Van’s Reviews > Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five > Status Update

This overruling is emotional regulation. There is nothing wrong with crying, or any other number of expressions, but you realize that there are social contexts where the behavior is appropriate and social contexts where it is not. People who do this well generally have lots of friends. If you want your kids to be happy, you will spend lots of time teaching them how and when this filtering should occur.

Until they acquire language, what's in store for young children as their tiny, emotion-heavy brains stitch themselves together is lots of confusion. This struggle is especially poignant in the early toddler years. Young children may not be aware of the emotions they are experiencing. They may not yet understand the socially correct way to communicate them.

You're probably used to thinking of emotions as the same time as feelings, but to the brain, they're not. Emotions are like Post-it notes that cause the brain to pay attention to something. Our brains tag those inputs most immediately concerned with our survival: threats, sex, and patterns. Emotions help us prioritize our sensory inputs. As you'd expect, a child's ability to regulate emotions take a while to develop.

The two ingredients go into creating socially smart children that have the strongest backing in the hard neurosciences, and also are of the most predictive for social competency:

- emotional regulation
- empathy

You will need to teach your children how to socialize effectively - how to make friends, how to keep friends - if you want them to be happy.

Help your children get into a profession that can at least make mid-five figures. Past $50k per year in income, wealth and happiness part ways. They don't have to be millionaires to be thrilled with the life you prepare them for. After their basic needs are met, they just needs lots of close friends and relatives.

In addition to satisfying relationships, other behaviors that predict happiness include:
- a steady dose of altruistic acts
- making lists of things for which you are grateful
- cultivating a general 'attitude of gratitude'
- sharing novel experiences with a loved one
- deploying a ready 'forgiveness reflex' when loved one slights you

The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships with other people. The more intimate the relationship, the better. People don't gain entrance to the top 10% of the happiness pile unless they are involved in a romantic relationship of some kind. Marriage is a big factor.

Recall that from marriages to workplaces, the largest source of conflict comes from the asymmetry from extrospective and introspective. A great deal of asymmetry can be averted through the correct interpretation of nonverbal cues. The less practice humans get at it, the more immature their social interactions are likely to be, which has implications ranging from future divorce rates to erosion of productivity.

Perfecting nonverbal communication skills take years of practice, and it's crucial that kids do it. Real-life experience are much messier than life on the Internet and not at all anonymous. Flesh-and-blood people touch each other, get in each other's way, constantly telegraph information to each other in a fashion not easily reformatted into emoticons and three-letter abbreviations.