I’ve failed the happiness test – and I’m delighted

A TRENDY TARGET THAT IS DAMAGING AND POINTLESS

JUSTIN WEBB, 57, presents Radio 4’s Today programme. He lives in London with his wife Sarah, a company director, and their children – twins Martha and Sam, 18, and Clara, 14. A CASUAL remark from a friend brought me up short. She revealed that she asks her children regularly whether they are happy. I realised I never had. Are you OK? Yes of course. Are you ill? Often. Are you serious? Often as well. But not ‘are you happy’. And me, the most affectionate, touchy-feely father in the world. Or so I thought. Now here was evidence that I was failing in a basic duty.

Or was it? The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that my failure to ask the question was actually (accidentally) a good thing. We are obsessed with happiness. It became, under David Cameron, a kind of trendy Government target, a way of suggesting that politicians understood all the various things that create a good life. The economist Lord Layard even brought out a UN-sponsored World Happiness Report.

And encouraged by the happiness industry, no wonder people check up on their kids. But I reckon we should resist the temptation. Not just because it’s pointless (as pointless as that index that found Britons slightly less happy than people in the United Arab Emirates) but much worse: it is damaging.

They have enough to worry about without worrying about themselves. Let them get on with life. Let them do their best. But don’t bog them down in this endless damaging self-contemplation.

It’s something our parents’ generation instinctively knew, perhaps because they’d lived through tougher times in terms of material wealth.

My mother, who grew up in the war, was affectionate and deeply interested in me all her life but she never once asked if I was happy. I think she knew I was not. I had a rather grim start in life for various reasons and she was hoping for the best long-term, but also protecting me from the short-term concentration on what was going wrong.

It sounds austere but it’s actually the opposite. Not encouraging children to think too deeply about whether they are happy takes off their shoulders a deadweight of self-examination that should come much later, if at all.

Of course I hope my three are happy. I hope it desperately sometimes. But ask the question: never.