We begin our lives in families. After a while we go to school. And eventually most of us form families of our own. How do these experiences affect us?

The Effect of Parents

How our parents treat us makes a huge difference. For humans, we cannot prove this experimentally, but we can for animals – by allocating them randomly to be brought up by different parents. A classic study of rats by Michael Meaney took the offspring of mother rats who were bad at licking their offspring and allocated some of them to foster mothers who were good at licking.Footnote ¹ These offspring grew up to be much less stressed, and they also became much better at licking their own offspring. Similarly, a classic study of rhesus monkeys by Stephen Suomi took the offspring of overactive mothers and randomly allocated some of them to calmer foster mothers.Footnote ² These offspring became much calmer than those who stayed with their biological mothers.

However, we cannot do such experiments on humans. So we have to rely on data thrown up by people’s actual experiences of life. Fortunately, there are now a number of longitudinal studies, which follow the same person from the cradle into adult life, and most of our understanding of the impact of families and schooling comes from these surveys. In each of them, the wellbeing of the children is measured initially by questions to their parents and teachers and then (after about 10) to the children themselves as well. Here are some key findings.

Every child needs unconditional love. The basic need is for a secure emotional tie to at least one specific person. This experience of ‘attachment’ is the basis for an inner security that can last throughout life.Footnote ³ Sixty years ago, the importance of attachment was identified by John Bowlby;Footnote ⁴ and his idea has stood the test of time quite well. In meta-analyses, early attachment is correlated with later social competence (r = .18), pro-social behaviour (r = .15) and inner wellbeing (r = .08),Footnote ⁵ and these correlations are undoubtedly underestimates because attachment is so difficult to measure precisely.

A striking illustration of the importance of caring relationships comes from a tragic ‘natural experiment’. After the end of Communism, some Romanian orphans were randomly assigned to foster-care in Western families; the unlucky ones remained in the orphanage. On average, the children were 21 months old when they were assigned one way or the other, and they were assessed again at 4 ½ years of age. If they had been assigned for foster-care, the children’s mental and cognitive wellbeing at 4 ½ was over one half of a standard deviation higher than if they had stayed in the orphanage.Footnote ⁶ And the younger the age at which the fostering began the better the outcome.

So the love of caregivers is essential. But so too is firmness – the ability to set boundaries. If combined with warmth, this is known as ‘authoritative’ parenting, and it is the most widely recommended approach. In this approach, compliance with rules does not come from fear, but children learn to internalise the parent’s response and thereafter act to please their own ‘better selves’.Footnote ⁷

Abusive parents can change their children for life, and abuse includes psychological neglect as well as sexual or physical abuse. Though most abused children develop normally, a minority experience long-lasting damage. On average, there are marked brain differences between people who have and who have not been maltreated as children.Footnote ⁸ Maltreatment also affects behaviour,Footnote ⁹ but the long-term effects on internal wellbeing are even stronger.Footnote ¹⁰

So for a child the relationship to her parents is crucial. But so is the relationship between the parents themselves. At present, 50% of 16-year-olds are in separated families in the United States, and in Britain it is over 40%. How much does this matter?

The literature on child development is large.Footnote ¹¹ However, most of the main findings can be illustrated from within one study, which makes the findings on different influences easier to compare. This is the famous ALSPAC survey of all the children born in or around Bristol, England in 1991/2. Table 9.1 shows how their parents affected the wellbeing of their children – and also their behaviour and their academic performance (all measured at age 16).

As the table shows, family conflict is bad for all three of these outcomes. And, incidentally, for any given level of family conflict, a break-up of the family causes no additional damage, except to academic performance. But ongoing conflict between the parents after they break up increases the risk that the children will become depressed or aggressive. By contrast, seeing more of the absent parent reduces that risk.Footnote ¹²

Closely related to family conflict is the mental health of the parents. In the Bristol study, the single most important family variable predicting a child’s wellbeing at 16 was the mental health of the mother.Footnote ¹³ The father’s mental health also mattered but less so – probably because the mother is still, generally, the primary care giver. Clearly poor mental health can lead to family conflict, and vice-versa, but what emerges clearly is that both matter, holding the other constant.

There are three other causal factors that are much discussed. The first is family income. This is much less important for child wellbeing than it is for exam performance. The Bristol study showed that a 10% rise in family income would increase a child’s wellbeing by only 0.007 standard deviations. Similar findings emerge from other studies.Footnote ¹⁴ A second important influence is parental involvement in the life of the child. This is important in early life, but in the Bristol study it had few lasting effects. And the third issue is whether the mother works and for how long. In the majority of studies, this has no negative effect on child wellbeing, once the positive effect of the mother’s earnings is taken into account.Footnote ¹⁵

As the last row of Table 9.1 shows, the overall effect of all the observed parental characteristics upon the wellbeing of the child is a β-coefficient equal to 0.27.Footnote ¹⁶ It is time to compare this with the contribution of schooling.

The Effect of Schools

The Bristol study covered all the children who were born in that area over a 2-year period. As a result, each school in the area taught many children who were in the study. This enables us to see how much difference it made which school a child went to. The results showed that it made a very great difference – the schools really did affect the wellbeing of the children, as well as their behaviour and their exam performance.

The study estimated the following equation for wellbeing (W), as well as similar equations for behaviour and academic score:

$W_i=\sum _s{a}_s{D}_{\mathrm{si}}+\sum b_j{X}_{\mathrm{ij}}+c{W}_{i\text{lagged}}.$(1)

Here $W_i$ is the wellbeing of the ith child, and the X_ijs are the characteristics of the parents. There is also a 1/0 dummy variable $D_s$ for each school (which takes the value 1 when the school is the one the individual attended and otherwise zero). So the coefficient a_s tells us what difference it made that a pupil went to school s.Footnote ¹⁷

We can now ask: How far did these different effects of the different schools contribute to the overall spread of wellbeing in the child population? The answer can be found by looking at the standard deviation of the a_s coefficients (weighted by pupil numbers) relative to the standard deviation of W. The answers are in Table 9.2. In the first row, the table examines how much difference secondary schools make to children at age 16, holding constant not only all the measured family variables but also the child’s measurement on the same outcome when she entered the school at age 11. The second row does the same for primary schools, showing their effects at age 11 holding constant the measurement of the same outcome at age 8. And the third row shows their effects at age 8 holding constant the measurement of the same outcome at age 7. As Table 9.2 shows, schools make a remarkably huge difference to the wellbeing of their pupils – almost as much a difference as they make to their academic performance. And, looking back at Table 9.1, schools are making as much difference to child wellbeing as parents do (in so far as we can measure parents’ characteristics).

For primary schools, we can go a lot further and isolate the effect of individual teachers. This is possible because each child has only one main teacher in any one year. So we use the same methodology as shown in equation (1), but we replace individual schools by individual teachers. Table 9.3 shows the average results for the children aged 11 and aged 8 (averaged). Strikingly, the teachers have a more differential effect on the wellbeing of their children than they have on their maths score. It is also possible to follow the long-term effects that primary school teachers have on their pupils right into their 20s. It turns out that a teacher who is good at raising children’s wellbeing also makes her children nearly 4 percentage points more likely to go to university.Footnote ¹⁸ And a good teacher reduces their likelihood of becoming depressed, anti-social or alcoholic in their early twenties.This type of analysis shows clearly that schools and teachers make a big difference to the wellbeing of their children. But exactly how do they make that difference? This is a much more difficult question to answer. Some negative findings are fairly well established:

• Smaller class sizes have no well-established advantages, in terms of their impact on wellbeing (or on intellectual development).Footnote ¹⁹

• Larger schools have no well-established advantages in terms of wellbeing.

But we have little naturalistic evidence on what things do make a difference. There is, however, one way to discover: by experiment. There have been many outstanding experiments that tell us a lot about how we can produce happier children.

Can we teach happiness?

In the earliest (and most famous) experiments, the wellbeing of the children was not measured as such, but many other important outcomes were. Most of these early experiments were conducted with young pre-school children (though there is no convincing evidence that early intervention is more cost-effective than later intervention).Footnote ²⁰ Two well-known pre-school interventions are the Perry Pre-School project and the Abecedarian Project.Footnote ²¹ Perry Pre-School was a randomised trial on high-risk African-American children aged three and four. They spent two years in school for half the day, and their mothers were also visited at home each week. The children in the programme behaved better in subsequent life and were half as likely to be arrested than those in the control group. They also studied better, and a calculation of the project’s real rate of return to society was 7–10% per annum – better than the real return on equities.Footnote ²² The Abecedarian Project provided all-day play-based care for deprived children from birth to the age of 5. By age 21, the treatment group were less criminal and also earned more than the control group.Footnote ²³

A less expensive project for children of school age was the Good Behaviour Game, played in schools in a deprived area of Baltimore. In the treatment group, each first-year primary class is divided into three teams, and each team is scored according to the number of times a member of the team breaks a rule. If the team has fewer than five infringements, a reward goes to all members of the team. Children who played (or did not play) the game were followed up to ages 19–21, and those in the treatment group used fewer drugs, less alcohol and less tobacco, and fewer had anti-social personality disorder.Footnote ²⁴

However, one should be careful about generalising from individual experiments, since once in a while an intervention will, by chance, appear effective even if it is really not so. To see what can be achieved we really need a meta-analysis that summarises the results of a large number of experiments on children of school age.

CASEL (the Collaboration for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning) has provided just such a meta-analysis (see Table 9.4). It has analysed 200 programmes aimed at the whole range of children in a school and covering the basic topics in social and emotional learning (SEL), namely

• understanding and managing your own emotions and

• understanding and responding well to other people.

The overall findings were encouraging and some key lessons emerge.

• Programmes that improve wellbeing also improve academic performance. These objectives do not conflict with each other. This is a vital and quite general point.Footnote ²⁵

• Most programmes improve wellbeing more for the children whose wellbeing was initially low. But this does not argue for targeting because the programme works partly through changing the overall ethos of the class, and it is also important to avoid stigma.

• Programmes work better if they are ‘manualised’ (i.e., use detailed manuals and related materials for each lesson) and if the teachers using them have been trained in how to use them.Footnote ²⁶

• Programmes are more likely to succeed if they focus on what is worth doing, rather than on what not to do. Most programmes fail if they are focused exclusively on the dangers of sex, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling or crime.Footnote ²⁷ In general, children and adolescents respond better to the prospect of a positive reward rather than the threat of a negative outcome.Footnote ²⁸

• The effects of most programmes fade over time. This is largely because they are too short – typically less than 20 hours in total.

The conclusion is therefore that, if we want to improve the wellbeing of our children, we need a more ambitious approach.Footnote ²⁹ This could include the following:

• The school makes wellbeing an explicit goal of the school and measures the wellbeing of pupils each year to see how they are improving or falling behind. Good tests exist.Footnote ³⁰ In the Dutch secondary schools, this is required to be done by law and the government provides the logistics for the measurement and also processes the results.Footnote ³¹ In Southern Australia, the system is similar, but participation by the school is voluntary.Footnote ³²

• This goal of wellbeing is reflected in all aspects of school life including how teachers, parents and pupils behave to each other.Footnote ³³

• There is specific weekly teaching of life-skills. This does not depend on inspired teachers. It is normally manualised. The race is therefore on to produce a curriculum that can cover the whole age-range in schools. One major trial was recently completed in Britain of a 4-year curriculum for ages 11–15 called Healthy Minds, which raised life satisfaction at 15 by 0.25 standard deviations (or 10 percentile points) – see Box 9.1.

Box 9.1 The Healthy Minds ExperimentFootnote ³⁴

This provided the curriculum for a weekly lesson over four years, with detailed materials for the teacher and pupils for each lesson and professional training for teachers. The topics covered were emotional resilience, self-management, relationships with others (including sex), healthy living, managing social media, handling mental illness, becoming a parent and the practice of mindfulness. Teachers received 19 days of training over the 4 years for the experiment.

Thirty-four schools were involved, randomly divided into Groups A and Group B. Group A schools taught the curriculum to the cohort of children aged 11 in 2013 and measured their wellbeing at age 11, at age 13 and at age 16. Group B schools did the same for the cohort of children aged 11 in 2014; but they also measured the wellbeing of the cohort of children aged 11 in 2013. Thus the older group B cohort acted as the control group both for the Group A cohort and the later Group B cohort. The overall effect of the course was estimated by the following equation (analogous to equation (9) in Chapter 7):

$W_{\mathrm{ist}}=a_0+a_1{T}_{\mathrm{ist}}+v_t+f_i+u_s+e_{\mathrm{ist}}$

where W_ist is the wellbeing of student i in school s in year t and T_ist means ‘Have completed the course’.

The findings showed that at the end of the final year ‘global health’ (the primary outcome designated before the trial) was raised by 0.25 standard deviations, and life satisfaction by a similar amount.

The teacher training and teaching materials are available through Bounce Forward, https://bounceforward.com/healthy-minds-research-project/.

Table 9.4 Effects of programmes of social and emotional learning (SEL)

	Average gain (in standard deviations)	(Number of programmes)
Effect of programme on
Emotional wellbeing	0.23	(106)
Behaviour	0.23	(112)
Academic performance	0.28	(35)

Source: Durlak et al. (Reference Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor and Schellinger2011)

Social Media

Another huge influence on young people’s lives (and those of adults) is social media. Clearly, this brings huge possibilities for disseminating information and reducing isolation. But social media also has one major disadvantage: it exacerbates the problem of social comparisons. People put the best of their life on social media, and others feel inferior or left out. It is notable that at the same time as social media has soared, adolescent depression has too (compare the changes since 2010 in Figures 9.1 and 9.2). And so has the number of people who say ‘I often feel left out of things’ or ‘A lot of times I feel lonely’.Footnote ⁴²

Figure 9.1 Percentage of 18-year-olds spending 10 or more hours per week on the internet and percentage undertaking 4 face-to-face social activities in a week (United States)

Source: Twenge (Reference Ng, Vaithilingam and Rangel2017)

Figure 9.2 Percentage of 13–18-year-olds experiencing various negative thoughts in last 12 months (United States)

Source: Twenge (Reference Ng, Vaithilingam and Rangel2017)

However, correlation does not prove causality. Experiments are the clearest method of establishing causality. There have been about a dozen controlled experiments where participants abstain from using Facebook. The majority of these show positive effects of abstention on subjective wellbeing.Footnote ⁴³ In the most elaborate of them, a sample of US citizens were asked how much they would have to be paid to stop using Facebook for a month.Footnote ⁴⁴ The researchers then selected those 1,700 or so with the lowest values and randomly assigned them to the treatment group (paid $102) and the control group. The treatment group did not use Facebook for a month. In consequence, the subjective wellbeing of the treatment group was higher during the month by 0.12 points (out of 7) than it would otherwise have been. Three months after the end of the experiment the treatment group were using Facebook 22% less than the control group – a partial vote of no confidence.

However, clearly Facebook has positive uses as well as negative. In some discussions, a distinction is made between active use (posting things on to Facebook), which is considered positive for the actor, and passive use (just reading other people’s posts), which is considered negative – because it often induces unfavourable comparisons of oneself with others and sometimes involves cyberbullying.Footnote ⁴⁵ Passive use takes up ¾ of the time so the combined effect of active and passive is negative. But people will always use social media and the central issue is how to promote the positive use while reducing the negative.

Family Conflict

Sometime after adolescence, most people start forming families of their own. As we have seen, having a partner is on average very beneficial to one’s wellbeing. In the British Household Panel Survey, people with partners are on average happier than others by a large amount (other things equal). Compared with people without a partner, they are on average happier by 0.6 points (out of 10). Similar results are found in other countries though they are reduced by about 0.2 points in fixed-effects regressions.Footnote ⁴⁶

We have already seen how family conflict and separation can damage children. But it can also be terrible for the adults. Roughly 12% of all partnered men and women in the United States engage in physical aggression, with more violence usually coming from the men.Footnote ⁴⁷ There can also be psychological violence – denigration, dominance or extreme withdrawal.

These behaviours often reflect chauvinistic attitudes, which society needs to change, and the law needs to be enforced. But there are also services that can help to stop conflict developing in the first place. A key moment is when the first child is born. From that point couples become, on average, less satisfied with their relationship. But this can be averted if both parents take ante-natal classes that cover not just the physical and emotional care of children but also the sustaining of love between the parents.Footnote ⁴⁸ There are many courses of this kind. One of the most successful is Family Foundations, which involves eight group meetings with the parents. Compared with a control group, parents who take the course were less stressed and more cooperative by 6 percentile points.Footnote ⁴⁹

But even with these courses, many couples will still fight. They need help and, as Chapter 10 shows, there are good treatments that can be provided.

Conclusions

• The way our parents behave affects our wellbeing.Footnote ⁵⁰ Warm love and firm boundaries are good for wellbeing. However, many children survive severe abuse without major changes. The mental health of parents (and especially mothers) is important for the wellbeing of their children.

• Schools have more effect on children’s wellbeing than is usually appreciated, and so do individual teachers.

• If they wish to improve child wellbeing, schools will make that a major goal of the school and will measure it regularly.

• Life skills will also be taught at least weekly using evidence-based materials.

• In adulthood, family life is on average beneficial to wellbeing. But the quality of relationships often deteriorates after the birth of the first child. This problem can be reduced if both parents take ante-natal classes covering not just childcare but the impact of the child on their relationship.

• If, despite this, the mental health of the children or their parents deteriorates, it is vital that professional mental health support is available.

So let us turn now to the issue of health – of mind and of body.