Name: Shawn Achor - The Happiness Advantage for Children
Uploaded: 2026-03-08T09:54:02.000Z
Duration: 7 min 9 s
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The comparative

So I think part of the issue that we see in a lot of schools and our education system is that a lot of these students are picking up on something that we have really put into our companies, which is if you work harder, you'll be more successful, and

Future simple

So you just put your nose to the grindstone, get good grades, then eventually, once you get into a good school, then you'll be happier, or once you get a good job, then you'll feel happier.

The problem is that that formula, I think, actually decreases our brain's potential.

It decreases our ability to respond and adapt to the world, and

actually lowers not only our happiness levels, but our success levels.

We were taught this because we were told that if you delay gratification, sometimes our test scores might improve, but

What we're really interested is how in the moment, can we reverse the formula?

How do we make it so that we feel that we can cultivate happiness in the present?

Through our educational practices, through the ways that we teach positive habits, even through our mindset.

The reason for that is because the formula we currently have doesn't work.

Because as soon as we have a success, our brain changes the goalpost of what success looks like, and

then we don't actually get the happiness we were promised.

there's no end to it as soon as you get a good job, as soon as you retire, as soon as you hit your sales target.

So what we really want to do from very early on is to teach students, teach children, a different formula.

And that formula is, if you cultivate happiness in the present, if you're connecting and creating deep social support with your friends, if you cultivate optimism, if you change the way you view stress from stress as a threat, to stress as a challenge, it turns out the formula actually works.

We can raise your levels of success, but your happiness levels will remain the same.

If we raise your levels of happiness first, we can really see what the human brain is capable of.

I think there's two things that we really need to teach students and educators alike to be able to do.

First of all, I think we need to create a mindset shift.

And I think it starts with realizing we need to prioritize happiness and positivity in the present.

Once we realize that we need to create that, instead of thinking, oh, as soon as I get a good grade, then we can start talking about happiness.

If we can start doing it in the present moment, what happens is you start to get a shift where people are not focused on being reactive to whatever workload is coming in, whatever papers they have to be working on, you know, whatever stresses they're feeling at school, they're actually changing where their brain is focused and their brain is focused on how do I move forward, how do I connect with other people?

Which actually raises our test scores and our success rates.

But the second thing I think we need to do is you can create a mindset shift, but

it won't stick unless there's a behavioral change as well.

So what we really want to do is teach first the educators to do it, but

then teach the educators to help the children to be able to do this is to create positive habits.

Just as we eat every day, because we know that eating will give us the fuel to be able to perform while in school, and

we need to sleep, we forget to do some really important things we know now based on science have huge impacts upon our ability to learn and process information and create memories.

So we've been looking at these habits, we've been looking at short habits that could be used in the classroom and used by educators to create these positive changes in they could be as simple as starting the class each day with having the students write down or say out loud three things that they're grateful for.

It has to be new each day, the things that they're grateful for.

But what happens is their brain starts at positive.

But however your brain starts, your brain actually gets stuck.

So as they go and look at their work, their brain is thinking about the strengths that they have, the optimism levels they have, what is actually going to move them forward.

So we can look at these habits, gratitudes, journaling about positive experiences, exercise for 15 minutes a day, meditation for just two minutes.

While not only creating a practice of meditation, which is so important, but

also allows us to go from multitasking, which we do so often at school and in life, down to single tasking for a little bit.

What happens is then as our brain is responding to a world, our stress levels go down.

The people around us, their stress levels go down, our happiness levels rise.

Or even writing a positive email or a note once a day to somebody in your support group.

All of these things have significant impacts that we've been researching in positive psychology.

That not only makes me happier in the present, which we could do with a chocolate bar, it's about making how do we create long term changes to the way these students view the world.

And we found that these two minutes can make all the Difference.

Parents have a unique role because when I talk to educators, they oftentimes tell me that they are doing the right thing, but

they just need the parents to get on the same wavelength.

When I talk to parents, they were like, we've been doing all this stuff at home.

We just need the educators to get on the same wavelength.

What I would like is to have everyone on the same page.

I like to expose them all to these discoveries in positive psychology that show that happiness actually an extraordinary advantage for these students if we cultivate in the present.

But oftentimes for parents, we think, you know, I'll be out speaking to a company, and

the parents will be like, oh, I can't wait to do some of these habits with my kids, to get my kids to do these three gratitudes each day.

So when we go to sleep at night, I'm going to make them say three things they're grateful for.

Something that would be even more helpful is that the parent modeled it right.

So instead of the child just doing the three things they're grateful for, the parent starts by showing, hey, this is so important to me that every time I have dinner with you, I'm going to tell you three things I'm grateful for.

Or when we go to sleep at night, I'm going to tell you three things that are important about this day.

We know from the research that we can actually literally rewire parts of the brain to become more optimistic if we practice this for long enough periods of time.

What we really want is the parents to not only get their children to do some of these positive habits, the gratitudes around the dinner table, the writing a positive note each day to somebody, you know, doing meditation for two minutes a day, doing exercise, going a walk.

As a family, what we really want is not only for them to teach the habits, but

And when we found that you get not only everyone in the family getting on the same wavelength, but

you actually get a cascade where the positivity one makes it easier for the other person to become more positive.

As the parent becomes more peaceful and calm and positive and compassionate, it's easier for the child to respond and to do these things as well.

So what I would love to see is that if we got the teachers, the educators, and

the students all doing the same positive habits and believing that positivity is important in the present, what we'd see is a very different future.