All parents want their toddlers to grow up healthy and be happy to follow their dreams and to find success in their endeavors in life. However, what can you do to make your toddler healthy and happy. Highlighted below are strategies that will strengthen the capacity of toddlers to experience joy.

Allow for Success and Failure

Focus more on providing your toddler with ample opportunities to learn new skills and less on compliments, if you want to bolster the self-esteem of such a toddler. The real self-esteem builder is mastery and not praise. Luckily, almost everything toddlers do is a chance to attain mastery, when it comes to the under-4 crowd because it is all new to them – learning to dress themselves, ride a tricycle, feed, walk, crawl and use potty. It is the duty of parents to stand back and allow their toddlers do what they are capable of doing by themselves. Nevertheless, doing too much for toddlers is the great mistake good parents make. Toddlers will never know the thrill of mastery unless they are allowed to risk failure, while it can be hard to watch them struggle. On their first attempt or try, few skills are perfected, which will later turn to mastery. Toddlers develop the can-do attitude that allows them face future challenges with confidence and enthusiasm that are fundamental to a happy life, through repeated mastery experiences.

Praise the Right

Stuff Praising the right stuff will make your toddler happy but make sure it is not monotonous so that he will not be afraid if he doesn’t succeed. Praising toddlers for specific traits such as athleticism, prettiness and intelligence can later undermine the confidence of toddlers, if they grow up believing that they are appreciated for something that is out of their control and potentially fleeting. For instance, if you praise your toddler primarily for being pretty, what happens when shoe grows old and loses that beauty? Praise efforts instead of the result and also praise the hard work, creativity and the persistence that goes into achieving, more than the achievement itself.

Practice Habitual Gratitude

Practice habitual gratitude because happiness constantly link feelings of gratitude to emotional well-being. If you keep daily or weekly gratitude journals, you will make more progress toward goals, feel more optimistic and feel better about your overall life. Keeping a journal for a toddler may be unrealistic. Asking each member of the family to take time to name something the toddler will appreciate before or during meal everyday is one way to foster gratitude in children. What matters here is to make this a regular ritual as it is one habit that will promote all kinds of positive emotions that will eventually lead to lasting happiness.