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Why wanting our children happy is not naïve?

EducationNest
May 20, 2023
10:00 am

An investigation and reflection on the meaning of happiness as an educational goal

What do you ask your children at the end of the day? Did you behave? Were you good? Did you behave?

Most of us can probably find traces of these questions in our earliest memories. Perhaps even now we often find ourselves wondering whether our behavior was up to expectations. Did we measure up in this or that situation at work? Or in the social context of friendships. Or with our partner. No matter the situation, did we behave well? – asks our inner voice.
But what about how we felt? How do our children feel? Certainly, today, much more than in the not-so-distant past, children's feelings and emotional growth are a topic of discussion in parenting culture, books are written about them, and a wealth of specialized, high-quality information is available.

Perhaps we need to understand one point first.

What do we talk about when we talk about happiness? We asked our fifth graders.

Starting from their class study of GDP (gross domestic product), the students, in conversation, wondered if there were other criteria for evaluating the quality of life in a country (or community). Their intuition was that this criterion should be the happiness of the population. So, by carrying out some research, the students discovered that Bhutan, one of the countries with the lowest per capita GDP in the world, has been using another measurement method for years now, GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS (as we know, the UN also uses the Better Life Index to measure the well-being of countries).
They explain:

The GNI is a national wealth index that measures the happiness of people rather than products and services. It is based on four fundamental pillars and covers nine different areas. The four pillars are: good governance, meaning that the Bhutanese state always strives to promote and assist in increasing GNI; sustainable socioeconomic development, meaning that all Bhutanese citizens can benefit from public education, public healthcare, a secure life, and live in a fair and just society; cultural preservation and promotion, meaning Bhutan's ability to maintain the country's culture, identity, and traditions; and environmental conservation, meaning that the country protects Bhutan's environment for future generations.

And what's happening in our school community? Are we happy?
The students therefore designed and developed a survey to be administered to all elementary school classes: FIL – STUDENT HAPPINESS INDEX SURVEY.
The areas they consider relevant are: happiness, environment, and wisdom.

With FIL, we wanted to measure how happy children are when they go to school, because you'll be more likely to go to school if you're happy and have no worries. We also wanted to find out how connected we are to nature and understand how much children feel they've learned. This is why the questionnaire was divided into three parts: happiness, environment, and wisdom.

To accurately capture everyone's opinions, the kids created a questionnaire with measurable answers on a scale of 1 to 10.

How do you feel when you get to school? How much do you like school? How happy do your friends make you?

We won't discuss the results of this survey now, because that's beside the point. The point is that the children understood the premise. The reasons why a person can be happy or not in life are many and complex, and this happiness can often be uneven and uneven. But without the premise—the emotional foundations for building oneself within society—happiness isn't even a goal; it doesn't exist. What the children are telling us is that to feel good, you need to be serene, feel like you've learned, and be in a beautiful, functional place.

Why then is it that many adults find talking about children having the right to be happy naïve?

One reason certainly has to do with the performance culture that affects many of us to varying degrees and in subtle ways, but which has undeniably become part of a certain way of life today and which also affects the education of children. In the common ideal of the "good child," recurring images are those of commitment and even a certain degree of suffering in study as the only path to success. The ideas of self-denial and suffering are also often attributed an ethical value, as if one deserves a certain personal value simply for having put in the effort (note that commitment is certainly a fundamental part of the growth process, but not the only or fundamental one).
It's also possible that the vision of happiness, based on a romanticized, abstract, and somewhat superficial definition, plays a role, according to which children are happy if they laugh, play, and, in short, "behave."
Thirdly, we are often more accustomed to being "seen" or judged by others and we worry a lot about this, even before we know how to reverse the perspective and first have our own personal opinion of ourselves.

The perspective of the educator who wants to work on the concept of well-being in educational terms is much closer to that of the fifth-grade students. For example, when we talk about a child's serenity, it has to do with proper psychophysical development, with awareness of one's abilities and potential, with the personal security that comes from having balanced and emotionally stable relationships with peers and adults. The relevance of the language used by the students in their survey is astonishing, especially when they use the phrase " feel they have learned." Indeed, the choice to add the verb "feel" before "learn" presupposes an active perspective , an awareness and confidence in one's own results (positive or negative)—what we adults call the ability to self-assess. Therefore, a whole series of fundamental elements, which we could also call transversal skills, come together in the development of a happy individual, providing a solid foundation for the learning process. In essence, what the kids are telling us through the structure of this survey, and what we agree with, is that to be happy, we must first learn to be people and interact with the world. Then, we can evaluate our performance in terms of productivity. Being able to meet demands and achieve goals can be a consequence, but not a prerequisite, of a happy human being.

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