What is more important, happiness now or building for the future? Ultimately we probably want a good balance—to enjoy the present, including friends, family, good food and fun, alongside a more cognitive sense of life satisfaction, or knowledge that we are succeeding.
What about children? NPC’s well-being questionnaire enables charities to measure different aspects of children’s well-being, including emotional well-being, friends, family, self-esteem and enjoyment of school. We believe it is vital that charities measure well-being so we can better understand the impact of the work they do.
Yet the comment is often put to me that we should be preparing children for the challenges of adulthood, not worrying about happiness now. For example, children may dislike homework, but it is important for them to pass exams. Therefore charities should focus on measuring hard outcomes like school grades or attendance, not well-being.
Firstly, I totally agree that charities should not only measure well-being at the expense of hard outcomes. In order to understand the full impact of charities we need both, and by capturing both we will be able to better understand the complex relationship between the two.
Secondly—just like work-life balance—happiness and preparedness are not mutually exclusive, as those people lucky enough to have interesting and enjoyable jobs know. You can prepare children for adulthood by helping them to develop the social skills, support networks, self-esteem and resilience required to overcome difficulties and succeed in life, whilst ensuring the experience is largely enjoyable and happy.
Of course some contradiction cannot be ruled out. There is evidence that the smaller the family, the higher the probability that children will perform well at school and succeed, but children often prefer to have siblings. But there will always be trade-offs in life and it is important that we understand those trade-offs, from children’s perspectives too.
Finally, children deserve to be happy. Sure, some adversity may be good for you, but too much can be very damaging. Charities have a crucial role to play both in developing children’s skills for the future and ensuring their present happiness.
If you have a comment or want to know more about the NPC well-being questionnaire you can email me at cnevill@philanthropycapital.org. Next time I will be blogging on the relationship between resilience and emotional well-being.
You have hit upon, but not totally explored, this concept of happiness as a search, or as a state of being. You know, I believe that our problem is "Trying. To. Be. Happy." No one is happy all of the time, or should be happy all of the time, and in fact, as Jenny Holzer says, disgust is the appropriate response to most things. The medicalization of our emotional states aside from happiness has allowed us to think that there is something wrong with us if we are not "happy." Having grown up when many of my schoolmates were on ritalin or prozac, I feel that we do ourselves a disservice by trying to measure "wellbeing." Why are we so focused on wellbeing? I blame the positive psychology movement. But that's a story for another post. http://wildwomanfundraising.com
I totally agree with you that it is wrong to label someone as unwell if they are not 'happy' all the time. In fact a perpetually happy person can be just as disconcerting as a perpetually sad one. You might like this tongue in cheek paper which suggested classifying happiness as a psychitric disorder in the DSMIV under the name: 'major affective disorder, pleasant type'. http://jme.bmj.com/content/18/2/94.abstractHowever, I think well-being is different from happiness. Happiness is affective mood, whereas well-being is a more complex and cognitive multi-dimensional concept incorporating multiple aspects of your life. Ands tools like ours, developed to measure well-being, must reflect this.I will blog my thoughts on the positive psychology movement soon.
@Mazarine: I think happiness is a state, but a state which is very very hard to define. It involves being satisfied with one’s place in the world – with situations and actions past and present – and an acceptance of what lies in wait for the future.
This is not some stoic concept of being content with whatever fate deals you. Instead, one is happy if one is satisfied with something worth being satisfied about – be it a personal achievement or a lucky turn of fate – but what is worth being satisfied about depends on the values that a person holds, which in turn feeds into their definition of success. Happiness, in this light, might be viewed as being satisfied about one’s position on the road to ‘success’.
Perhaps we can have a conversation on what values and measures (subjective or objective) contribute to ‘success’ another time, but I do think that wellbeing should be one of the necessary factors within an adequate definition of success – in all its multi-dimensional glory!