Money, fame and new possessions can make us feel better for a while – but not much better, and not for long. The gloss soon wears off. Winning the lottery, appearing on reality TV or buying a new car is not a reliable route to lasting happiness. Meanwhile, the quest for wealth, success and social recognition often distorts people’s lives and makes them unhappy, especially if it gets in the way of things that really do matter, such as close personal relationships. As we shall see later, excessive materialism is a pervasive cause of unhappiness.
When it comes to children, parents sometimes pay lip service to happiness. If asked, most would agree that what they want above all else for their children is happiness. But, just as with their own happiness, parents do not always behave as if they really mean what they say. Their everyday concerns typically focus on tangible issues like their children’s performance at school and prospects of getting a good job. Few parents make their children’s happiness an explicit objective, and the education system certainly does not: there are as yet no national league tables for happiness. In real life, the quest for demonstrable success generally overshadows the quest for happiness.
Fortunately, parents do not need to choose between wanting their children to be happy and wanting them to succeed at school or get good jobs, because there is no real conflict between these goals – quite the reverse, in fact. Happiness and success go hand in hand. Research has demonstrated that happy people are on average mentally and physically healthier, more successful in the classroom and at work, more creative, more popular, more sociable, longer lived, and less likely to become criminals or drug addicts. In short, happy children make better students and better employees. We shall look at some of the evidence for this later.
So, even the pushiest of parents – those who care only about their children’s tangible achievements and regard the quest for happiness as woolly-minded self-indulgence – should nonetheless make happiness their top priority. In this case, you really can have your cake and eat it. The added bonus is that raising happy children who develop into happy adults will also benefit society as a whole, for all the reasons listed above. Wanting your child to be happy is not even selfish. Helping children to become happy people should be an explicit and praiseworthy goal of parenting and education.
The story comes in three parts. First, we will consider what happiness is and why it really matters. Defining happiness at the outset is obviously crucial, because although the word is bandied about in everyday conversation, its meaning is rarely clear. ‘Happiness’ signifies different things to different people.
To preview the next chapter, I will argue that happiness consists of a combination of three distinct elements: pleasure (the emotional sensation of feeling good in the here and now), the absence of displeasure (freedom from unpleasant sensations such as anxiety or pain) and satisfaction (judging, on reflection, that your life is good). Thus happiness depends both on feeling (pleasure) and thinking (satisfaction). We will then look at the many different ways in which happiness is good for us, such as making us physically healthier and more likely to succeed in our chosen aims.
Having looked at the nature and benefits of happiness, we will examine the main factors that influence its development during each individual’s lifetime. We will consider, for example, how happiness is affected by personal relationships, work, genes, health, intelligence, marriage, money, education, religion and physical attractiveness. Some of these influences, notably personal relationships, turn out to be very important whereas others, notably wealth, have surprisingly little enduring impact.
The final part of the book discusses how parenting and education can help or hinder the development of happiness in children. We will see how different styles of parenting behaviour affect children’s long-term prospects for happiness and well-being. We will also imagine what an education system might look like if it paid more attention to happiness. One conclusion here is that a preoccupation with short-term, measurable attainment can do more harm than good. Education must obviously provide children with far more than just qualifications if they are going to be happy, successful people for the rest of their lives.
This is not a self-help book in the conventional sense, although I hope you will find it helpful. Vast numbers of books have been written on the subject of happiness, but I would like to think this one is different for a number of reasons. For a start, it approaches happiness in terms of development – that is, how happiness emerges and changes during the lifetime of the individual, from conception to death. Often the best way to understand a complex aspect of human nature is to see how it is assembled during the early years of life, and how it changes over time in response to experience. Most self-help books on happiness are only about adults, or only about children, and they focus on one slice of a person’s life, usually the here and now. But a fuller understanding can only come from thinking about the whole lifespan. Happiness is not an afterthought to be grafted on when we have grown up: its foundations are laid in childhood.
Childhood, however, is not merely a preparation for adulthood, and there would be no excuse for subjecting children to prolonged unhappiness on the grounds that it might make them happier or more successful as adults. Forcing children to neglect their friends and hobbies in order to study hard at subjects they dislike might pave the way to well-paid careers, but at what cost? Such strategies often backfire before the hallowed goal is ever reached. Conversely, keeping young children ‘happy’ (or, at least, docile) by indulging their every whim is not difficult, but children who are spoiled in this way sometimes turn into unpleasant adolescents and unhappy adults. Happiness is for life: it should start at the beginning and continue through to the end. The aim should be to raise happy children who develop into happy adults.
Old age matters as well. Thanks to improvements in living conditions and healthcare, the populations of wealthy nations are living longer and spending a larger proportion of their lives as elderly people. Laying solid foundations for lifelong happiness will therefore be even more important for future generations than it is for ours. Fortunately, the ingredients that contribute to successful aging are, by and large, the same ones that promote happiness earlier in life.
Some self-help books on happiness or parenting appear to be based on remarkably little evidence, relying on anecdotes and appeals to ‘common sense’ rather than verifiable data. The novelist Ian McEwan was barely exaggerating when he wrote that there is ‘no richer field of speculation assertively dressed as fact than childcare’. In my opinion, it is a good idea to be sceptical of any argument that relies mainly on appeals to ‘common sense’, because ‘common sense’ often turns out to be wrong. (Albert Einstein famously defined common sense as the collection of prejudices we acquire by the age of eighteen.) I have tried as far as possible to base my arguments on published scientific evidence rather than ‘common sense’ or personal opinion – although I have not shied away from expressing my opinions as well. Many of the scientific papers and books from which I have drawn this evidence are listed in the References section at the back.
A substantial body of objective research evidence is now available to cast light on a subject that was once the preserve of philosophers, theologians and gurus. Over the past decade or so, many scientific investigations have been conducted into the nature, causes, consequences and origins of happiness.
Within psychology, in particular, there has been a revolution in thinking. During the second half of the twentieth century, psychology focused almost exclusively on what goes wrong with people’s minds, largely ignoring all the things that usually go right. For instance, between 1967 and 1994 the main academic psychology journals published nearly 90,000 papers about depression, anxiety or anger, but barely 5,000 that even mentioned happiness, satisfaction or joy.3 The negative outnumbered the positive