Being Good Makes Kids Feel Good

Today’s parents spend a lot of time worrying about their children’s happiness. In some senses, this isn’t new—every parent wants his or her child to be happy. But the surge in teen mental distress—anxiety, depression, and mental disorders—has made the question of what makes kids happy particularly salient.

Much has been said and written about what makes adults happy. The happiness of children, by contrast, has received relatively little scholarly attention. A recently published review of the literature, authored by the University of Chicago’s Fan Yang, summarizes what we know. More importantly, Yang delves into one key question—are children only motivated by feeling good, or also by doing good?

This distinction has important implications for how parents think about raising their kids. After all, everyone knows that kids like things that feel good, like the taste of a lollipop or watching cartoons. But do children regard right behavior as a component of happiness? Do they care about what Aristotle called eudaimonia, living well by being good?

In her review, Yang divides the literature on children’s happiness into older and newer research. The older research, she finds, consistently (and unsurprisingly) finds a significant association between “material desires and simple pleasures” and children’s happiness. For example, by age 2, children are able to predict happiness “based on obtaining desired objects;” children under the age of 7 “doubted that people could act against their own desires.” As late as age 12, children identify happiness with engaging in enjoyable activities—as opposed to forming social relationships, a connection that comes with adolescence.

More recent research, Yang finds, does not rebut this picture, but does nuance it. Specifically, it finds that children associate happiness with doing and being good—they find some connection between moral behavior and fulfillment. For example, in one study children ages 4 to 9 thought that “mean” individuals were less happy, even when mean and nice individuals had the same level of material fulfillment. In a longitudinal survey of Chinese 9- and 10-year-olds, peers’ impressions of a respondent’s pro-sociality predicted that respondent’s happiness, “over and above children's self-reported levels of desire satisfaction.”

The implication, Yang writes, is that children have a multidimensional concept of happiness. They care about feeling good, but they also care about doing or being good. As Yang puts it, “happiness for children entails gaining personal benefits … when the actions involved are not morally objectionable.”

On the one hand, this claim seems blindingly obvious. Much like grown-ups, kids’ happiness is influenced not just by sensual pleasures, but by their personal conduct. 

At the same time, though, it has implications for how parents interact with their kids. There is a temptation in parenting to regard moral formation as a necessary but unpleasant chore. Kids, in this model, are pleasure-seeking creatures, who need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, toward the right choices and away from the things that they actually want.

Of course, any parent who has raised a child knows that making kids behave morally can be a chore. No toddler wants to share, for example. But the implication of Yang’s summary is that behaving morally can bring its own kind of pleasurable reward—it can make children happier than they would be if just left to pursue their desires. In other words, the moral formation of children is a way for parents to help them flourish. It can be tough—but if the research is right, it has a great deal of reward in the end.