Happiness Is...
It seems this week’s pediatric literature is awash with happiness, or at least with articles about who is happy and why. Evidence demonstrates a link between mood, cortisol levels, and medical outcomes, so as the Kardashians stop dominating popular culture, they may want to invest in better health insurance, especially Kim. I was in Colorado this weekend as Tim Tebow’s Denver Broncos lost to the New England Patriots, and I swear I could feel the well-being of one of the nation’s healthiest states fall, if just a little. So what does all this have to do with children?
The Children’s Society, a British charitable organization, released a comprehensive survey of children’s happiness in Great Britain this week. According to the study, 1 in 11 British children aged 8-15 years is significantly unhappy. Any unhappy child is tragic, of course, but honestly I was surprised the number was so low. It makes me wonder whether Great Britain will in future decades have an ample supply of standup comics.
The study illuminated factors that contributed to the sadness of 500,000 unhappy British kids. The authors did not address my personal theory, that He Who Must Not Be Named is gaining power. Instead it turns out unhappiness stems from the usual suspects: poverty, fears of not fitting in, and unstable family situations. Whether parents are married, unmarried, straight, or gay, matters much less than whether the family is loving and stable. While wealth does not improve happiness, children as young as age 8 were affected by awareness of financial hardships in their families. Unhappiness levels rose dramatically as children approached age 15, a finding that might not surprise parents of teenagers. How the parents felt about this was not reported, but I'm guessing it didn't make them happy.
The week also saw the publication of a study in PLOS-One guaranteed to make supporters of breastfeeding (ahem) unhappy. Parents reported that at 3 months of age infants who exclusively nursed were harder to soothe and less likely to smile, vocalize, or laugh than were formula-fed babies, possibly due to their more frequent need to express hunger. The authors were quick to point out the myriad health benefits of nursing to mothers and infants, and they also noted that over longer periods of time breastfeeding infants actually seem calmer than did formula-fed babies. Since nursing seems to improve cognitive outcomes, I suspect these infants are just smart enough to have read and understood the day’s headlines.
Finally, if you have an unhappy teenaged girl, it appears a phone call is worth a lot more than a text. Researchers publishing in Evolution & Human Behavior reported that levels of cortisol and oxytocin in stressed out girls responded much better when the teens called their moms than when their mothers just texted their support. These results will probably not surprise a lot of people, but I’d like to see a new study that isolates the effect of the moms’ voices by having the mothers say things like, “OMG, IMHO, LMAO!” In the meantime, I hope someone soon will get a grant to determine the cortisol levels of teenaged girls whose families get a reality TV show based on them. There may yet be time to save the next Kardashian family. As for the Denver Broncos, well, there’s always next year.