Write an article Emphasizing the fact that a happy atmosphere at home is essential for childrems well being
Answers
Answer:
Noddings (2003) suggests that happiness should be an aim of education. Her assertion
that children learn best when they are happy will resonate with parents and early-years
educators, especially. However, this does not mean that learning is always fun or
undemanding. Indeed, meeting challenges and overcoming difficulties successfully is
both implicit in learning and a source of happiness.
Happiness is an active state, not simply the absence of pain. Nor is it the same as
pleasure. We may not know whether we are happy or not; and will in practice often
be happy in some respects but not in others. For example, we may be happy to have
achieved an immediate goal, but unhappy with how longer-term relationships; or
broadly content with our life, but not with the particular circumstances in which we
find ourselves. So, self-reporting of happiness is difficult for adults; and even more so
for young children less capable of placing immediate sensations into a longer perspec-
tive. Moreover, as Mill (1909, 94) wrote, ‘ask yourself whether you are happy and you
cease to be so’. Csikszentmihalyi (1992, 2) cites Frankl’s view that, like success,
‘happiness … must ensue … as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication
to a course greater than oneself’. The direct search for happiness may, paradoxically,
make it more elusive.
Achieving happiness as one of the chief motivations for action goes back to the
ancient Greeks, for whom the exercise of virtue was fundamentally linked to happiness.
One of Aristotle’s conceptions of a life truly worth living was that it leads to eudai-
monia, usually translated as happiness. However, as Grayling (2001, 72–3) points out,
this loses the original ‘strong, active connotation of eudaimonia as well-doing and well-
being, as living flourishingly’. This is closely associated with conducting oneself
appropriately in a social context. Indeed, the Greeks emphasised that happiness should
be independent of health, wealth or the ups and downs of everyday life. Layard (2005)
argues persuasively that, once an optimum level has been reached, additional wealth
does not lead to greater happiness. This depends on other, less tangible things, such as
experiences and relationships.
The Greeks saw eudaimonia as a sustained, rather than episodic, state, making an
important distinction between immediate and long-term happiness. The former is