Ideas about happiness vary from one person to the next? These are mine!

Don't worry Be happy - Bobby Frenin's song

I wrote a short post on my blog, educatingparents.org on Wordpress in June this year. It is titled it What is happiness to you? It was a little message for parents. Working with parents, training and running of programs has been a long term role in my working life and so it made a lot of sense for me to continue communicating with mums and dads through my blog when my paid job came to an end. Raising happy children to become happy adults is easy enough as long as parents create happy environments, it is modelled and taught.

Lots of studies have investigated the reasons for people's happiness and the benefits of happiness. Giving, sharing and helping others are actions that create happy feelings inside the giver. Being hopeful and having strong beliefs in spirituality and religion are high are seen to be contributing factors toward the happy feeling. Always seeing the positives is a good thing so why not teach this to your children. Hence the motivation for this short post.

I am sharing it today because a person called informedintergrity wrote this thought provoking comment on my blog recently. Coming from a totally different angle it reminded me that we all write from our own different perspectives. Not wrong, not right, just an opinion, an idea.

Hi Angela, one’s happiness and the wellness of the world are not related. Happiness for me is knowing the truth of things in deeper and wider detail so as to make the world a better place.

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I am philosophising today on the concept of happiness. Why you might ask? Because one, to me being happy is the ultimate state of good well being. And two, happiness is contagious, catchy; it passes onto others. It is by far much better to be happy than sad and being down in the doldrums.

My logic is that if one is happy all is well with me and the world. There are a number of definitions of happiness and it is a matter of taking your pick. Here are two definitions that I like. Deepak Chopra says:

“Happiness is a feeling of great pleasure, contentment or joy”

Eleanor Roosevelt defines happiness. She says that happiness is “feeling of being honest with yourself and to those around you; a feeling that you have done the best in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.”

What makes a parent happy?

Is it the giving and receiving of love in a family?
Is it doing your best to raise happy laughing children who feel secure and safe?
Is it being honest with yourself and your partner and children?
Is parent happiness a feeling of pleasure, contentment and joy?

Wishing you all happiness.

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Cheers

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