Children and Happiness

You might think that children and happiness go together without too much thought or planning; but a look around our society shows otherwise. So how can we bring up our children to be happy? Here I offer some thoughts on this fascinating topic.

Unhappy Children

From time to time we see reports in the news about children suffering from depression, and ever younger people engaging in alcohol and drug use. It would appear that children and happiness is not an automatic correlation. Something is going wrong with many children to cause them to be deeply unhappy.

Scientists have found that depression has an inherited genetic component as well as a behavioural component so I am not dealing with that here. What I want to address though, is the general discontent of so many children and explore how we as mothers can try to help our children to be happier.

What Do Children Need To Be Happy?

I have done a fair bit of reading about children and happiness as I was desperate to support my kids as best I could through their troubles. I found that, although what kids need does vary a little with age, there are fundamentals that all kids (and in fact all humans!) need in order to be happy and contented.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

This image is used under licence from Wikipedia.
The theory behind this diagram is basically that the needs lower down the pyramid need to be met before the higher needs can be met. When you think about it that's pretty common sense: if you haven't got enough to eat you're not going to worry about being creative and fulfilling your aspirations. Therefore, thinking about what children need to be happy, let's state the obvious.

They Need To Survive

Children need to have their basic survival needs met: food, water, clothing, shelter and physical health. We do what we can to make sure that our children have these basic needs met and most of us can be grateful that we can do this.

They Need Safety

Children also need to feel secure, in their body, that it will not be damaged or violated. They need to feel that they have security of a stable family and home. Sometimes this can be a challenge, especially when many families are losing their livelihoods and homes. This will impact, temporarily on the children.

They Need Love

Children need love and a sense of belonging and acceptance to be happy. They need to know that they are loved and accepted, most importantly, by their parents (or primary carers). We can show children we love them by listening to them. Not just half listening as we're doing the dinner or the ironing, but really giving our full attention. Active listening involves giving eye contact to the child, reflecting back to them what they've said by way of clarification, and asking encouraging open questions to promote dialogue. In his book The Secret of Happy Children, Family Therapist Steve Biddulph dedicates a chapter to listening to children.

They Need To Feel Good About Themselves

It is clear that if children don't have a positive self image and a healthy self esteem, they won't be happy. We can help children to feel good about themselves by our behaviour every day. We are programming our children's subconscious mind every day by interacting with them, in our conversation and behaviour. What beliefs are we programming them with? If we are constantly critisizing and belittling them, we will be giving them the belief that they are no good. If we often say that we love them; not just for what they achieve but for who they are, they will develop a positive self image.

They Need Our Respect

Children need to feel that they are respected, that their views and opinions are important and that they have some control over their own lives. We can give them this by using the authoritative parenting style . This is basically assertive parenting, where the child is listened to and valued, has choices; but the parent has the last word and explains why the answer is sometimes no.

They Need To Be Accepted

Children need to be accepted as they are. Often we berate our children for a particular behaviour which might irritate us. It may well be the case that the behaviour is a normal part of the child's stage of development. A basic knowledge of Child Development is useful to avoid this.

Children and happiness can be tricky to bring together, but a little thought on our part will help our kids to be happy little bunnies!