While relationships are extremely important for children’s happiness, another important ingredient is called mastery. This means that children are happy when they have something they are ‘good at’, and when their family and other important people in their lives notice and appreciate these skills. However, children should not be so focused on goals that they feel their happiness depends directly on achieving them. For example, a child who enjoys playing football for the game is likely to be made happier by the experience than one who can only feel happy if the team achieves a win. The tendency to feel that happiness is dependent on achieving particular goals is called ‘conditional goal setting’—‘If I score a goal in the game, then I will be happy’. This is a style of thinking that is associated with depression in both children and adults.

Up until now we have been considering how life events and circumstances contribute to happiness. However it is important to keep in mind that a large part, perhaps even more than half, is dictated by genetic factors. For example, studies have found that siblings who were raised in different families show striking similarities in the level of happiness, whereas unrelated children living in the same families do not. These types of findings may partly be attributable to the link between personality, known to be quite heritable, and happiness: people with extroverted personalities tend to be happier than those with more introverted, ‘neurotic’ personalities.

Research does show that some basic aspects of the brain circuits involved in emotion are in place from very early in life. Professor Richard Davidson, an expert in the brain bases of emotion, has shown that people whose brains are more active in the left frontal area tend to be more positive, outgoing, and smile more; by contrast people who show the opposite pattern of more activity in the right tend to report more negative thoughts, be more shy, and smile less. While this basic pattern can change as peoples’ feelings change from moment to moment during the day, it is estimated that about 60% of the variation between adults reflects the stable characteristics of the person.

Professor Davidson and his colleague Professor Nathan Fox have shown that a similar relationship between brain activity and emotion is seen even in newborns. They gave newborns either a sweet taste or a sour taste to induce positive or negative emotions, and then measured brain activation using the electroencephalogram (EEG). Newborns showed greater left frontal brain activation while smiling for the sweet taste but greater right frontal activation when showing disgust for the sour taste. Studies of older infants show the same type of results: at 10 months of age infants displaying right frontal brain activation are more likely to cry when their mother leaves than those displaying left frontal activation.

Do these types of studies mean that a child’s level of happiness is ‘set’ from the very beginning of life? The answer to this question seems to be ‘no’ - as we saw earlier on, life events and circumstances contribute as well. Moreover, particularly during development, the aspects of happiness reflected in the EEG measures are changeable. For example, when Professor Fox and his colleagues followed up a group of children who had shown high levels of shyness and right frontal activation at 9 months of age, they found that some of the children continued to show the right frontal pattern at 14 months and continued to be quite shy even at 4 years. However, some showed a shift to a more left frontal pattern at 14 months of age and were less shy by 4 years. While this study does not tell us what factors led some children to remain very shy and others to become less shy, it does suggest that it is possible to change a child’s basic emotional outlook. Interestingly, children themselves are quite optimistic about changing the negative: while 5 to 6 year-olds feel it is quite hard to change negative physical traits, they feel it is quite easy to change negative psychological traits (e.g., being very shy/fearful). This optimism seems to diminish by 7 to 10 years of age however, as children, like adults, come to believe that negative psychological traits are relatively difficult to change.

What, then, makes children happy? In the long term, the basic ingredients that make children happy during childhood seem to be the same ones that help them to become happy adults: a secure relationship with parents gives the base to confidently explore the world and develop a sense of mastery and recognition, all important components in the recipe for happiness. However, in the short term, the new toy might provide a smile too!

Further Reading
Well-being and affective style: Neural substrates and biobehavioral correlates from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
R J Davidson

Happy Child, happy adult: The childhood routes of adult happiness
E M Hallowell

The pursuit of happiness from Scientific American, 274
D G Myers & F Diener

The Optimistic Child
M E P Seligman, K Reivich, L Jaycox and J Gillham

From the web:
EEG asymmetry

Attachment theory

Positive Psychology Centre

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