48 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • FEBRUARY 2019
FAMILY & EDUCATION
KJ DELL’ANTONIA SHARES HER ROADMAP TO THE BRIGHTER SIDE OF PARENTING
“We have this personal chaotic
life where there’s a frantic sense and
it feels like we’re not really finding
much enjoyment in it,” Dell’Antonia
says. “And I just kept thinking: ‘That’s
not really what I signed up for.’”
It’s no secret that parents need to
vent sometimes: After all, they deal
with some pretty weird stuff. Dell’Antonia
realized she needed a change
when one of her close friends, whom
she had spent hours complaining
with, went through a divorce.
“That was definitely a moment of
just, ‘Oh god, I don’t want that at all,
and if that’s what somebody who
sounds like me wants, then I don’t
want to sound like me anymore,’” she
explains.
From there, she found that happiness
is attainable: You just have to
work for it.
Dell’Antonia had already spent
much of her career covering parenting
and happiness in the Times and
Motherlode, but creating a book was
both different and liberating.
“I got to go much deeper in the
book. I got to write about things in the
book that are kind of ‘boring.’ I had
the opportunity to go really deep and
the opportunity to be really practical
about everything,” she says. “I got to
just say, ‘Hey, sleep really matters.’
You know, before, I couldn’t really
talk about sleep unless there was
some new research study, and this
was my chance to be like, ‘No, there’s
so much research on this!’”
Dell’Antonia also conducted extensive
research to ensure that her
advice was accurate and spoke to the
masses.
“I worked with a professor from
Fordham University, and we put
together a piece of research study
that would reach a thousand people,
and we ended up with 950 good answers,
with people who reflected the
demographics of the U.S.,” she says.
“And did I reach out to a thousand of
my closest Facebook friends? Absolutely.
Lots of quotes and practical
advice are from people I know or
people who have written for me!”
After the various entries, Dell’Antonia
began writing. As she wrote,
she started to notice that the same few
phrases kept popping up — phrases
that turned into her 10 essential
mantras.
“They’re not in there because I
said I would like to have 10 mantras.
They’re in there because they kept
coming up,” she says. “Every chapter,
I was like, ‘I’ve written these words
before, damn it, I’ve written this
before. Oh, I’ve written this before,
I can’t say it again!’”
And all these are words she says to
herself daily; it just depends on the
circumstance of the particular day.
“I would say one of my favorites
right now is: ‘What you want now is
not what you’ll want later,’” Dell’Antonia
says. “I have to remind myself
that it’s easier now to do it yourself,
but it’s not easier later to have done
it yourself.”
The key takeaway from How to
Be a Happier Parent is for parents
to know that parenting is worth the
effort.
“You can try to be happier, we can
try to enjoy things more, that it’s
okay,” Dell’Antonia says, adding, “We
have a lot of guilt, we don’t feel like
we deserve to be happy, and we can’t
be happy if our kids aren’t dancing in
the streets holding balloons.”
But she wants to change that notion
and reiterate that happiness goes
beyond your children’s happiness to
include your own: “It’s good for everyone
if we put forth the effort to look
around and enjoy what we’ve got.”
To learn more about How to Be a Happier
Parent, visit kjdellantonia.com
This article first appeared in New
York Family Magazine.
continued from page 47
"Happiness goes beyond your children’s
happiness."
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