It’s not about being constantly laughing, or downplaying what’s important and deserves it, or never being able to be sad. For psychiatrist and father of six,  Luis Gutiérrez Rojas,  raising children with humor means facing everyday problems with a positive attitude, ensuring that the small dramas we all encounter don’t diminish happiness or blind us to what’s truly important. As parents, this means helping your child mature, become responsible, independent, autonomous, and happy.

Faced with the overwhelming task of being parents, spouses, workers, motivating and understanding, the psychiatrist and author of the book  The Beauty of Living , in his list of tips, leaves a ten-point guide to face parenting with optimism and, ultimately, to not complicate life.

1. To downplay

Many of the conflicts or anxieties that children bring home after a long day at school are trivial, and therefore, should be treated as such. Faced with a case like “my friend Pepito is angry because I didn’t lend him the eraser” or “they wouldn’t let me play soccer in the playground,” Gutiérrez Rojas recommends that parents not interfere.

“Talking too much about a problem makes it a bigger problem,” explains the psychiatrist. But we also shouldn’t belittle their worries or the child themselves. To that end, he advises practicing active listening and not telling them their anxieties are nonsense.

2. Teach simplicity

Children—and often adults—tend to overcomplicate everything. Something very common in adolescents is what’s known as the neurotic profile: “always thinking about what they’ve been told, how they’ve been looked at,” explains Gutiérrez Rojas.

When a third party, whether parents, siblings, or friends, fuels this neurotic narrative, the person becomes increasingly immature. To combat this, “we must teach our children to be simpler, to be less complicated.” And what better way to begin than by setting an example?

3. Separate the urgent from the important

While this point can be applied to many other aspects of life, it is especially important in raising and educating children. Children always have urgent needs: “I have a soccer game,” “We need to buy construction paper for tomorrow”; leaving parents constantly putting out fires and without time to prioritize what is truly important.

Some families waste a lot of time on urgent matters, when their focus, Dr. Gutiérrez points out, should be on shaping their children’s character, ensuring good academic performance, and developing their social and communication skills, such as assertiveness and extroversion. “If you only attend to emergencies, you won’t be happy, because your life will be filled with commitments that aren’t important,” emphasizes the author of *The Beauty of Living*.

4. Face life with humor

“It doesn’t mean we spend all day laughing, but rather that when drama arises, we introduce an element that diminishes its importance,” Gutiérrez Rojas points out. And the best way to do that is with a sense of humor.

When someone tells him “we are living through the worst moment in history”, Gutiérrez Rojas responds: “Are you talking about World War II, the Spanish Civil War…?”, to which no one could help but let out a small laugh, a little chuckle at their own worries.

“Humor can be very aggressive if used to laugh at someone who is suffering, but it’s about laughing together,” explains the psychiatrist. What works best is laughing at yourself.

5. Adolescence is not bad

Not only is it not bad, it’s necessary. “We’ve all gone through this stage of life; it’s just that we don’t remember it anymore,” Luis Gutiérrez points out. The psychiatrist compares it to the story of the ugly duckling: when adolescence ends, the swan appears.

Children going through adolescence question everything, but it’s also the time when they learn to understand themselves and what’s happening to them. Parents don’t play a crucial role in this process either. In the words of the psychiatrist: “During adolescence, you don’t have to do too much; just let them know you’re there if they need attention, but without being pushy.”