What makes children happy? ‘That’s easy,' you might say, ‘a new toy, an ice cream or a trip to the amusement park.’ While these things bring an immediate smile to many children’s faces, they are probably not the things that will keep them happy day by day, or turn them into happy adults.

Even though we might all like to know the key to happiness, there is actually relatively little psychological research on this topic. In the past psychologists have tended to focus on how disorders involving negative mood can be prevented rather than how happiness can be achieved. However, more recently psychologists, notably Professor Martin Seligman, have developed what they call ‘positive psychology’: the study of happiness and well-being.

One somewhat surprising finding is that research disproves the common notion that being rich makes people happy. While it is true that living under very deprived circumstances is related to being unhappy, once people’s income exceeds the poverty level further increases in wealth do not lead to corresponding increases in happiness. One example to illustrate this point is that, if wealth did lead to happiness, we might expect people in today’s society to be much happier than in the past decades as we are earning much more. However, studies across the globe have shown that, in spite of great increases in income since the 1950s and 1960s, levels of happiness have remained pretty much the same.

Why have these improvements in life circumstances not resulted in lasting changes in happiness? There seem to be two reasons why wealth does not lead to any lasting change in happiness. One is people’s changing aspirations: once you have more, you also want more. The other reason is social comparison: once you see what other people have you are less satisfied with your own possessions. This last point is well put by Marx: ‘A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small, it satisfies social demands for a dwelling. But if a palace rises beside the little house, the little house shrinks into a hut.' These same reasons might partly be why the happiness of the child’s new toy is often short-lived!

Instead of wealth leading to happiness, research time and again has shown that good relationships are necessary for lasting happiness. This brings us directly to children, because children’s relationships with their parents (or other primary caregivers) are the starting point for happiness. Professor John Bowlby, a pioneer in the study of parent-child attachment, believed that this relationship has enormous influence in shaping a child’s self-esteem, her expectations of other people and view of the world in general.

Professor Mary Ainsworth was the first to develop a way of formally classifying the different types of relationships that exist between parents and children. Her test, called the ‘Strange Situation’, involves observing toddlers’ reactions during a series of separations and reunions with the parent. Securely attached toddlers protest when the parent leaves but are quickly comforted when they return, whereas insecurely attached infants continue to cry or avoid the parent when they return. Prof. Ainsworth’s own work, and that by others using the Strange Situation, shows that securely attached toddlers typically go on to have more positive, less troublesome relationships than insecurely attached toddlers, including relationships with friends, with romantic partners, and even their own future children. A happy note is that having a bad childhood does not necessarily doom children to repeat the same negative pattern with their own children. If a parent has reflected on their bad childhood, attempting to make sense of past events, they are less likely to repeat the same negative pattern.

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Content last updated: 14/12/2005

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