The Happiness Problem
Editor’s note: Eli Spector is the Jr/Sr High Principal.
We live in a society and culture which values happiness but misunderstands it at a fundamental level. When asked what makes them happy, teenagers often say things like:
“Playing video games.”
“Doing whatever I want.”
“When I don’t have to do [chores, homework, hard work, etc.]”
Some students are wiser and may say things like, “I’m happy when I’m with my friends” or “I’m happiest when playing outside.” However, the amount of time that students spend in unstructured time is decreasing (schools and parents increasingly script and structure many hours of the week with defined activities, clubs, tasks, homework, and extracurriculars). It is as if we believe that if we keep our kids busy, then we can prevent them from getting into trouble. The result is that they are sometimes too busy to play unless it is in a structured, competitive environment. Simultaneously, the amount of time that students spend getting together with friends outside of school has also decreased significantly since the early 2000s. It is growing rarer and rarer for students to go hang out at other students’ houses. Outside of school, many students “maintain their friendships” largely through digital interactions (or at least they believe that is what they are doing).
Happiness is something that we all chase. Jefferson wrote it into the Declaration of Independence. It is programmed into our advertisements (because it works), and it is baked into the stories that we tell and the Disney movies that we watch (because we so badly want everything to end happily ever after). We also live in a society and culture in which anxiety, depression, a general lack of purpose, and other emotional & behavioral issues are now fairly endemic. How is it that a culture which has oriented itself so strongly around chasing happiness seems to be having such a hard time in finding it?
Maybe we have failed to recognize the relationship that exists between happiness and struggle. In his book, The Happiness Crisis, Jon Eckert contends that humans are like trees. We need resistance in order to develop well (such as forceful wind or changes in weather). If we remove those forces which result in struggle, trees do not develop strong roots. The tree that is not exposed to struggle will not develop strong roots and will eventually collapse on top of itself. Similarly, when children struggle – and particularly when they struggle productively – they develop a core belief that they are capable of dealing with discomfort, they begin to see setbacks as challenges rather than as final defeats, they begin to believe that they can handle conflict through their own ability to listen and speak, and they ultimately learn that they can impact the world around them (that’s a nod to the FRCS mission statement). They learn this—or fail to—from a very early age.
Many schools/parents are afraid to protect struggle. It is scary right now. Perhaps a school allows a student to avoid a public speech because the child is nervous. Maybe the school makes changes to the requirements of a program in order to placate a really upset student who did not meet the program criteria. Some schools work very hard to ensure that students don’t experience any negative emotions (these schools might ensure that everyone gets a 1st place ribbon or a 1st place prize or the same award—because it would result in a “negative” emotion if a student thought they performed worse than a peer). But without struggle, the tree does not develop strong roots. Without struggle, the student does not learn the strengths of character described above.
Maybe it would be better if schools focused on creating more struggle for students rather than less of it.
How can we curate appropriate challenge for each student and in each discipline? How can we celebrate when students try new things—even if they are met with setbacks or initial failures? How can we parent, teach, and coach in ways that help students to realize their own capabilities and appreciate the capabilities of others?
The Harvard Study of Adult Development launched in 1938, and is the longest study of happiness ever conducted. The study is still tracking the lives of the original 724 participants and now three generations of more than 1,300 descendants. The current study directors wrote, “A rich life—a good life—is forged from precisely the things that make it hard.”
It would seem that struggle is related to happiness. We should choose to struggle through many things that make us uncomfortable, nervous, or uncertain. We need to model this for students, and we need to protect their ability to struggle for themselves.
