Great for Thanksgiving at Forty

Your kid is devastated. Grounded, heartbroken, embarrassed - whatever it is, right now it feels enormous. Everything feels enormous when you're in it.

Annie Duke's technique with her children: mental time travel. When they were upset, she'd say: "This is going to be so great for you when you're forty at Thanksgiving. You're going to tell these stories to your children and it's going to be the best."

It sounds like a joke, but it's actually a powerful decision-making tool. Nothing is as important as it seems when you're thinking about it - that's Kahneman. Most things that feel catastrophic today will be funny stories later.

The twenty-one-year-old whose girlfriend just broke up with them thinks they'll never recover. But will they still be heartbroken in ten years? Probably not.

Helping your children zoom out doesn't minimize their feelings - it gives them perspective. And perspective is how we get through the moments that feel impossible.