going through hard times.

How do we find happiness?

When our children are our young adults, How do we find happiness?

When our children or our young adult children aren't doing as well as we'd like them to?

That guilt can really eat us alive and keep us from being happy. It probably is one of the most challenging

things in life that causes us to be unhappy because when our kids struggle there's a

real tendency to feel a lot of guilt over that, and when there's

guilt, there just isn't much happiness.

Well, as parents, we do have some responsibility for the ways our kids turn out, particularly in the early years.

I mean, of course they have different dispositions.

Some kids come out kind of feisty and angry.

Other kids are more placid and calm. But overall when they're younger,

we affect the way their behavior responds to life and we help shape them. But very soon they begin to have other influences, far more than us.

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