Today’s parents spend a lot of time worrying about their children’s happiness. In some senses, this isn’t new—every parent wants his or her child to be happy. But the surge in teen mental distress—anxiety, depression, and mental disorders—has made the question of what makes kids happy particularly salient.
Much has been said and written about what makes adults happy. The happiness of children, by contrast, has received relatively little scholarly attention. A recently published review of the literature, authored by the University of Chicago’s Fan Yang, summarizes what we know. More importantly, Yang delves into one key question—are children only motivated by feeling good, or also by doing good?
This distinction has important implications for how parents think about raising their kids. After all, everyone knows that kids like things that feel good, like the taste of a lollipop or watching cartoons. But do children regard right behavior as a component of happiness? Do they care about what Aristotle called eudaimonia, living well by being good?
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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