🌟 Parenting Brings "Eudaimonic Wellbeing"
Plus, how important is playing make-believe?
Jed Baker
August 16, 2026
🌟 TRENDING
Kids Who Play Make-Believe Are Doing Something More Important Than You Think
If your child has been spending large swaths of the summer narrating elaborate scenarios with stuffed animals, building worlds out of couch cushions, or insisting you refer to them as a dragon for the third consecutive day, new research suggests you should let it run. A longitudinal study published this summer in the Early Childhood Education Journal tracked the relationship between pretend play and mental health in young children and found a meaningful link: kids who engaged in more imaginative play consistently showed better mental health outcomes over time. The mechanism that researchers expected to explain the connection, emotional regulation, turned out not to be the driver, which pushed the team toward a more interesting explanation rooted in embodied cognition: the idea that physically acting out scenarios, giving voice to characters, inhabiting different perspectives, actually builds the kind of flexible thinking that underlies psychological resilience. In plain terms, a child who spends an afternoon pretending to be a pirate negotiating a treaty with a mermaid is practicing something cognitively sophisticated that no structured activity can quite replicate.
What makes this finding practically useful for parents is the reminder of what gets crowded out when kids are overscheduled or defaulting to screens. Pretend play requires boredom as a precondition. It almost never starts on command. It tends to emerge in the in-between moments when nothing is happening and a child has to generate their own world from scratch. The research can't yet prove that pretend play causes better outcomes rather than simply correlating with them, and the authors are appropriately careful about that. But the direction of the evidence is consistent enough to make a compelling case for protecting unstructured time with no agenda, no screen, and no adult directing the narrative. The dragon phase is doing more work than it looks like.
🌟 SPONSORED POST
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🌟 PARENTING
Parenthood Won't Make You Happier Day to Day. Research Says It Will Do Something Better
One of the most persistent and quietly uncomfortable findings in social science is that having children does not, on average, make people measurably happier on a daily basis. Study after study has confirmed this, and it has become a reliable conversation starter at dinner parties that either offends everyone in the room or validates them, depending on who showed up. But a major new cross-cultural study of more than 5,500 people across ten countries, including the UK, China, Japan, Peru, and Poland, has added an important layer to that finding that most of the headlines missed. While parenthood barely moved the needle on moment-to-moment happiness, it significantly deepened something researchers call eudaimonic wellbeing: the sense that life is meaningful, purposeful, and worth living. Parents, far more than non-parents, reported feeling that their lives mattered and that what they were doing had lasting significance. The study was careful to separate the effect of parenthood from the effect of being in a relationship, a confound that had muddied earlier research, which makes the finding more credible.
The practical implication of this is less a piece of advice than a reframe that many parents may find genuinely useful. The days are long, the joy is often not where you expect it, and the gap between the experience of parenting and the cultural mythology around it can feel disorienting. But what the research suggests is that the meaning parents are drawing from the experience is real, measurable, and distinct from happiness in a way that actually holds up across very different cultures and contexts. Happiness, as researchers increasingly understand it, is a narrow target that fluctuates with sleep deprivation and school pickup traffic. Meaning is something else entirely, and it turns out that raising children is one of the most reliable ways humans across the world have found to build it.
🌟 TLDR
Hey Parents, It’s OK If You’re Having a Hard Time With Back-to-School Too — Parents looks at the emotional pressure parents can feel during the back-to-school transition and why acknowledging their own stress can make it easier to support kids through theirs.
Schools Across the US Banned Phones. Teens Are Demanding More Offline Support — The Guardian examines the growing push for school smartphone bans and why some teenagers say removing phones is only part of the solution if schools do not also address loneliness, social pressure, and digital well-being.
When Parents Are Stressed, Kids Get More Screen Time, Study Finds — New research from Florida International University suggests that children's screen use is closely tied to parental stress, offering a more complicated picture than simply telling parents to impose stricter limits.
Back-to-School Season Is Hectic. To Stay Sane, We Do the Bare Minimum for 1 Month — A mother of four explains why deliberately keeping schedules and commitments light during the first month of school can help families protect sleep, reduce stress, and adjust to new routines.
Why Teens With ADHD May Seem Tired Even After a Full Night’s Sleep, According to Experts — Parents explores why teenagers with ADHD can experience disrupted sleep and persistent fatigue even when they appear to be getting enough hours in bed, and what parents can do to help.
