What is happiness?
We all want our children to be happy but this can sometimes seem like a slightly woolly, intangible goal. A while back, I did a mini poll on social media, asking parents what made their children happy – responses mostly involved spending one-to-one time with a parent, receiving hugs or carrying out certain creative extra-curricular activities. Those things are all great to do but it doesn’t quite nail the whole concept of happiness – it’s a little more than this. When one of my children was bullied in school, no amount of hugs, kisses and crafting could suppress their negative emotions and make them happy. Bad things happen and emotional understanding and resilience is also needed to keep your child’s spirits up when adverse childhood experiences inevitably happen.
From the research I’ve done, I’ve concluded that children find true, deep, long-term happiness when they:
- understand and have confidence in their strengths and are able to then pursue activities which enable them to excel.
- recognise and develop other strengths which would be of benefit to them and increase their emotional intelligence – certain essentials such as forgiveness, gratitude and optimism are very powerful strengths.
- develop regular, positive habits which protect their mental health and boost their levels of happiness.
- are supported by an adult who can educate and help them find coping strategies in difficult times and help them begin to make sensible decisions for themselves.
- know what makes them feel good and can tap into their own source of happiness whenever they need it.
Child happiness is the objective since happy children are an absolute joy to the adults around them. So let’s have closer look at some of the things we can do to help keep a smile in their faces.
Strengths
It takes a little while to work out what you’re really good at in life, but when you do, and you use that to find that niche profession which you are truly made for, you feel enormous levels of life satisfaction and happiness and perhaps even experience great success in the process. Wouldn’t it be wonderful when choosing subject options if our children knew exactly which subjects/professions they should persue in order to excel? Wouldn’t it be great if they were supremely confident and knew exactly what they were brilliant at?
In 2004, Peterson and Seligman first published their work, defining 24 character strengths and placing them into 6 categories.
These are:
- Wisdom and knowledge (creativity, open-mindedness, curiosity, perspective and a love of learning)
- Courage (integrity, bravery, vitality and persistence)
- Humanity (kindness, love and social skills)
- Justice (fairness, leadership and citizenship)
- Temperance (mercy, forgiveness, humility, self-regulation and prudence)
- Transcendence (gratitude, appreciation of excellence and beauty, spirituality, humour and hope).
Educating and exploring what these are with children by carrying out exercises and experiments to help them recognise what their personal strengths are and help them work on strengths which don’t come quite so naturally to them will build their confidence, emotional understanding and resilience.
Protective Habits
Certain activities have been proven in scientific studies to have a positive effect on children’s mental health and can even improve their physical health as well. These habits can be incorporated into daily life quite naturally from a young age and their effects can last a lifetime. Positive results have been experienced by children in studies about journaling, mindfulness and the use of affirmations. Mental health issues have been reduced and positive emotions increased with the habitual the use of these activities.
Knowledge
Everyday life is not always easy – people are sometimes forced to move house, children need to move schools, bereavement can be painful, bullies are a reality in today’s schools and technological advancements expose our children to abuse and harmful material online. As parents, there are many things we can do to protect our children, but studies have shown that educating children and increasing their understanding of certain difficult topics can protect them too.
A Happiness Toolkit
Our bodies possess their very own happiness-making me hanism via the production of hormones: dopamine makes us feel great, seratonin helps us feel calm and happy, oxytocin makes us feel warm and fuzzy and endorphins make us feel euphoric. Putting together a playlist of songs which make a child happy, a collection of their favourite feel-good movies which make them laugh out loud and giving them the experience of being at one with nature for example, can help children tap into their very own feel-good factory.
Happy children make for happy parents and the habits they get used to in childhood and the emotional education our children receive go a long way to helping them have a happy life.
Jennie Segar, author of ‘Maximise your Child’s Happiness ’
