essay about happy childhood

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How to Recover from a Happy Childhood

Recovering from a happy childhood can take a long time. It’s not often that I’m suspected of having had one. I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, a daughter of immigrants. When I showed up at college and caught sight of other childhoods, I did pause and think: Why didn’t we grow our own tomatoes? Why did I watch so many episodes of “I Dream of Jeannie”? Who is Hermes? What is lacrosse? Was my childhood a dud? An American self-inspection was set in motion. Having lived for more than forty-five years, I finally understand how happy my childhood was.

One might assume that my mother is to blame for this happiness, but I think my father has the stronger portion to answer for, though I only had the chance to know him for seventeen years before he died unexpectedly. He was an extoller of childhood, generally. I recall his saying to me once that the first eighteen years of life are the most meaningful and eventful, and that the years after that, even considered all together, can’t really compare.

The odd corollary was that he spoke very rarely of his own childhood. Maybe he didn’t want to brag. Even if he had told me more, I most likely wouldn’t have listened properly or understood much, because, like many children, I spent my childhood not really understanding who my parents were or what they were like. Though I collected clues. Century plants sometimes bloom after a decade, sometimes after two or three decades. I saw one in bloom recently, when my eight-year-old daughter pointed it out to me. I’m forty-six now, and much that my father used to say and embody has, after years of dormancy, begun to reveal itself in flower.

Growing up, I considered my father to be intelligent and incapable. Intelligent, because he had things to say about the Bosporus and the straits of Dardanelles. Incapable, because he ate ice cream from the container with a fork, and also he never sliced cheese, or used a knife in any way—instead, he tore things, like a caveman. Interestingly, he once observed that he didn’t think he would have lasted long as a caveman. This was apropos of nothing I could follow. He often seemed to assume that others were aware of the unspoken thoughts in his head which preceded speech. Maybe because his hearing was poor. He sat about two feet away from the television, with the volume on high. He also wore thick bifocal glasses. (In the seventies and early eighties, he wore tinted thick bifocal glasses.) The reason he wouldn’t have lasted long as a caveman, he said, was that his vision and his hearing meant that he would have been a poor hunter. “Either I would have died early on or maybe I would never have been born at all,” he said. The insight made him wistful.

If I had met my father as a stranger, I would have guessed him to be Siberian, or maybe Mongolian. He was more than six feet tall. His head was large and wide. His eyes seemed small behind his glasses. His wrists were delicate. I could encircle them, even with my child hands. His hair was silky, black, and wavy. He and my mother argued regularly about cutting his hair: she wanted to cut it; he wanted it to stay as it was. He was heavy the whole time I knew him, but he didn’t seem heavy to me. He seemed correctly sized. When he placed his hand atop my head, I felt safe, but also slightly squashed. He once asked me to punch his abdomen and tell him if it was muscular or soft. That was my only encounter with any vanity in him.

It would have been difficult for him if he had been vain, because he didn’t buy any of his own clothes, or really anything, not even postage stamps. Whenever there were clearance sales at the Dillard’s at the Sooner Fashion Mall, my mom and I would page through the folded button-up shirts, each in its cardboard sleeve, the way other kids must have flipped through LPs at record stores. We were looking for the rare and magical neck size of 17.5. If we found it, we bought it, regardless of the pattern. Button-ups were the only kind of shirts he wore, apart from the Hanes undershirts he wore beneath them. Even when he went jogging, he wore these button-ups, which would become soaked through with sweat. He thought it was amusing when I called him a sweatbomb, though I was, alas, aware that it was a term I had not invented. He appeared to think highly of almost anything I and my brother said or did.

He had a belt, and only one belt. It was a beige Izod belt, made of woven material for most of its length, and of leather for the buckle-and-clasp area. My dad wore this belt every day. Every day the alligator was upside down. How could it be upside down so consistently? He said that it was because he was left-handed. What did that have to do with anything? He showed me how he started with the belt oriented “correctly,” and held it in his left hand. But then, somehow, in the process of methodically threading it through his belt loops, it ended upside down. His demonstration was like watching a Jacob’s-ladder toy clatter down, wooden block by wooden block.

I loved Jacob’s ladders as a kid, I think because it took me so long to understand how they produced their illusion. And I also loved the story of Jacob’s ladder in the Bible, which was similarly confusing. Jacob dreams of a ladder between Heaven and earth, with angels going up and down it. Another night, Jacob wrestles with an angel, or with God, and to me this part also seemed to be as if in a dream, though we were meant to understand that Jacob’s hip was injured in real life. This is not Biblical scholarship, but I had the sense—from where? My Jewish education in Norman can perhaps best be summarized by the fact that my brother’s bar mitzvah is the only bar mitzvah I have attended—that Jacob was the brainy brother and Esau was the good hunter, with the hairy arms, and Jacob had stolen Esau’s birthright blessing by putting a hairy pelt on his arm and impersonating Esau before his father, Isaac, who was going blind. And yet we were supposed to be cheering for Jacob. And Jacob’s mother, Rivka—that was me!—had been the orchestrator of it all. What a sneak. Though it was also a classic story of a household that appeared to be run by the dad but, for more important purposes, was run by the mom.

My dad loved arguments. If he had been a different kind of man—more of an Esau—he probably would have loved a brawl, too. He sought out arguments, especially at work, where arguing was socially acceptable, since it was considered good science, and my father was a scientist. Fighting was a big pastime in my family, more broadly. Our motto for our road-trip vacations was: We pay money to fight. I remember once breaking down in tears and complaining that my mom, my dad, my brother—they all fought with one another. But no one ever wanted to fight with me. I was the youngest by six years.

I did not call my dad Dad but, rather, Tzvi, his first name, which is the Hebrew word for deer. I assume that my older brother started this. As best as I can deduce, Tzvi went to bed at about 4  A.M. and woke up at about 10 or 11  A.M. It was therefore my mom who made me breakfast—two Chessmen cookies and a cup of tea—and packed my lunch, and drove me to school, and bought my clothes, and did the laundry, and cleaned the house, and did all that for my brother and my dad, too, and did everything, basically, including have her own job. But if I thought about who I wanted to be when I grew up, and who I thought I was most like—it was my dad. My dad slept on many pillows, which I found comical and princess-like. (When I was twenty-three and in medical school, I realized that this was a classic sign of congestive heart failure.) He was a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, though arguably he was better known as a regular at the Greek House, a gyro place run by a Greek family which sold a gyro, French fries, and salad for less than five dollars. My dad was beloved there, as he was in many places, because he gave people the feeling that he liked them and was interested in what they had to say, and he gave people this feeling because he did like them and was interested in what they had to say.

My father had a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, though it had been obtained in a school of geosciences, and so he had been required at some point to acquire competence in geology and maybe something else. He had grown up in a moshav, a collective-farming village, in Israel. The few photographs of him as a child are of him feeding chickens; of him proud alongside a large dog; of him seated in front of an open book with his parents beside him. His mother’s name was Rivka, and she died before I was born. When one of my partner’s sons saw a photo of her, in black-and-white, he thought that it was a picture of me.

Although my dad didn’t say much about his childhood, he did speak, more than once and with admiration, about a donkey from his childhood, named Chamornicus, that was very stubborn. The name, which is old-fashioned slang, translates, approximately, to “my beloved donkey,” but my dad used it when someone was being intransigent. My dad admired stubbornness, especially of the unproductive kind. He once took my brother on a four-week trip to China and Japan. My dad had work conferences to attend. My brother was sixteen or so at the time. My dad took my brother to a bridge that Marco Polo had crossed and said something to the effect of “Isn’t it amazing to think that Marco Polo crossed this same bridge?” And my brother said, “What do I care?” My dad was amused and impressed. My dad also cited with great pride my brother’s insistence on eating at McDonald’s or Shakey’s Pizza while they were in Japan. “He stuck with his guns,” he said, with his characteristic mild mangling of cliché. My dad had a gift for being amused, and for liking people. He was particularly proud of saying, of the anti-immigrant, anti-N.E.A. politician Pat Robertson, “He doesn’t like me, but I like him.” And even when he genuinely disliked, or even hated, people, he enjoyed coming up with nicknames for them. I learned the names of dictators through my parents’ discussions of people nicknamed Mussolini, Idi Amin, and Ceauşescu. He had gentler nicknames for my friends: the Huguenot, Pennsylvania Dutch, and, for a friend with a Greek dad, Kazantzakis.

I said that I was never involved in the household arguments, but I do remember one fight with my dad. He told me a story about something he’d done that day, and I was appalled. He wouldn’t tell a student of his what a herring was. It was a problem on an exam, about herring and water currents. The course was in fluid dynamics. Many of my father’s students came from China. Their English was excellent. But apparently this particular student was unfamiliar with the word “herring.” A deceptive word: it looks like a gerund but isn’t.

My father, who learned English as an adult and would put a little “x” in our home dictionary next to any word he had looked up, and whose work answering-machine message promised to return calls “as soon as feasible,” was, at the time of the herring incident, unfamiliar with the word “cheesy,” having recently asked me to define it for him. He was also accustomed to having students complain about his accent in their teaching evaluations. All that, and still my dad expressed no sympathy for this student. “It’s part of the exam,” my father said that he told the student, as if the line were in the penultimate scene of “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.” My dad had a weakness for narrating moments in which, as he saw it, he dared to speak the truth. One of his favorite films was “High Noon”; this paired well with another favorite of his, “ Rashomon .” In one, there’s good and evil; in the other, a tangle of both that can never be unravelled.

I now see that he must have doubted himself in this herring incident, though. Otherwise, why was he telling me the story? I said—with the moral confidence of youth—that he should have told the student what a herring was, that it was an exam on fluid dynamics, not on fish. And I told him that I thought what he had done was mean. We had a pretty long argument about it. But my father stuck with his guns. He said, “When you go through life, you’ll understand that, if you don’t know what a herring is, people don’t tell you. You have to know it yourself.”

I should say that I have, through the years, received notes now and again from students who loved my father. One woman wrote me that his encouragement saved her career when she was thinking of giving up. Some of his students were Chinese dissidents, one had been a journalist, and my dad had helped these students get visas to come over. Shortly after my father died, a student of his from Brazil invited us to his home for dinner. He wanted to tell us how much my father had meant to him. What I really remember about that dinner was the man telling my mother and me that it was difficult for his wife to live in Norman, because in Norman no one tells you that you’re beautiful. “Not at the grocery store. Not at the hardware store. Not on the street. Nowhere! So that is hard for her,” he concluded.

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Students complained not only about my dad’s Tzvinglish but also about his handwriting. His accent was very heavy in part because he couldn’t hear well, so his speech was more like what he had read than like what he had heard. But his accent could have been managed if he had had decent handwriting. He was a lefty, from an era before lefties were celebrated, and maybe this had something to do with his terrible handwriting. When he wrote on a notepad, he pressed down with his ballpoint pen so hard that you could see the imprint clearly even several pages beneath, and I often stared at those indentations, which for me had the mesmerizing power of hieroglyphs. Maybe this was what he didn’t want to, or couldn’t, translate for his students—something of making your way in the world when you are, by nature, not really the kind of person who makes his way in the world. Maybe the herring was a red herring. When I went to college, I always praised my foreign grad-student T.A.s to the moon and back.

One fight I remember, because my father did not enjoy it, was about what kind of car he should get when the old one broke down. For years, he drove an enormous used beige Chevy Caprice Classic, which fit all of us plus relatives for long road trips. My dad wanted to replace it with a Jeep with no doors. He had always, he said, wanted a Jeep with no doors. We got a Subaru station wagon.

At about 7  P.M. or so, most nights, I would hear my father pull into the driveway with the station wagon that he wished were a Jeep with no doors. It would then be about forty-five minutes before he entered the house. What was he doing out there? He said that he was organizing. He took seriously all the dials and indicators in the car—the mileage, the warnings, the details of the owner’s manual. He was often going through his hard-shelled Samsonite briefcase again as well.

But also forty-five minutes was, I think, his atom of time, the span of shortest possible duration. It took forty-five minutes to brush and floss his teeth. Forty-five minutes to shave. And forty-five minutes, minimum, to bathe. Forty-five minutes between saying, “I’m almost ready to go,” and going. He, and therefore we, were often late.

These forty-five-minute intervals were because, I think, he did everything while thinking about something else. He lived inside a series of dreams, and each dream could admit only one pedestrian task into its landscape. He often spoke of the life of the mind. He wished for my brother and me that we could enjoy a life of the mind. But, as with many phrases, I think my dad used “the life of the mind” in his own way. He never, for example, urged us to read Foucault, or Socrates, or, really, any books. Those forty-five-minute blocks of daydreams were, I think, closer to what he meant by the life of the mind. They were about idly turning over this or that, or maybe also about imagining yourself as Marco Polo. They were about enjoying being alone, and in your thoughts. That’ll slow you down.

It also took my dad a long time to fall asleep. He managed this by watching reruns of detective shows that came on late at night. He sat in a dining-room chair, close to the television in the living room, not while reclining on his three or four or five pillows in bed. I would sleep on the sofa in the living room, rather than in my own bed, because I didn’t like going to sleep in my room alone. My dad particularly loved “ Columbo ,” with Peter Falk. Also, a show with a large balding man called Cannon. And “The Rockford Files,” with James Garner. Garner was from Norman. It was known that he was related to my elementary-school principal, Dr. Bumgarner. He was so beloved, a dream of a man—both the actor and the principal. Later, when I was older, there was a new show, “Crazy Like a Fox,” that would come on before the reruns. It starred a father-and-son detective team: the dad was kooky and couldn’t be restrained; the son was practical. Together, they could solve anything. Sometimes I slept through the shows, dimly registering their high-volume presence. At other times I watched them, but while lying down. It was essential that I fall asleep before “ The Twilight Zone ” reruns came on, because a whole night of sleep would be ruined if I accidentally saw an episode in which there was a fourth dimension in a closet, or a character who discovered that he could pause time.

Until I was at least ten, my dad helped me fall asleep every night. He sang lullabies about boats going out to sea and never returning. He told stories, one of which was about an extremely tiny child, small enough to fit into a soda bottle, and one day, when a wolf comes and eats up all the other normal-sized siblings, the tiny sibling is there to tell the mother what happened, so that she can cut open the wolf’s stomach and retrieve her children, and they then all have the tiniest child to thank for their survival. My daughter is familiar with this story through years of being indoctrinated about the special powers of littleness.

I’m now as old as my dad was when he was a dad, staying up, transitioning into restfulness by watching those shows. Why was my dreamy dad such a fan of detective shows? The only other shows I remember him liking were political-argument shows, “Jeeves and Wooster,” and, for some reason that I have yet to unpack, “The Jewel in the Crown.” Was it because those detectives shrugged into dangerous situations coolly? Because they always said the right thing? Ultimately, they were men of action. They could easily have handled a Jeep with no doors. Maybe they were the ideal avatars for a man devoted to the life of the mind. Not that the shows were a consolation prize for having “no life.” It wasn’t like that. The life of the mind wasn’t no life—it was life. And great battlefields were plentiful. When my brother had a mild conflict with his high-school calculus teacher over a midterm grade, my dad gave him Churchill’s speech about fighting on the beaches and never surrendering. If I had the urge to step back from a just conflict, my dad would remind me that Chamberlain had a choice between war and shame, and that he chose shame but got war later. If you heard my dad humming something, it was probably the “Toreador Song,” by Bizet, or Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

I remember a battle he assisted me with. One day, when my brother brought home a soccer trophy, I started to cry. I had never won anything. (If only I had spent my childhood crying less and fighting more!) When the fifth-grade track meet came around, I was set to compete in the one event that had only four competitors—the unpopular distance event. The distance was half a mile. If I could run faster than even one of the other girls, I would get a ribbon, which was at least atmospherically related to a trophy.

Tzvi did something classic in one way but very unlike himself in another. He did something practical. The month before the track meet, he took me out to our school track several nights a week. I ran in a button-up shirt, I now remember, one that was white with blue stripes. Four laps around the track was half a mile. He timed me, and he shouted at me.

During the race, when, on the third lap, I passed a girl whose name I won’t mention to protect her from the indignity of it, she began to cry. To be passed by me was much worse than just coming in last. But my dad had no sympathy for her. The way he saw it, I had shown the world; I had never surrendered. I guess what I’m saying is that some ways of being nice came easily to my father, and other ways were difficult for him, even as, for someone else, it would be a whole other set of things that were easy, that were difficult. When he trained me for that meet, he had done something, for me, that for him was difficult. He had not been forty-five minutes late.

We rarely ate dinner together as a family. My mom doled out to each of us the food that we wanted, at the hour that we wanted it. Chopped-tomato-cucumber-red-onion salads for my father. Plain couscous with butter for me. An argument with my brother about ordering takeout. I believe my mom ate whatever was left over, that no one else wanted. Years later, without quite deciding to, I assumed a similar role. In that role, I nicknamed myself the Invisible Dishrag. Being a dishrag extends beyond cooking, of course. Sometimes I would find myself deeply bothered and resentful about my dishrag role. But most of the time I found myself thinking, perhaps smugly, Well, I’m capable. My dad often talked about how intelligent my mother was. To be a dishrag was not to be Jeannie from “I Dream of Jeannie” (though I loved her, too) but more like Samantha, from “Bewitched.” Samantha was powerful—she could, for example, teleport by wiggling her nose—but she kept her power under wraps out of respect for the man in her life, a guy named Darrin. That I watched so much television during childhood, wasting away like that, I also somehow have become O.K. with. Though it has left me unable to watch any television at all now, when television has supposedly become so good.

There was one meal that my family did eat together. That was the Passover meal, which we usually shared with the Scottish Jewish Orthodox family who lived on the other side of town, the Levines. To this day, my brother and I still call roasted potatoes Levine potatoes. What I remember best about those Seders was how my dad and Martin Levine, a dentist, were capable of long discussions about almost any line of the Haggadah. They debated the meaning of the line “My father was a wandering Aramaean.” Where and when had they got this knowledge? My dad came from a very secular family, but, in the Israeli Army, he had won some sort of contest in Bible knowledge. (This is also true of Bertie Wooster.) That my father had been in the Army—that fact felt to me like fiction, though we had his old Army water bottle under the kitchen sink. For some reason, the inessential learnedness of those Seder meals impressed me as something that I could never accomplish but which resided in the realms where true worth lay.

When my dad’s father died, he didn’t tell me. My mom told me that my grandfather had died, and that was why my dad was away, but that he would be home soon. When my dad returned, he attended our local Hillel each Friday, sometimes with me, to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Often, there weren’t the required ten men present to have a “real” service, with the Kaddish, and this frustrated my father: he had come for the Kaddish. As a child, I didn’t count among the ten—maybe also as a female. I remember that my father argued otherwise.

That Kaddish year gave me a narrow but real peek into my dad’s childhood. I knew that my grandfather put a sugar cube into his mouth when he drank tea, and that he told my dad he wouldn’t understand the movie “Rashomon” until he was older. I think Tzvi said little to me about his own childhood because he wanted to let me have my childhood, and not crowd it out with the inner lives and melancholies and anxieties of adults. He did say to me once, “Your mother and I did one thing right. We made sure that you and your brother got to be children for a long time.” What he felt worst about was that the family had to move so much when my brother was young; after I started first grade, we stayed in place for more than ten years. I’ve come to think that maybe my childhood was happy mostly because it was childhood. When I moved in with my partner and his children, and later when I had a child, my own childhood returned to me. I believe that children arrive with their own life of the mind, and that to the extent that they get to spend time in that world which they themselves have invented—that’s pretty good. Much of the rest is roulette.

The summer after my dad died, I found myself studying at a women’s yeshiva in Jerusalem—I assume because I thought I’d learn some of the Biblical knowledge mysteriously held by my father. My family thought I was insane. I may as well have been studying with Scientologists, as far as they were concerned. Most of the young women there had, well, backstories. One was a professional dancer who had been in a car crash and broken her back. Another was the daughter of a psychiatrist who had been shot by one of his patients. Another was just a very tall and very slim woman who we all knew was “from Oxford.” One of the rabbis who instructed us had blue eyes and had been a d.j. and a ski instructor living in Berkeley before becoming religious. He told us a long story in class one day about how, through a series of kooky chance encounters, his son’s congenital heart malformation was found and immediately operated on—and that this was because Hashem was watching out for him. At that point, I decided that my dad would have sided with the rest of my family, and wanted me out of there. My dad’s voice has often been with me in this way, generally amused, occasionally in the mood for a fight.

One afternoon, toward the end of my last year of high school, I found pages from a magazine torn out and taped to my door. The pages were titled “Messages from My Father,” and they were by Calvin Trillin, in the June 20th, 1994, issue of The New Yorker . The reason we had a New Yorker subscription at all was that it was advertised on one of those Sunday mornings when my dad watched the “fighting shows” at full volume, and I had said that maybe we should get a subscription, and he had said, “I don’t have time to read it, but how about you read it, and you tell me if there’s something in there I should read.” The day that my dad taped the Trillin piece to my door, he told me that I should one day write something like that about him. Ha-ha. Four months later, my father had a heart attack and died, at the age of fifty-three. I didn’t write that essay. I didn’t know enough. I barely even knew that my father was gone. I was not many weeks into my first year of college, and a substantial part of me thought, I’ll see him when I go back to Oklahoma. I had several dreams in which he was sitting in a booth at a diner. When my Spanish teacher learned, through some conversation exercise, that my father was a meteorologist, she told me that she had always wanted to understand how wind chill was calculated, and she asked me to ask my dad about that. I told her I would. ♦

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✍️Essay on Childhood: Samples in 100, 150 and 200 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 2, 2023

Essay on Childhood: How was your childhood? I bet it was full of adventure, fun and joyful activities. Agatha Christie has rightly said – ‘One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.’ Childhood memories are considered one of the most beautiful days one can ever experience in their life. Those are the days one can never forget. Well, no amount of words can describe those good old days. Today we will highlight the importance of childhood with some essays on childhood which you can use anywhere.

Table of Contents

• 1 Importance of Childhood
• 2 Essay on Childhood in 100 Words
• 3 Essay on Childhood in 150 Words
• 4 Essay on Childhood in 200 Words

Importance of Childhood

Childhood is life’s early stage of development where growth and changes rapidly take place A child needs to be nurtured and loved by all their family, friends, and teachers around him. At the same time, the child must have a healthy childhood to have a better mental health lifelong.

Childhood is that stage where young children get to learn about themselves as well as their surroundings. Early childhood is the best time to learn about developing good habits that will help them shape their future and at the same time be good human beings. Children should get into the habit of eating healthy food, getting fresh air, drinking plenty of water and finally doing a lot of exercise. By doing so, this will help them to grow into resilient adults who will be able to handle any situation.

Moreover, a child’s childhood is that period of their lifetime when they get to develop their personalities. Also, it is the time when they must be exposed to a variety of situations to develop into responsible people. It is important to remember that childhood is a time when children learn from their experiences and mistakes, explore various opportunities and create memories from them. 

Also Read: Essay on the Importance of the English Language for Students

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Essay on Childhood in 100 Words

Childhood is that period when a child is considered to be one of the most carefree and joyful. In this period, a child has a lot of innocence, an unlimited number of opportunities and is naive. 

Some of the best childhood memories one can have are learning new things, playing with their friends, spending time with their family and finally learning skills which will help them lifelong. We all can recall those days when we used to play various types of games with our friends in the evening after school. The excitement of finishing our studies and going out, those days of watching our favourite TV shows can never be forgotten. 

Apart from all the fun days, childhood is the best time for personal development. We pick up the skills necessary such as communication skills and engage with the world. Each of us develops our distinct interests.

Also Read: Essay on Save Environment: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

Essay on Childhood in 150 Words

We all remember that magical period of our lives- Childhood. It was that time of our lives when the world around us was full of excitement when we were surrounded by our close ones and had nothing to worry about. Those days when all we had to do was study, meet friends, go to school and play outside. We all had created our exciting worlds. 

One of my most treasured childhood memories is, spending time with family and friends. Those days when we would visit our grandparent’s house, listening to stories during vacations is another of the best memories. All these memories have led to the creation of a unique bond between our family and who we have become as adults.

Apart from all the memories, childhood is the most important period of our lives when we get to learn new things and mould ourselves. It is rightly said that what we learn during our childhood days we get to carry throughout our lives.

How beautiful was that period, when we got to cultivate our talents, pick up new skills, and create our own distinct identities 

Also Read: Essay on Unity in Diversity in 100 to 200 Words

Essay on Childhood in 200 Words

Childhood is a magical period of one’s life. Those days of innocence, fun and endless possibilities, oh, how can one forget that It is now that we wish that we had the chance to relive that period once again? How can we forget that time when we created an endless amount of memories which will last a lifetime?

Gone are those days when we fought with our parents to buy us toys or play. With time, the definition of childhood has also changed. Children in the 21st century will now have a unique childhood experience, shaped by the technological advancements and social changes of our time. Now, children have access to information on their electronic devices (iPads/Phones). How can we forget, that children now prefer to use smartphones for entertaining themselves rather than playing outside? 

Despite these changes, the meaning of childhood can change no matter if the way of living has changed. Growing children still crave the love, support and guidance which will help them to be responsible adults. 

To conclude, everybody’s childhood is a priceless period. Parents and other adults who care for children contribute to their joyful and fulfilled childhood by showing them love, support, and guidance.

Related Articles

The time of life from birth to adolescence is known as childhood. It is a period of fast-paced cognitive, emotional, and physical growth. During this period, children learn and develop, acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed as adults.

Early experiences have a significant impact on how the brain develops in children.

There is no specified age for childhood. It depends on the person’s brain development. A person aged 18 or 21 can be considered as a child than someone who is 16 or 17.

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Malvika Chawla

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• Child Development

Childhood Happiness: More Than Just Child's Play

The lasting value of childhood happiness..

Posted January 13, 2012

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How happy was your childhood ? A seemingly simple question can be more complicated to answer than one would think. Most people are able to think of a wide array of events, activities, people and things they encountered during their childhood. Some memories are happy, and some sad, upsetting, or frightening. Is the impression we have of our childhood happiness the sum of all that we have experienced or primarily a function of the good or the bad?

It isn't clear how accurate childhood memories are. Many of them are incomplete and have been influenced by the retelling, input from others, and viewing photographs and souvenirs. Our understanding of childhood events can be quite different when viewed from the adult perspective. So, impressions of childhood are not necessarily accurate reflections of the quality of that time period. An individual can remember childhood as better or worse than it really was. While the events themselves can have an impact on psychological well-being during adulthood, one's perception of the events can also influence well-being.

For example, believing that you were cheated of the things, experiences, love or acceptance that every child deserves can negatively impact relationships and feelings of adequacy and belonging. Recent research suggests that the impression of having had a happy childhood is associated with greater social connectedness, enhanced sense of self, and healthy behaviors. Adverse impressions of childhood are related to greater difficulty in relationships, self-insight, and dealing with distress.

An incredible amount of attention has been devoted to how children should be raised. Parents can seek advice from experts in books, magazine articles, on television and websites. Parents want to know how much of their children's time should be spent in educational endeavors, sports, creative arts, and recreational activities. Which toys, games, smart media, television programs, exercise, music, and role models are safe, acceptable, beneficial, or harmful?

Recent research is beginning to explore the extent to which different aspects of childhood are associated with an individual's impression of how happy her or his childhood had been. Impressions of childhood happiness are related more closely to social events and activities than to more solitary ones. For example, having a party for a special occasion is important to the memory of having a happy childhood, whereas getting things a child had wanted such as toys and games is not. Family traditions, praise from a family member, and interacting (doing things together, sharing secrets, etc.) with siblings, friends, or trusted adults are all important to establishing a happy childhood. The time a child spends entertaining him or herself by playing video games, watching television, hiking, fishing, drawing or listening to music contributes less to the sense of childhood happiness.

Parents worry about unhappy or adverse experiences that can happen in childhood. Again, the social or solitary nature of problems is important. For example, serious health problems or academic difficulties are not strongly related to the sense of how happy one's childhood had been, whereas witnessing parents argue, being bullied, or being rejected by peers contribute to a sense of having had an unhappy childhood. Children can't be protected from every adversity, but attention to their feelings can make a difference. While separation from a loved one is an unhappy experience, feeling lonely is more important to the adult sense of having been unhappy as a child. Similarly, children are not always satisfied with their physical appearance, but changing what they can by losing weight or trying a new hairstyle can lessen the emotional impact.

Parents can observe their children's activities and their performance in school, sports, music or art. What is not as obvious is how their children feel about the events and experiences, and how they feel will be more important in shaping their view of childhood happiness. It is more important that a child feel proud of an achievement or pleased with their performance than being selected for a team or receiving an award.

It isn't possible to ensure that a child will experience only success and happy times. But recent research suggests that the role of other people and how children feel can be more important than the events. Getting things a child wants, academic issues, or failing to make a sports team are not strongly related to the adult perspective of childhood happiness. It is feeling loved by parents that makes the most influential contribution to childhood happiness. As adults, we no longer feel that the number of toys, sports trophies, or top grades we received as children were as important as we thought. What is important to us as adults is knowing that we shared joys and sorrows, successes and disappointments with people who loved us. Long after our memories of toys, gifts, test scores have faded, the feelings of trust, comfort, reassurance, and love remain.

Krystine Batcho, Ph.D. , is a professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Happy children: a modern emotional commitment.

• Department of History, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States

American parents greatly value children’s happiness, citing it well above other possible priorities. This commitment to happiness, shared with parents in other Western societies but not elsewhere, is an important feature of popular emotional culture. But the commitment is also the product of modern history, emerging clearly only in the 19th century. This article explains the contrast between more traditional and modern views, and explains the origins but also the evolution of the idea of a happy childhood. Early outcomes, for example, included the novel practice of hosting parties for children’s birthdays, another mid-19th-century innovation that has expanded over time. Explaining the intensification of the happiness commitment also reveals some of the downsides of this aspect of popular emotional culture, for example in measurably complicating reactions to childish unhappiness. The basic goal of the essay is to use this important facet of modern emotional history to evaluate a commitment that many modern parents assume is simply natural.

One of the most pervasive beliefs about emotion, at least in American culture, is the idea that children should be happy and that childhood should be a happy, perhaps unusually happy, stage of life. There is little question that many parents are strongly guided by this standard, even though a variety of experts argue that they often go about it in the wrong way. And it is highly likely that many adults simply assume that childhood happiness is a natural connection, that while its implementation may be varied and debated and while a few reprobates may not accept the goal at all, the basic notion is simply a normal part of human life.

International polling confirms the pervasiveness of the happy childhood assumption, in American and several other cultures – though it also opens the door for a somewhat more nuanced assessment. A recent survey found that 73% of Americans rated happiness as the most important goal in raising children and assessing the results of education – far ahead of any other option. And they were joined, or even modestly surpassed, by a number of other modern Western societies: Canada at 78%, with France heading the pack at 86%. Other goals paled in comparison, even though it was possible to select more than one option: only 20% of Americans rated success as a major goal (along with 17% in Australia and the United Kingdom).

However – and here is the first opening for more than a brief summary of the happiness/childhood emotional linkage – several other major societies presented quite a different profile in the same poll. Most strikingly only about 49% of respondents in India selected happiness, overshadowed by the 51% who put success and achievement first. Mexicans also rated success most highly. The Chinese, interestingly, did not seize on success but they did not highlight happiness either, putting good health at the top of the list. The poll suggested, plausibly enough, that a predominant commitment to children’s happiness was an artifact of advanced economic development (bolstered, quite possibly, by a particular dose of Westernism as well) ( Malhotra, 2015 ).

Certainly the American assumption that happiness and childhood go together can be additionally confirmed. A childrearing expert, Robin Berman, puts it this way: “When I give parenting lectures around the country, I always ask the audience ‘What do you want most for your children/’… The near-universal response I get is ‘I just want my kids to be happy.”’ Berman herself deeply challenges the validity of this commitment, but for now the main point, again, is to emphasize the depth of the American assumption (shared, clearly, with other Western societies). It is understandable that many Americans simply take the priority for granted, open perhaps to a discussion of what strategies best achieve the goal but not inclined to subject the goal itself to much scrutiny. The idea that children should be happy, indeed that childhood stands out as a particularly happy time of life, is deeply ingrained ( Berman, 2016 ).

But without placing too much emphasis on international polling, the gap between Western and Asian (or Mexican) responses already suggests that the childhood/happiness equation is not automatic or in any sense natural, but the product of more particular circumstance. And this in turn opens the way to a more searching analysis, aimed initially at determining where the idea that children should be happy came from in the first place and then tracing the way the association has evolved in the United States, with some clear downsides or problems attached.

Assessing the childhood/happiness linkage provides in fact a fruitful opportunity to demonstrate the role of emotions history in shedding light on significant popular assumptions and commitments. The emotions history field, which has grown rapidly within the history discipline over the past 30 years, contends that key aspects of the emotional beliefs and experiences of any society are shaped not by invariable psychobiology but by particular social and cultural circumstances. This means that we can learn more about the past by including emotional variables in the human equation and that – as in this case – we can understand current patterns better if we examine how they have emerged from contrasting assumptions in the past ( Matt and Stearns, 2013 ; Boddice, 2018 ).

In the case of happy children, the emotions history approach raises two initial questions, before we get into most recent evolution of the association: what did people think about happiness and childhood at an earlier point and when (and of course why) did the happiness emphasis begin to develop.

The most glaring historical challenge to the childhood happiness equation is not easy to handle, but it adds up to the statement: before about the middle of the 19th century most Americans (and, probably, most people in most agricultural societies) did not equate children and happiness and indeed were unlikely to see childhood as a particularly happy phase of life ( Greven, 1988 ; Mintz, 2006 ). This does not mean that they necessarily expected children to be unhappy, or that they were gratuitously nasty to children, or that they did not enjoy moments of shared joy. But any kind of systematic happiness, or even a common use of the term, was simply not part of popular expectations ( Gillis, 1981 ). 1

And the reasons for this stance are not hard to identify, in a combination of general features of premodern childhood and some particular cultural assumptions that took deep root in colonial America. In the first place, high child mortality rates – with 30–50% of all children born perishing before age 5 – surrounded children themselves with frequent death and constrained adult reactions as well. A dead child might be deeply mourned, but the expectation of transiency obviously affected perceptions of childhood more generally: adulthood could easily be seen as a preferable state. Further, for most people childhood after infancy was primarily associated with work, under the sometimes rough direction of adults. Childishness, in this context, was not highly valued, as opposed to the early acquisition of more mature qualities. In all probability, obedience was the quality most sought in children themselves. Small wonder that, before the 19th century, few autobiographers spent much time describing their childhoods in any detail or referring to their early years with any pleasure ( Stearns, 2016 ).

This is not to say that before the 19th century children had no pleasure, or that adults never enjoyed their more informal interactions with offspring: considerable historical debate cautions against too gloomy a view. Work requirements were not always too intense, particularly for younger children, and there were informal opportunities for playfulness ( Huizinga, 2016 ). 2 Traditional leisure outlets, and particularly the village festival, gave young people some space for pranks and hijinks. But none of this seriously qualifies the claim that more systematic ideas associating childhood with happiness were lacking.

In the colonial American context, this general situation was exacerbated, particularly in New England, by the strong Protestant commitment to the notion of original sin. How many adults viewed actual children through this severe lens is hard to determine, though it was certainly linked to harsh disciplinary practices in schoolrooms and churches. But even if youngsters were not actively seen as sinners requiring redress, Protestant beliefs certainly argued against conceptions of happy childhoods. Indeed a number of studies suggest that, even for adults, an emphasis on a degree of melancholy was urged even for adults, well into the 18th century ( Greven, 1988 ; Demos, 1999 ; Mintz, 2006 ).

Granting the perils of trying to establish the absence of a quality in the past, the claim seems reasonably secure: the association of childhood and systematic happiness, as opposed to periodic moments of release, is essentially a modern development.

Several factors, taking shape in the later 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States and other parts of the Western world, began to reshape the conception of childhood, despite the lingering hand of the past.

Interest in happiness in general began to accelerate in Western culture during the second half of the 19th century ( Kotchimedova, 2005 ; MacMahon, 2006 ; Jones, 2017 ). The Enlightenment encouraged a new commitment to optimism about life on this earth, and hopes for happiness increased accordingly. Apologies for good humor, common during the previous century with its preference for melancholy in the face of human sinfulness, began to disappear ( Stearns, 1988 ). Even more, a positive expectation that decent people should present a cheerful demeanor began to gain ground. One historian has suggested that, along with the general push from Enlightenment thinking, improvements in dentistry and a decrease in rotten teeth heightened a willingness to smile openly – and to expect others to do the same ( Jones, 2017 ). Emphasis on happiness may also have been furthered by some measurable improvements in life’s comforts, from home heating to cleaner clothing, at least for the property-owning middle classes. And of course, in revolutionary America, pursuit of happiness was listed as a basic right.

This significant cultural shift did not initially apply to children, at least with any specificity. Older beliefs persisted. Checking the rise of attention through the relative frequency word use (happiness, cheerfulness) bears this out suggestively ( Figures 1 , 2 ). Google Ngrams suggest the chronological lag: while references to cheerfulness and happiness in general peaked in relative frequency during the 18th century in American English, commentary on happy children was virtually non-existent until the 19th century, and became at all common only in the middle decades of the century. 3

Figure 1. Frequency of the word “happiness” in American English, 1700–2008, Google Ngram viewer, accessed March 19, 2019.

Figure 2. Frequency of the phrase “happy children” in American English, 1700–2008, Google Ngram viewer, accessed March 19, 2019.

Obviously, sometime was required to overcome earlier assumptions and extend new cultural expectations downward in age. For several decades after 1800, some halting steps suggested the difficulty of fully overcoming earlier standards: thus the idea of cheerful obedience gained ground in family manuals. Insistence on obedience was maintained, but for the first time the potentially demanding hope that it could be accompanied by a cheerful demeanor was added to the list ( Stearns, 2014 ).

In addition to the time required to apply an initially adult innovation to the thinking about children, several other shifts in the first half of the 19th century further explain the timing of the change. Most obviously, amid intense American debate during the 1820s and 1830s, traditional notions of original sin were increasingly replaced, in mainstream Protestantism, by insistence on childish innocence. By the late 1820s the most widely purchased family manuals routinely highlighted children’s sweetness and purity, which only bad adult behavior would corrupt. An obvious barrier to the notion that children might be happy was being lifted, though amid ongoing sectarian dispute ( Sedgwick, 1850 ). 4

Here it is possible to see how the new cultural commitment to happiness combined with several other social factors to generate a new approach to children. Most obviously the birth rate began to drop, which may have facilitated more emotional attention to the individual child. Work obligations increasingly yielded to schooling as a child’s obligation, in the middle classes; seeing children in less functional terms might have contributed to a new interest in happiness, bolstered as well by a desire to cushion the burdens of education. Most tantalizingly, the middle decades of the 19th century saw a general middle-class interest in portraying the family as an emotional refuge from the complexities of economic and social life amid early industrialization – what one historian has called the family as “haven in a heartless world.” Here was a clear context for new attention to cheerful children as part of this equation, linking the shift to social pressures as well as the larger cultural framework ( Lasch, 1977 ; Mintz, 2006 ).

Certainly, as the role of the middle-class family began to shift away from function as a production unit and toward service as a source of emotional refuge and support, the ideal of a loving and happy assemblage, children very much included both as beneficiary and source, became increasingly common. While smile-drenched photographs would await the 20th century, in part thanks to improvements in technology, positive representations of the family unit, often grouped around a piano, became increasingly common ( Mintz, 2006 ).

Again, the middle decades of the 19th century were something of a transition. Association of happiness and childhood continued to gain ground, but explicit discussions of parental obligations concerning happiness, or of happiness as an explicit goal, were not yet fully developed. Had polls been conducted in the 1850s, they might have suggested the same kind of priorities for achievement or health, over happiness, that remain common in places like India or China today.

But one innovation, that would ultimately become emblematic of the conversion of expectations about childhood, quietly started becoming standard fare in middle-class life: the (presumably) happy birthday – directed toward children – girls and boys alike – above all. Here is another case – more specific than children’s happiness in general – where understanding innovation cuts through any assumptions of timelessness ( Pleck, 2000 ; Baselice et al., 2019 ).

For children’s birthdays are a modern invention. Royals publicly touted their birthdays in many societies, going back to the Egyptian pharaohs, as a means of promoting public attention and support. European aristocrats may have begun celebrations in the 18th century, but the emphasis was on adults as well as social privilege. The idea of singling out children depended on a much higher valuation of their individual importance than any traditional society had generated – which is why the emergence of the new practice is so revealing.

The first recorded child birthday in what was becoming the United States occurred in Boston in 1772, for the 12-year old daughter of a wealthy family. Presumably this was a way to show off the family’s wealth as well as honoring a child. As the birthday practice began to spread, very slowly, several goals were often mentioned besides the family’s material achievement: a means of encouraging young people to display gratitude and sometimes as well an opportunity for the birthday child to give little gifts to servants as a token of appreciation ( Pleck, 2000 ; Cross, 2004 ).

By the middle of the 19th century birthday celebrations were clearly becoming more common. Several manuals were written to guide the practice, one of them going through several editions. Emphasis rested on a modest party, with pastries and special fruits (commercial baking was improving at this point, thanks in part to German immigration: an obvious source of cakes). Parents would usually offer a single gift, sometimes a toy but sometimes religious or educational material. By the 1870s, when the hugely successful Ladies Home Journal was founded, women’s magazines began to feature stories about successful birthdays at least once a year, until (by 1900) the practice had become so common that guidance was no longer needed (except perhaps for encouraging parties for adults as well). By this point many African American schools were also celebrating birthdays, and there were signs of working-class and immigrant interest as well ( Prentiss, 1857 ; Barnard, 1861 ; Leslie, 1869 ; Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1916 ).

The new practice faced some opposition (as it still does today in societies were birthdays are just beginning to surface). Some religious writers worried that children would be made too prideful, that a celebration that should actually honor God, or at least one’s parents, was being distorted. While worries about consumer excess were not yet common (this would await the 20th century), some commentators criticized children who came to insist on annual festivities; the demanding child was hardly a traditional ideal ( Davenport, 1864 ; Hill, 1906 ).

But, obviously, birthdays advanced quite rapidly, clearly indicating an eagerness to highlight the individual child, and this even before the massive reduction in child mortality that would further support the practice. And the question, briefly, is why. Of course families imitated each other; undoubtedly children learned from their friends and put some quiet pressure on their parents; consumer success and opportunities to display gratitude continued to enter in. But by the 1850s all the published recommendations on birthdays, and all the comments from approving parents, stressed the role of these festivities in making children happy.

The parents and prescriptive writers who commented on birthdays and cheered them on made the basic goal very clear: birthdays were becoming important because they made children happy, and happiness in turn was quietly turning into a priority. Thus a comment in 1886 insisted that birthdays should be pleasurable, full of “rejoicing jubilees”: “a ripe, full year is a glorious thing to have had,” and for their part children, “poor little things,” “need all the fun they can get.” Schools began to pick up the celebratory theme: a Helena, Montana, high school noted “the charming custom” growing among students and teachers to acknowledge the occasion through surprise parties and small gifts. Late 19th-century etiquette writers, recommending birthday festivities, urged the occasions be “joyous, for children are easy to please” and “nothing is quite as beautiful and gratifying as a group of laughing, happy children.” Childrearing manuals, though late to the topic, echoed similar sentiments. Right after 1900 Alice Birney commended regular attention to birthdays by “makers of happy homes” because of the “pleasure and enthusiasm” that the festivities generated ( A New Idea, 1855 ; Aldrich, 1891 5 ; Gardner, 1904 ; Primary Education Journal, 1907 ; Buffalo High School Yearbook, 1925 ; Helena Independent Newspaper, 1982 ). 6

Beyond the rise of the birthday and its signal connection to aspirations for children’s happiness (and the concomitant expansion of Christmas celebrations), wider commentary on the importance of happy childhood proliferated in the early 20th century. Whereas 19th-century childrearing manuals had remained somewhat hesitant, prioritizing other goals and insisting on connecting happiness to moral behavior, popular entries after 1900 prioritized the goal with no strings attached. “Don’t forget to be indulgent; do your best to make a pleasure possible, and enter heartily into it.” To be sure, parental “readiness” to “bring happiness into your children’s lives” should be rewarded by good behavior. But happiness began to be its own goal, predicated on a belief that children’s dispositions prepared adult qualities, and was important to train people up to be cheerful ( Leach, 1993 ).

From about 1915 on, the happiness theme became truly ubiquitous. “Happiness is as essential as food if a child is to develop into normal manhood or womanhood.” Parents had a “duty” to make their offspring happy: “The purpose of bringing-up in all its phases should be to make the child as happy as possible” (italicized in the original for emphasis) ( Birney, 1905 ). “Make a child happy now and you will make him happy 20 years from now… And happiness is a great thing…It contributes to the making of a normal childhood, which is in turn the foundation of normal manhood or womanhood.” Chapters of parenting books began to be devoted explicitly to the need to promote childish happiness, even, in many accounts, as the expense of discipline. Even the rather severe behaviorist, John Watson, intoned, “Failure to bring up a happy child…falls on the parents’ shoulders” ( Stearns, 2012 ). And, symbolizing the intensification, it was in the 1920s that the song “Happy Birthday” emerged, gaining widespread popularity during the following decade. Enjoyment and nurturing of happy children had become a central feature of ideal family life but also a solemn obligation as part of preparing for successful adulthoods. Finally, the theme began to spill beyond family life, to other institutions that dealt with children. “Cheerfulness” was one of the twelve characteristics enshrined in Boy Scout Law, for example, while the Campfire Girls insisted on happiness directly. And – though this issue remains with us today – schools and teachers began to be drawn into concerns about children’s happiness as well ( Groves and Groves, 1924 ; Spalding, 1930 ; De Kok, 1935 ; Baruch, 1949 ; Gruenberg, 1968 ).

Intensification of the childhood/happiness has obviously continued into recent decades, among other things adding measurably to parental obligations. By the 1960s parents were reporting an increasing sense of obligation to play regularly with their children, as part of their commitment to sponsoring happiness. In the schools, the Social and Emotional Learning movement (another 1960s product) has gained ground, urging teachers to emphasize positivity and guard against less happy emotions. Serving the happy child continues to gain momentum ( Stearns, 2019 ).

But the main point – happy childhood as a product of recent history – deserves primary emphasis. The commitment to happy childhoods obviously builds on the precedents that had developed during the later 19th century. It connected quite explicitly to increasing hopes for happiness in life in general and to beliefs that cheerful people were more likely to win success in life. And the escalation surely benefited from the new demographic framework: with low birth rates and, now, rapidly declining child mortality, it was easier to connect the early years of life with more positive goals. Happy childhoods became part of what has been aptly described as the rise of the “priceless” child ( Zelizer, 1994 ).

Though the idea of children’s happiness emerged over time, and responded to a number of wider cultural and social changes, it must be remembered that it was a really new aspiration. The fact that most modern American, or French, or Canadian parents regard it as a normal goal, indeed a self-evident priority, should not disguise its innovative nature or, in historical terms, its relative recency. Our current assumptions have a past, responding to a changing environment.

But there is more to this historical perspective as well, including some complexities that are at least as relevant to contemporary childhood and parenting as the happiness commitment itself. The evolution of the idea of the happy child, particularly from the early 20th century onward, also highlights some of its downsides and risks. Three points stand out, all of which add to the expansion of parental obligations inherent in the modern happiness theme itself: the extent of parental responsibility: the association with consumerism; and, above all, the problem of sadness.

The first wrinkle in the surge of interest in children’s happiness, as it took shape from the early 20th century onward, was a basic question that was, however, rarely hauled out for explicit evaluation: were children naturally happy, or did parents (and other adults) have an obligation to create happiness in a more difficult terrain? Commentary on birthdays in the 19th century occasionally, as we have seen, suggested that the celebration should help compensate for a less-than-joyous stage in life. And this might touch base with more traditional ideas about the drawbacks to being a child. On the other hand, enthusiasm about childish innocence, though more modern, might emphasize children’s spontaneous gaiety and their positive contribution to a cheerful family.

Actual childrearing materials frequently suggested a mixed opinion – sometimes within a single passage. Thus from a 1920s manual: “childhood is meant to be a joyous time. In the opinion of most adults it is actually the most joyous time of life” (the dramatically modern view). But then, twenty lines down, “Nevertheless it is the province and duty of parents to make the childhood of their progeny a joyous time.” Other materials suggested that the obligations here could be quite demanding.”: “Avoid unpleasant incidents like the plague. They shake the fabric of happiness to its foundations.” Make sure that kids never go to bed sad: “Darling we are quite happy now, aren’t we? Look up and smile at mother… You know she loves you so much and wants you to be always the very happiest little boy in all the world”( O’Shea, 1920 ; Galloway, 2013 ).

Inconsistency about children’s nature, where happiness was concerned, may be built into the modern process to some extent. Many parents will have days when they can simply capitalize on a child’s good mood, and others when a tremendous amount of effort is involved. The uncertainty obviously staked out a potentially challenging obligation for adults, adding to the growing emotional list of what a good parent was responsible for: if children were not naturally happy, or when their mood turned sour, the vigilant parent needed to compensate. But uncertainties also spilled over into the other main complexities of the growing commitment to happiness.

This in turn relates to the second complexity. It was probably inevitable that interests in happy childhood became deeply connected with family consumerism. The marriage began to take clear shape early in the 20th century and it steadily intensified thereafter. The first explicit parental purchases for children date back to the late 18th century, when the focus was on the new genre of children’s books. Interest expanded in the 19th century, as in the practice of birthday gifts, but the range remained rather modest. But with the 20th century, and particularly with the rise of the toy industry, the interest in using purchases to promote children’s happiness became increasingly entrenched.

Many aspects of this intertwining are familiar enough. Shortly after 1900 many parents began to buy toys even for infants (including the soon-famous Teddy Bear). There was brief discussion of whether this kind of attachment to things was desirable in the very young, but hesitation was brief and short-lived. “Things” made children happy and prepared a life of consumer attachments, and they helped fulfill the otherwise daunting parental task of linking childhood and joy. Whole companies devoted their attention to the happiness connection: Disney, founded in the 1920s, made happiness its core theme, and later would proclaim that child-centered parks like the California Disneyland were the “happiest places in the whole world.” Not to be outdone, soon after World War II McDonalds would sell its child-focused and highly caloric burger combination as a “happy meal,” complete with cheap toys ( Cross, 2004 ).

Another post-World War II innovation pushed the linkage further. Many parents began to prepare for Christmases or birthdays by encouraging their children to draw up wish lists, which usually turned out to be quite long and detailed exercises in maximization ( Moir, 2017 ). The result? Another dilemma. As one children’s consumer expert put it: “how much do you want your child to be happy – meeting what you think are their desires?” ( Rosen, 2015 ). Against this, the sheer limits of a family budget (though sometimes transcended through the credit card) and a recurrent concern that many kids were becoming too greedy and materialistic, that they were internalizing the happiness/consumerism equation too thoroughly. Worst of all was a growing belief that children learned, if unwittingly, to play on their parents’ commitment to happiness, developing a sense of entitlement that overwhelmed any sense of gratitude ( Stearns, 2012 ).

The consumer/entertainment/happiness combine played on one final later 20th-century development: a redefinition of boredom. Boredom was a modern concept in itself: the word came into common usage only in the mid-19th century, associated obviously with the growing interest in active happiness. Initially, however, boredom applied to childhood mainly as a character lesson: children should be taught not to be boring. After 1950, however, the meaning was flipped: boredom now became a state to be blamed on others, a reason for personal discontent. And children became adept not only at identifying their boredom, but at strongly implying that their parents, or teachers, or others had an obligation to do something about it. “I’m bored” became yet another way of telling the adult world that it was falling short, for the child should be entertained ( Stearns, 2003 ; Toohey, 2011 ).

In real life, of course, most children learned to handle a bit of moderation. Wish lists were rarely fully fleshed out, and children could even survive the lack of the year’s most popular toy or game. But the dedication of part of childhood to early forms of consumerism, and the pressure on parents to fulfill part of their happiness obligations through toys and entertainments, played no small role in actual family life and, sometimes, a nagging sense of falling slightly short.

And this linked to the third complexity of happy childhoods: the inevitable tensions that resulted when confronted with the unhappy child. Not surprisingly, the relative frequency of discussing unhappy children went up rather dramatically in the 19th century (as Google Ngrams suggest), as a counterpart to the new expectations more generally. While rates dropped a bit thereafter, the topic remained vivid, encouraged by growing interest in, and claims by, child psychologists and other experts. Two outcomes seem pretty obvious. First, of course, the unhappy child (or the period of unhappiness), whether directly experienced or not, was a cautionary tale for parents themselves: something must have gone wrong, some adult must have failed in her duties, for this to have emerged. The facile association of unhappy childhoods and parental dereliction (and often, resultant unhappy adulthoods) became a conversational and literary staple by the mid-20th century, particularly amid the popularization of Freudian psychology ( Ludy, 2007 ). And second, when the unhappy child was encountered there was a risk of exculpatory diagnosis: the child must be unhappy because of some psychological disorder, the unhappiness a sign of some kind of illness, beyond the responsibility of good parents. It became harder to accept or even understand the sad child ( Berman, 2016 ).

Historical value judgments are never easy, particularly since by definition we are trapped in our own contemporary standards. It is hard not to believe that, for all the complexities involved, the emergence of the idea of happy children was an advance over earlier frameworks – which is one reason that the idea of children’s happiness has spread geographically as part of globalization (though without yet creating uniform agreement). But, inevitably, since we are enmeshed in the happiness culture it is hard to evaluate it against past patterns.

Certainly, there are the downsides, which the historical approach, cutting through any assumption that the idea of happy childhood is a natural human concept, helps highlight as well. It becomes too easy to overdo the happiness card, whether the result is undue accumulation of childish junk or the difficulty of appreciating periods of childish sadness. It is easy to complicate the actual achievement of normal happiness by expecting too much, by reacting to quickly to emotional lows. As it emerged from the 19th century onward, the assumption that children should be cheerful as part of the child’s contribution to the happy family can be genuinely burdensome, just as the assumption places obligations on parents as well. The realization that much of this is a recent historical product, which might be open to some reconsideration or modification, can be constructive. Not a few experts are joining in urging greater nuance and flexibility about the childhood/happiness association.

There is one final point. We began this essay by noting the premium that Western parents, when polled, place on children’s happiness. But of course happiness is not the only thing we want, and it is even possible that our cultural standards prompt us to claim a higher priority than we really mean. Contemporary Americans certainly do not want unhappy children, but the classic helicopter parent, this creature of the past quarter century, may actually be more focused on achievement than we explicitly recognize – however, parentally orchestrated that achievement may be. Recent analysis that suggests how successful many middle-class parents have become in positioning their children for college and beyond, in a newly demanding economic environment, may complicate the happiness equation: these parents want to think their offspring are happy, but they are orchestrating other goals ( Druckerman, 2019 ). The extent to which middle-class American parents are unusually focused on the importance of hard work, compared to European counterparts, certainly raises some questions about actual priorities, despite lip service to the hope for childish joy ( Doepke and Zilibotti, 2019 ). The happiness standard will surely prompt the demanding parent to bursts of indulgence, often with a strong consumer component, and probably some real guilt about not succeeding as consistently on the happiness front as we would like.

The relatively modern conversion to the notion that children should be happy added important criteria to the ways many American parents evaluated their own performance and clearly helped motivate changes in actual interactions with children, including the growing commitment to consumerism. It affected people’s evaluations of their own childhoods, and could affect children directly as well, as in the injunctions to be cheerful. But, as several recent studies of happiness suggest, the results in terms of actual happiness and well being are harder to assess: expectations could be raised beyond reasonable hope of fulfillment, and signs of occasional sadness might become harder to handle ( Ahmeds, 2010 ). Add into this the pressures for achievement and success, so vivid in the current generation of middle-class teenagers, and the evaluation of actual outcomes, as opposed to professed goals, becomes undeniably complicated.

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• ^ In contrast, youth, though never systematically empowered, might be valued. Greek and other cultures celebrated the beauty and athletic prowess of youth. Artisanal arrangements in many societies – Europe, Japan, the Middle East cherished a few relatively carefree years between apprenticeship and full adulthood. But childhood was a different matter.
• ^ Huizinga’s Homo Ludens mounts a particularly detailed case for children’s play in traditional societies.
• ^ Google Ngram Viewer is a search application that allows one to measure the relative frequency of particular terms or words in the Google Books database. While in some ways problematic and obviously not a complete representation, the tool is a helpful way to assess cultural trends and changes.
• ^ These early Victorian manuals interestingly combine the emphasis on childish innocence with continued insistence on obedience with rarely if ever a bow to happiness.
• ^ Aldrich also writes of taking “personal note” of each student on the birthday.
• ^ As noted above, the American Journal of Education had been recommending birthdays since the 1860s.

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Keywords : happy children, childhood, emotions history, American culture, childrearing, happiness

Citation: Stearns PN (2019) Happy Children: A Modern Emotional Commitment. Front. Psychol. 10:2025. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02025

Received: 16 April 2019; Accepted: 19 August 2019; Published: 06 September 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Stearns. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Peter N. Stearns, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Childhood Essay

Childhood is one of the most beautiful phases of human life. It is a time of discovery and exploration. At this stage, we learn about the world and ourselves. As kids, we understand life as an endless adventure with infinite possibilities. When we grow up, our worlds broaden. It is important to create a healthy and happy childhood. The easiest way to do this is by providing the best upbringing possible.

Moreover, childhood is a time of innocence and wonder. Activities such as playing, exploring, and simply being a kid are special because they are all a part of the carefree nature of childhood.

Children are constantly learning new things about themselves and the world around them. This childhood essay covers the importance of well-being, mental health, and nutrition to kids to help parents better understand their children and what they need to do to protect them.

Childhood is a period of physical and intellectual growth, hence it is an important period of a child’s development. The period can be regarded as a means of cultural construction whereby all things influenced by the child are constructed as being innocent, different from adults.

Importance of Childhood

During children’s early years, they grow and change rapidly. They need to be nurtured and loved by those around them, whom they trust for this time to be successful. It is also important to have a healthy childhood for better mental health lifelong.

As children grow, they learn about themselves and their surroundings. Early childhood is the time to develop good habits that will shape them for life. They need healthy meals, exercise, fresh air, and plenty of love to grow into resilient adults who can handle any situation.

Childhood is the time when kids develop their personalities and tastes. It is also when they need to be exposed to different experiences to grow up to be mature adults. The importance of childhood shouldn’t be overlooked because this is where kids learn, explore, and build memories.

Memories of Childhood

We all have memories from our childhood that we cherish. It’s a time in our life when everything seemed perfect and wonderful. The most memorable things about childhood were holidays, birthdays, school days and vacations. Our parents did their best to make these special occasions special for us, ensuring we had plenty of delicious sweets, good friends, family time and doing something that captured our attention.

My childhood memories are the best part of my life. I remember when I used to play in the nearby park with my parents and sisters, when I had ice cream, or when playing in the hidden garden in our backyard. Every memory is etched in my heart and mind for eternity.

I always looked forward to the summer holidays. Going to the beach near my grandmother’s house was what I usually did. It used to be so hot outside, and it was the perfect way for me to relax while reading a book in the sun.

I was so excited to have the summer vacation because I love spending time with my friends and doing all of the things that we always talked about. We used to go to the movies, and my uncle drove us around town or just stayed out in the backyard.

Also, our winter vacation used to be fun, and our family used to have a get-together. All my cousins used to come to our house. Once, we built a snowman and named it Goofy. Goofy was our best friend who listened to our secrets.

To know more about childhood memories, click on BYJU’S childhood memories essay . Find more essays, worksheets, puzzles, etc., on our website.

Frequently Asked Questions on Childhood Essay

What is your favourite childhood memory.

One of my favourite memories from my childhood was spending the summers at my grandparents’ house. I used to go to the beach at my grandparent’s house. During summer, it is the perfect way for me to relax while reading a book in the sun.

Why is childhood important to kids?

Childhood is important because it is the phase where kids develop their personalities and tastes. They are also exposed to different experiences to grow up to be mature adults. Childhood is the time when kids learn, explore, and build memories.

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Essays About Childhood Memories: Top 5 Examples

Our childhood memories are often some of the most cherished experiences of our lives, so if you are writing essays about childhood memories, you can start by reading our essay examples and writing prompts.  

Childhood is the period in our lives when we learn about our feelings, social skills, and the world around us. When we think of our childhood, we remember the years when we learn the most basic life skills, from being able to talk to the difference between “good” and “bad.”

Many fondly look back on their childhood memories, recalling when life was much more straightforward. They remember their parents, grandparents, favorite foods, friends, and essential experiences, among many other things. It is easy to imagine the idyllic, innocent life most of us had before, especially in our challenging times. 

If you want to write essays about your childhood memories, go over the essay examples, and writing prompts featured below. 

1. Happy childhood memories – and an old mix-tape by Séamas O’Reilly

2. favorite childhood memory by david dziegielewski, 3. a reflection of my childhood by shivani bajaj.

• 4.  I Would Have Liked Childhood More Without the Pressure to Grow Up by Jane Coaston

5. Lessons from my mother: A reflection on motherhood by GraceAnna Castleberry

1. your favourite childhood memory, 2. the importance of positive memories from childhood, 3. memories of your childhood home, 4. important figures from childhood, 5. the value of childhood memories, 6. childhood vs. adulthood, 7. childhood food memories.

“For the last few years I lived here, I was the same height as I am now, so why am I astonished at the low hang of countertops, or that I can catch my reflection in the mirror that hangs high on the wall? Sometimes peering at that tired, but devilishly handsome, man in the mirror evokes the same, bittersweet feeling of vertigo you get from visiting your old primary school, as you stand 3ft higher than you’re supposed to, like some befuddled Lemuel Gulliver.”

In his essay, O’Reilly reflects on his time visiting his father in his childhood house. He recalls his memories inside the house alongside his son’s experiences today and how they are similar. He also explains how pleasant it is to be in the house again, as it evokes warm, cozy memories of his upbringing. While much has changed about the house, every visit remains as nostalgic as ever.

You might also find these essays about camping trips helpful.  

“I always smile when I remember fishing with my Father. Many years have now since passed since those Saturday morning fishing trips. Time has taught me that the bond between Father and Son is what made those memories special to me. Now when I close my eyes I can remember those days since passed with joy and with a remembrance of the love I have for my Father.”

In this short essay, Dziegielewski describes memories of fishing with his father. He recalls every detail, from the fresh smell of the lake to the sound of a fishing bobber. Most importantly, however, he remembers how his father taught him the skill of fishing. This made him love his father, even more, allowing him to look back on these memories fondly.  You can also check out these essays about development .

“Water also drives many of our decisions — from the seafood we eat to our most romantic moments, and from where we live, to the sports we enjoy, and the ways we vacation and relax. We know instinctively that being by water makes us healthier, happier, reduces stress, and brings us peace.”

Bajaj recalls a memorable experience in which she dove into a deep pool after her mother had told her not to. She remembers the feelings of curiosity and excitement she felt and how despite her nearly drowning, she remembers that time happily. Reflecting on the memory, she also explains how water has helped her become more satisfied, peaceful, and happy. Our childhood memories shape us and provide us with the basis for the rest of our lives.

4.   I Would Have Liked Childhood More Without the Pressure to Grow Up by Jane Coaston

“I felt like I was given no time for trial and error. My choices were either to make the very selective local club soccer team or never play the sport again, be a genius or give up. Because being bad at anything was the worst possible sin I could imagine committing.”

Coaston writes about a more negative aspect of her childhood: the constant pressure to “not be a kid anymore.” She recalls several things expected of her, including having exceptional grades while being athletically gifted at the same time, with “no time for trial and error.” She feels everything was expected of her, and she did not have time to discover herself by making mistakes. She wishes parents would not rush their children along and let kids be kids for a while.  Check out these essays about growing up .

“I remember calling home once when I was spending the night at a friend’s house. I was homesick and just wanted to come back home. It was near midnight, but my mom drove over and picked me up. It was in these little moments that I especially felt loved. These were moments when I really needed my mom, and she was there for me. As a mother of a one-year-old now, I treasure these moments too.”

In her essay, Castleberry recalls her childhood memories involving her mother, including ones in which her mother entertained her and her friends and picked her up from a late night at a friend’s house. She remembers the small things her mother would do for her and how she was always there when she needed her. In raising her daughter, Castleberry strives to be the same mother that her mother was for her. 

7 Writing Prompts On Essays About Childhood Memories

Think back to one beloved childhood memory and retell the story in your essay. Then, describe all of the details you can recall, such as; who was involved, where the memory took place, what events transpired, and why it is such an important memory. Next, provide context by explaining the circumstances behind the memory, and most important of all, be sure to explain how this memory made you feel. Finally, use descriptive language to convey why this memory is your favorite.

Whether good or bad, people say childhood memories are crucial to who you are today. Why is this the case? In your essay, write about the value of keeping your childhood memories close. Then, write about any lessons you learned from them, and include a mix of supporting details from research and your opinions. 

Describe the home you lived in as a child- the layout, the neighborhood, the living conditions, and whatever else you can think of. Did you like it? Write about how it compares to your current home, and if you still live in the same place today, describe how it has changed from before and how it is similar. 

You can also write about a childhood figure who impacted you, such as one of your parents, grandparents, uncles, or aunts. Explain why you remember this person so well and the impact they have had on your life. For inspiration, you can look through an old photo album with photos of that person. 

Recall your childhood and think about this: overall, is it a childhood others would enjoy? Did you have a “good” childhood, or If there is anything, you can also include things you would change about your childhood you could. In this essay, delve into the value of your childhood memories and write about any that impacted your life for the better.

Compare yourself now to how you were back then. In most cases, much has changed; however, what similarities do you see between you now and in your childhood memories? If you wish to be more like “childhood you” in some ways, explain these as well. 

For a fun essay, write about your favorite food growing up. Include a brief description of how to prepare it and perhaps some of its history. What significance does this food have to you? You can also write about any memories you associate the dish with, as these might explain why you enjoyed that food so much. 

Grammarly is one of our top grammar checkers. Find out why in this Grammarly review .

If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

10 Keys To A Happy Childhood (Science-Based)

Childhood lays the foundation for the rest of a person’s life.

The things we remember, people we’ve met, activities, and life events we’ve shared become a part of our fond memories of childhood. Healthy childhood leads to healthy adulthood.

Table of Contents

The importance of a happy childhood

The development of children is both physical and mental. 

Happy children grow into healthy, well-adjusted, and successful adults. 

On the other hand, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have harmful health effects. 

A childhood dominated by negative emotions can result in poor mental health .

Benefits of growing up with happy early life experiences include:

• Better physical health and mental health outcomes
• Less behavioral problems
• Higher academic performance
• More creative
• Better problem-solving skills
• More social skills
• Elevated self-esteem
• Stronger resilience
• Better health in adulthood
• Increased life satisfaction

The keys to a happy childhood

Does nature or nurture determine long-term happiness of your child?

Science tells us that they both contribute to children’s happiness.

Good genes may put a child in a better position to enjoy family life, but parenting and childhood environment can also affect how a child turns out. 

There isn’t just one or the other; it’s the interaction between them.

We cannot change genetics (yet). But years of ground-breaking research have revealed several different ways to raise happy, healthy children.

1. Happy kids tend to have warm, responsive primary caregivers

Warm and responsive parenting is one of the strongest predictors of happy childhood.

Children tend to develop secure attachment which is associated with many positive outcomes.

Parents who respond promptly to their children’s behavior and meet their needs create a secure childhood filled with good memories .

Children feel safe and protected. Good relationships with parents contribute to happy childhood memories.

2. Happy kids receive strong emotional support from adults

Emotions are extremely important to our brains .

Children are happy easily. Have you ever seen those baby videos in which the baby laughs nonstop at the tiniest thing?

You can play peekaboo with them for hours on end and they’ll not grow tired of it.

One study found that children between ages 6 and 12 showed high levels of positive emotions, but as they aged, the degree of positivity decreased.

The youngest seems to be the most satisfied with their lives, while the oldest seems more hesitant .

Why is that?

That is because a happy childhood is not just about giving them positive experience and happy childhood moments. It also involves supporting them and assisting them with negative emotions under difficult circumstances.

When a toddler tantrums, show compassion and provide co-regulation so they can learn to self-regulate.

Do not ignore them or punish them.

Show a child unconditional love instead of shaming and blaming them for traumatic experiences.

Validate their feelings and coach them on how to handle their emotions .

3. Happy kids have good interpersonal relationships

Happiness can be found in positive relationships with a good friend or family member.

Children’s perception of happiness is strongly influenced by their close relationships with peers and parents. Getting praise from friends and family helps promote happiness in them .

4. Happy kids learn from good role models with strong values

Parents’ adoption of certain values and behaviors can contribute to the happiness of children.

Researchers have found that the happiness of parents can be transmitted to children through their values and behaviors.

Two of those happiness-inducing behaviors and values include putting a high priority on pro-social and family values over material ones and maintaining a healthy balance between work and leisure .

5. Happy kids feel competent and have a sense of self-efficacy

Engage children in activities that are aligned with their interests and help them become proficient.

Children who develop a sense of mastery and self-sufficiency are healthier, happier, and more successful.

How children feel valued by their parents and teachers also influences their desire for self-improvement.

Motivate their growth mindset by praising their effort and process , not their abilities or talents.

6. Happy kids have autonomy in life

Children raised by autonomy-supportive parents tend to have better psychological and psychosocial functioning. 

They feel in control of their own lives .

They can take charge of their studies and friendships.

In contrast, controlling parents who do not allow children to make any decisions can cause anxiety, depression, and general unhappiness in children.

7. Happy kids have parents who use reason, not punishment, to teach

Giving children autonomy does not mean they are not disciplined.

Children who are disciplined using inductive reasoning instead of punishment show more prosocial behavior, which is positively correlated with happiness.

Using punishment to teach is often associated with raising children with mental health issues, such as depression.

8. Happy kids are kind and grateful

People find happiness in offering kindness and gratitude.

Children who are kind and grateful perceive more happiness in exciting events.

They enjoy better social relationships and are more pleasant in their everyday lives.

9. Happy kids participates in social activities

Children’s involvement in social activities and community contributes to their feeling of belonging, increases their sense of social connection, and makes them happier.

10. Happy kids exercise regularly

Physical exercise can boost a child’s mood.

Exercising regularly is associated with a host of well-being benefits including happiness, self-esteem, and reduced drug addiction risks.

Final thoughts on a happy childhood

A happy childhood is essential for a child’s development.

However, this doesn’t mean we have to keep our kids happy all the time.

It’s hard for any child to be happy when doing math homework all day, when their parents turn off the internet, when they lose a ball game, or when they have to finish a large serving of green beans.

All of these experiences are unpleasant for the child, but they are also educational and beneficial for them.

When a child goes through these inevitable negative experiences, they can develop healthy frustration tolerance with the help of their parents.

So, children don’t need a perfect childhood to be happy.

Providing warm and loving support is one of the best ways to help them overcome challenges even with a difficult childhood.

References For Happy Childhood

• 1. Crandall A, Miller JR, Cheung A, et al. ACEs and counter-ACEs: How positive and negative childhood experiences influence adult health. Child Abuse & Neglect . Published online October 2019:104089. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2019.104089
• 2. Bellis MA, Hughes K, Jones A, Perkins C, McHale P. Childhood happiness and violence: a retrospective study of their impacts on adult well-being. BMJ Open . Published online September 2013:e003427. doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2013-003427
• 3. Greene TR, Noice H. Influence of Positive Affect upon Creative Thinking and Problem Solving in Children. Psychol Rep . Published online December 1988:895-898. doi:https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1988.63.3.895
• 4. Cohn MA, Fredrickson BL, Brown SL, Mikels JA, Conway AM. Happiness unpacked: Positive emotions increase life satisfaction by building resilience. Emotion . Published online 2009:361-368. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015952
• 5. Abdel-Khalek AM. Happiness, health, and religiosity: Significant relations. Mental Health, Religion & Culture . Published online March 2006:85-97. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13694670500040625
• 6. Vaillant GE. Triumphs of Experience. Published online October 30, 2012. doi:https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067424
• 7. Cabral de Mello M. Responsive parenting: interventions and outcomes. Bull World Health Organ . Published online December 1, 2006:991-998. doi:https://doi.org/10.2471/blt.06.030163
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• 9. Headey B, Muffels R, Wagner GG. Parents Transmit Happiness Along with Associated Values and Behaviors to Their Children: A Lifelong Happiness Dividend? Soc Indic Res . Published online April 19, 2013:909-933. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0326-7
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Disclaimer: The content of this article is intended for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for medical concerns.

Essay on Childhood | 500+ Words Long

Childhood is a magical and transformative phase in a person’s life, filled with innocence, curiosity, and wonder. It is a time when we learn, grow, and lay the foundation for the future. In this essay, I will argue for the importance of childhood, a period that plays a fundamental role in shaping who we become as individuals. By exploring the significance of childhood, its impact on development, and the value of preserving its essence, I hope to convey why this phase of life deserves our utmost attention and care.

A Time of Learning and Discovery

Childhood is an extraordinary time when learning and discovery are at their peak. Young minds are like sponges, soaking up knowledge and experiences that will stay with them throughout their lives. In this stage, children acquire essential skills, from reading and writing to problem-solving and critical thinking. They explore the world around them, asking questions, and seeking answers, which sets the stage for a lifetime of curiosity and learning.

Emotional Development

Emotional development is a crucial aspect of childhood. During these formative years, children learn to understand and manage their emotions. They develop empathy, compassion, and the ability to form meaningful relationships with others. These emotional skills are vital for building strong connections with family, friends, and the wider community. Childhood provides the foundation for developing emotional intelligence that serves individuals throughout their lives.

Imagination and Creativity

Childhood is a time when imagination and creativity flourish. Children engage in imaginative play, inventing worlds, and scenarios that foster creativity. This creativity is not only enjoyable but also essential for problem-solving and innovation in the future. Encouraging and nurturing a child’s creativity during this phase can lead to a more innovative and imaginative adulthood.

Physical Health and Well-Being

Childhood is a period when physical health and well-being are of paramount importance. It is during these years that lifelong habits related to nutrition, exercise, and self-care are established. Encouraging healthy habits in childhood can significantly impact an individual’s long-term health and reduce the risk of chronic diseases in adulthood. Thus, childhood serves as a foundation for a healthy and active life.

Formation of Values and Ethics

Values and ethics are instilled during childhood. It is during this time that children develop a sense of right and wrong, guided by the values imparted by their families and communities. The moral compass formed in childhood influences an individual’s decision-making and behavior throughout life. Therefore, a nurturing and value-based upbringing during childhood is essential for fostering ethical individuals and responsible citizens.

Preserving Play and Fun

Childhood is synonymous with play and fun. It is a time when laughter, games, and adventures are an integral part of daily life. These playful experiences contribute to the emotional well-being of children, reducing stress and fostering happiness. Preserving the element of play in childhood allows children to develop social skills, resilience, and a love for exploration that will benefit them as adults.

Challenges Faced in Modern Childhood

While childhood is indeed a precious and transformative phase, it is not without its challenges in the modern world. Children today often face the pressures of academic performance, social media, and technology. Balancing these challenges with the need for unstructured play, creativity, and emotional development is a critical aspect of modern childhood.

Conclusion of Essay on Childhood

In conclusion, childhood is a treasured and vital phase of life that significantly shapes our future. It is a time of learning, emotional development, imagination, and physical health. The values and ethics instilled during childhood guide our behavior and decision-making throughout life. Preserving the elements of play and fun in childhood is essential for overall well-being. As we navigate the challenges of the modern world, it is crucial to prioritize and protect the essence of childhood. Childhood is not just a fleeting moment; it is a formative journey that deserves our utmost care and attention. By cherishing and nurturing childhood, we pave the way for a brighter and more fulfilling future for generations to come.

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• Childhood Memories Essay

Essay on Childhood Memories

Memories are one of the most crucial things we can cherish throughout our lives. They build up our personality as all our knowledge and previous experiences are stored there. Memories can be both good and bad. There are memories either from long ago or from the recent past. In our critical times, we may get some refreshment by recalling our memories. We can run our lives smoothly with the help of these memories. Memories help us in many ways. We can rectify ourselves from past mistakes. Childhood memories are treasured by all of us. They make us smile even in our old age. 

Importance of Childhood Memory:

Childhood memories are very significant in our lives. We can recall the best times of our lives. Childhood memories build up our future and way of thinking. People with good childhood memories are happy people. On the other hand some bad childhood memories also affect the future of an individual. 

The things a person learns during childhood remain as important lessons and memories for life. It applies to things like family and society values, morals, learning the importance of friendships and being respectful to adults. Without learning proper manners, people can become reckless and take unnecessary risks in life. 

Childhood memories are also strongly related to good habits such as proper discipline and cultivating the proper attitude in life. These values, which are very important for success in adult life, cannot be learnt overnight at a later stage. 

A childhood memory definitely does not define anyone but they play a pivotal role in one’s life. It is not necessary that a person with good memories always lives a prosperous life while a person with bad memories always lives a hazardous life. Sometimes, ghastly childhood memories make a man stronger. 

Nevertheless, it can be said that the inner child is kept alive by childhood memories. There is always a child inside every person. It may come out all of a sudden at any stage in life. It may also be expressed every day in the little things that we enjoy doing. 

Our inner child is especially seen when we meet our  childhood friends. Regardless of how grown up we think we are, we go back to kids the moment we are with old friends. Memories also take up the bulk of our conversation when we meet old friends after many years. The trip down memory lane is bittersweet as we long for a time we will not get back but also cherish its joy. 

Some may be excited about seeing swings, some may act like a child when they see panipuri. The reason behind the facts is we are reminded by our childhood memories every time. The same happens when we enter the children’s play park and are reminded of our favourite rides. It is even more so when we ate ice cream or our favourite ice candy when we were 5 years old.  Hence, childhood memories play a very vital role in our lives. 

My Childhood Memories:

I was born and brought up in a very adorable family. I have grown up with my elder brother with whom I used to play a lot. I remember each and every game we used to play together. Every moment is very precious to me. In the afternoon, we used to play cricket in our nearby ground. The memories of playing in the ground together are mesmerising. 

Another beautiful thing I can remember is flying kites. It used to be one of the most exciting things of my childhood. Even the older members of the family participated with us. We used to fly kites on our terrace. The kite-flying programme would last for the entire day.

Another beautiful thing I can remember is my visit to the zoo with my family. We made one zoo visit every year. They used to be those very simple yet fun-filled family picnic moments. We would carry packed food from home that my mother used to cook. My elder brother would click several photographs of us. When I look at those pictures now, the memories come alive. Today, so many things have changed but my childhood memories are still fresh in my heart. It feels so refreshing to relive them again and again. My childhood memories are very close to my heart and make me smile on my difficult days.

Perhaps the time I remember very fondly was going to swimming classes. I have always loved playing in the water, and swimming in clear pools was always an exciting activity. Even though I loved the water, at first I could not swim as I was not aware of the basics of the sport. Slowly, as I learnt to kick and paddle, it became easier to swim in shallow water. The big test was swimming in deep water as it was a terrifying thought and simultaneously exciting. I still remember the day I decided to let go of my fears and dived into the deep end of the pool. The instant I jumped into the water, the fear was gone, and I swam like a fish to the other end of the pool. That day also taught me a valuable lesson about taking the first step in any daunting task. 

Conclusion: 

We should all cherish our childhood memories as they can always be our companion, our “bliss of solitude.” Simple things hold grave meaning when they are from their childhood days. The days were free of complexities and full of innocence. Hence, they are so close to heart.

FAQs on Childhood Memories Essay

1. How to write a childhood memory essay?

The most important thing you will need to write this essay is about great childhood memories! You will have to look back in time and remember all the good and bad things that happened to you. As you get older, your memories will also change in their context as you change as a person. Like all essays, this should also have a steady narrative of the events from your childhood. You can choose to write only about the best memories you have or choose to write them as they occur. Some of the best things to write are topics such as your friends, your favourite games, and all the vacations you have been on and all the experiences you had in school.

2. How would you describe your childhood memories?

The older you get, the more the bits and pieces of your memory begin to fade or change. The best way to write about your childhood memories is to close your eyes and remember them. Then you have to start writing the events as they occurred without giving them context. Once the essay is written, the stories and events can be arranged as per the requirements of the essay. You can choose to describe your memories in any light you feel.

3. Why are childhood memories important?

Our childhood memories have a significant influence on who we are. People with mostly happy memories tend to be more relaxed with a positive outlook on life. People who have had traumatic memories tend to be more cautious and cynical in life. People can still change with positive or negative experiences in life. However, our childhood influences stay with us for the rest of our lives and can sometimes even come into conflict with the better choices we want to make. Therefore having childhood memories is a good reference to understanding ourselves and why we behave in certain ways.

4. What could be a common childhood memory for everyone?

Everybody remembers their “first-time” experiences in life. It could be things like the first day of school, the first time visiting a zoo, the first time taking a flight in an aeroplane, having a bad experience, etc.

Best Childhood Memories Essay Ideas: 94 Narrative Topics [2024]

Many people believe that childhood is the happiest period in a person’s life. It’s not hard to see why. Kids have nothing to care or worry about, have almost no duties or problems, and can hang out with their friends all day long.

An essay about childhood gives an opportunity to plunge into your memories. All you need to do is recollect those happy days and write a brilliant essay! In this article by Custom-Writing.org , you’ll find great tips and topic ideas to kickstart the process.

• 🔝 Top 10 Topics
• 💡 Coming Up with Ideas
• 🧸 Childhood Memories Essay Topics
• ✍️ Writing Examples & Guide
• 🔍 References

🔝 Top 10 Childhood Topics to Write About

• Your favorite holiday memory.
• Your brightest memories of winter.
• Your earliest school memory.
• Your first visit to a farm.
• What was your favorite toy?
• Do you remember your granny’s kitchen?
• Your childhood memories of your parents.
• Your best childhood friend.
• Things that you initially disliked at school.
• Experiments with physics in childhood.

💡 Coming Up with Childhood Memories Essay Ideas

Perhaps you got lost in your memories and cannot choose the best one to describe in your essay. Or maybe you have a bad memory and cannot recollect something specific to write about. If that’s the case, here are some recommendations for you.

Childhood Memories List: How to Write

Don’t know where to start? Try creating a list of your memories to decide which ones you need for your paper.

There are our top tips on making a childhood memories list:

• Write down everything that comes to your mind. What are some significant memories from your childhood? Every little experience starting with your earliest memory matters. Of course, you don’t need all of this information for your essay. Still, it will help your brain to start working in the right direction.
• Try to focus on specific things such as holidays, trips, or food. Everybody’s favorite childhood memories are often connected with them. Remarkable events also might include school, neighborhood, hometown, presents you received, and your achievements. Nostalgia is your best friend in this case.
• Divide your memories into categories. Good childhood experiences such as receiving a dream present or adopting a pet belong to one category. Life-changing events, key achievements, and unfortunate accidents can go into other categories.
• Try not to avoid bad childhood memories. It’s not the most pleasant thing in this task. But sometimes, writing about bad situations or challenges is a good strategic decision for your paper. It can also help your personal growth.

How to Remember Childhood Memories

What is your earliest memory? A frightening fall down the stairs? Or perhaps blowing candles on your second birthday? Whatever the content, it is probably short and vague.

When we grow older, our recollections of early childhood become fragmentary . In fact, a profound memory loss occurs, which psychologists call infantile amnesia (you can learn more about it from the article “ New perspectives on childhood memory ”). Memories formed during early childhood are more fragile than those formed later in life.

That’s why it’s a great idea to write down our childhood recollections. This way, they’ll stay with us even after they lose their rich vividness and start to fade altogether.

Naturally, you can’t keep everything in your head. Some childhood memories will stay with you forever, while others vanish during your teenage years. Remembering something you have forgotten is not an easy task.

Here’s a way out: use this checklist to recall your childhood experiences:

Feeling completely out of ideas? Or maybe you can’t think of a specific topic? Keep reading to learn how to generate new ideas and write a great childhood memories essay.

🧸 Childhood Memory Essays Topics List

Favorite childhood memory ideas.

• Meeting Santa at a mall
• A gift you’ve created yourself
• First time you stayed up all night
• Your first visit to an amusement park
• Your favorite children’s book or comic
• Your best childhood camping memory
• The craziest fact you’ve learned as a child
• Memory about winning a school competition
• What was the most fun school assignment?
• Your favorite food at the elementary school cafeteria

Early Childhood Memories Essay Topics

Kindergarten is often the place where kids start socializing for the first time. Think about your experiences with friends and teachers, as well as with your family. These topic ideas will help you get on the right track:

• The first day in kindergarten. Kindergarten is a new world for a child. It has an unfamiliar environment, new people, and rules. This essay can aim at discussing feelings and expectations that accompany a child on their first day.
• Describe the first pet you had in early childhood. Almost all families have a pet that they love. Often pets are given to children as presents. This essay can relate the best moments spent with a pet when you were little.
• A relative who was closest to you in early childhood. Every child has a family member with whom they enjoy spending time. It could easily be a parent, a grandparent, a sibling , or perhaps an uncle. Write about exciting moments related to your beloved relatives.
• Your first childhood hobby. Most people had hobbies when they were kids. This initial interest sometimes determines one’s future occupation. Here, you can describe the activities you used to do as a little child. Focus on the events associated with your first hobby.
• Festive events in kindergarten. During the whole year, people celebrate many holidays. Naturally, kindergartens hold festive events to amuse children. This essay can portray the unforgettable celebrations in kindergarten.
• Describe family gatherings from your childhood.
• A typical day in your kindergarten.
• What’s the first birthday celebration you remember?
• Activities or games in kindergarten.
• Your first Halloween costume.
• Things that you didn’t like in kindergarten.
• Write about your relationship with nature in early childhood.
• Describe a performance you took part in when you were little.
• What was the best teacher in your kindergarten like?
• Discuss the book or story you loved the most in early childhood.

Elementary School Memories Essay Topics

Would you like to look back at your elementary school days? This section is just what you need. Check out these ideas and get inspired:

• How you met your first teacher. Teachers lead children through a complicated yet exciting path. That’s why we all remember our teachers, especially the first day of meeting them. This essay can recount the brightest moments associated with this event. Additionally, you might describe the teacher’s appearance and personality .
• The most challenging lesson in elementary school. You can probably recall numerous lessons from your school years. This essay can aim at describing positive and negatives aspects of studies, as well as your favorite classes.
• Memories about extracurricular activities in school. It could be sports, artistic pursuits, or activities related to specific subjects. Describe your personal preferences and say who inspired you to start doing them.
• Celebration events at school. Celebrations create the brightest and most joyful memories. In this essay, you can share personal experiences about such events, be it school performances, shows, or games.
• Who was your best school teacher? Describe the personalities of your favorite teachers and explain why you liked them.
• Write about a person who helped with school lessons.
• What did your first school building look like?
• Describe what you daydreamed about in school.
• Wonderful hikes or trips organized by the school.
• What were your plans for the future growing up?
• Write about going to a museum with your class.
• Memories of participation in school sports activities.
• Recall your participation in writing for a school newspaper.
• Did you take part in any important school activities or events?

Happy Childhood Memories Essay Topics

When writing about your childhood, you’d probably prefer recalling happy events rather than sad ones. But what if you don’t know which pleasant memory to choose? This list will help you make up your mind!

• The best birthday party ever. Recall the most exciting details associated with it. For example, describe some beautiful presents and a celebratory atmosphere.
• The day you’ve met your first love . Write about the impressions, feelings, and the most treasured memories associated with that day.
• Recall the best day spent with your childhood friend. Recount the activities and events that made you happy.
• The most significant achievement in childhood. Recall your achievements connected with the studies, sports, or arts. You can start by describing the task you’ve had, explain its importance, and thank the people who helped you.
• The day you made somebody happy . This essay can describe the instances where you helped others. What were your motivations, and why did it make you happy?
• Describe the best school gathering you can remember. Schools often organize parties where students can have fun. This essay can recount the circumstances and special moments related to such a party.
• Recall a fictional character you liked the most in childhood.
• Write about the best present you gave to someone when you were little.
• Describe the best surprise made by friends or relatives in childhood.
• The most wonderful journey or trip in childhood.
• A sad event that changed things for the better.
• What were the happiest summer holidays in your childhood like?
• Chronicle the day when your childhood dream came true.
• Write about your childhood fear and how you overcame it.
• Tell about getting a good grade for an important assignment.
• Describe the first home where your family lived.

Funny Childhood Memories Essay Ideas

Writing about a funny event is perhaps the best option you can choose. You’ll enjoy describing it, and your readers will appreciate you for making them laugh! Here are some prompts to kickstart the creative process.

• Recollect your childhood actions that make your relatives laugh. Children often behave in interesting, comical, and amusing ways. This essay can detail some fun moments that your parents remember.
• Amusing and funny moments in your favorite cartoons. You probably remember many great cartoons from your childhood. What made them funny? Do you still find them entertaining?
• The funniest pranks you did at school. If you were a mischievous child, this topic is for you. Recall various funny, elaborate, or even failed pranks you did at school.
• Describe the first time you rode a bicycle. Learning to ride a bike is a staple of many childhoods. It’s challenging, but once you master it, you will never forget how to ride it!
• What tricks used to help you pass difficult exams? Usually, students make cribs or copy someone else’s answers. You can describe more creative ways of passing exams.
• Poking fun at younger siblings. If you have brothers and sisters, you probably tease each other. How do you feel about such activities? Do you both have a good laugh, or did somebody get upset?
• Playing superheroes in childhood. Many children have favorite superheroes such as Batman, Spiderman, Ironman, and others. What were your personal favorites? Did you try to imagine you have superpowers?
• Describe the most ridiculous haircut you’ve had when you were little.
• Funny moments with your school teachers.
• Did you have an imaginary friend? What were they like?
• Trying to cook in childhood.
• What tricks did you use to hide bad marks from your parents?
• Attempts to renovate your childhood room.

Childhood Christmas Memories Topics

Christmas is the favorite holiday of many children. Were you one of them? Choose your essay title from this list on Christmas memories:

• What is the best Christmas present from your childhood? Describe the present, the wrapping, and your emotions related to it. Why did you want it so much? You can also try to remember where this present is now.
• Describe a family Christmas trip that you enjoyed the most as a child. Answer the following questions. What were the new places you have seen? What were the new people you met? How much time did you spend there? Did you feel homesick? What did you feel when you returned home?
• What was your favorite pastime during the Christmas holidays in childhood? For example, you can write about watching cartoons or playing with your siblings. Or maybe you enjoyed winter sports and walking with your friends.
• Was Christmas your favorite holiday in childhood? Explain why or why not. Create a list of the things that you did and didn’t enjoy. You can also compare Christmas with other holidays. Find several arguments to defend your opinion.
• Describe the best Christmas present you gave somebody in childhood. It can be something you made yourself or bought. Explain why you chose this gift and what was the recipient’s reaction. What did you want to show with this present? Was it your idea to give it? How did you choose it? Answer these questions in your essay.
• What are your favorite Christmas memories ? You have a wide choice here. You can describe family get-togethers, receiving or giving presents, eating sweets, or having fun while resting from school.
• Describe your favorite childhood Christmas photo. Explain why it is so valuable to you. Define the people or objects in the picture. Try to remember who took it and what camera was they used. Also, provide some information about the time and place.
• Write about your family’s Christmas traditions.
• Describe your favorite Christmas decorations in childhood.
• When was the time you stopped believing in Santa Claus?
• What was your favorite Christmas movie in childhood?
• Write about the Christmas dishes did you enjoy the most as a child.
• What was your favorite Christmas TV special ?
• What were your favorite Christmas songs when you were little?
• Describe the perfect Christmas Eve of your childhood.
• Tell about the friends you liked to invite to your Christmas parties.

These recollections can form a great foundation for your essay. Because childhood is often the best time in a person’s life, writing essays on your childhood experiences can be a real pleasure. If you try to be creative and choose a unique topic, you are sure to succeed in writing an impressive essay.

✍️ “My Childhood Memories” Essay Writing Guide

Writing about your childhood is an exciting assignment that has some peculiarities. Let’s explore some of them.

Childhood Memories Essay: Dos and Don’ts

Your main task is to make the reader feel like they’ve experienced the memory you described. There are certain elements that you can include in your essay to make it stand out. Similarly, some things are better to avoid.

Keep these things in mind, and you will surely write a perfect composition.

Childhood Memories Essay: Step by Step

Follow these steps of the essay writing process, and you will see that writing a good essay on your childhood memories is not as challenging as it may seem.

Narrative Essay on Childhood Memories: Outline

Every essay must have a proper structure. That’s why it’s useful to make a short outline before you start writing. It will keep you from losing your way as you write your essay. It also saves you time! If you have a plan, you won’t miss any important points in your essay.

Your paper should include:

After you’ve finished writing, revise and edit your essay . Make sure your paragraphs are written in a logical order. Read your essay aloud so that you can see how it flows and determine where you need to improve it.

Try our memory-activating prompts and follow these writing tips to compose your perfect childhood memories essay! If you’re not sure that you can write a good paper on your own, you can always ask our experts to help you out.

Further reading:

• School Days Essay: How to Describe a Memorable Event
• Growing Up Essay: Great Ideas for Your College Assignment
• Writing Essay about Someone Who has Made an Impact on Your Life
• Excellent Remembering a Person Essay: Free Writing Guidelines
• Life Experience Essay: How to Write a Brilliant Paper

🔗 References

• The Fate of Childhood Memories: Children Postdated Their Earliest Memories as They Grew Older
• Can You Trust Your Earliest Childhood Memories?: BBC
• How to Start Writing Your Own Childhood Memories for Posterity: HobbyLark
• 650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing: The New York Times
• Bright Side Readers Shared 14 Childhood Stories and We Plunged Into Their Memories Together: Brightside
• Great Questions: StoryCorps
• Introductions and Conclusions: University of Toronto
• Make a List: Childhood Memories: Practical Parenting
• Tips to Retrieve Old Memories: Harvard University
• Make the Most of Your Memory: 10 Tips for Writing About Your Life: Writer’s Digest
• Childhood Christmas Memories: DNA Explained
• What Do Your Earliest Childhood Memories Say about You?: The Conversation
• Can’t Remember Your Childhood? What Might Be Going On: Healthline
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5 Secrets to Raising a Happy Child

Want to raise a happy child? Follow these steps to improve your kid's confidence and bolster their joy, contentment, and self-esteem.

As a parent, there is nothing you want more than to make sure your child is happy. Their contentment and wellbeing, after all, is—in some ways—within your power. Many of these things are within your control. But what makes a happy child ? Is it giving into their every whim—and granting them more screen time—or is it about patience, secure attachments, and validating their experiences?

We spoke with Mary Beth DeWitt, Ph.D., chief of child psychology at Dayton Children's Hospital, to find out what goes into making your child happy. Here's what she had to say.

What Makes a Happy Child?

While happiness may seem rather basic—one is either happy or not—many things can contribute to your child's happiness. External stimuli, for example, may make your child happy (or, conversely, it could make your child sad). Validation can result in peace and contentment, and friendships can be full of pleasure and joy. But there is no one thing which makes your child happy. There is also no way to keep a "happy child." Full-time happiness is a myth, one which is impossible to attain. Still, there are skills you can teach your child to help them experience joy, Dr. DeWitt explains.

"Teaching kids to be resilient allows them to discuss their ability to successfully adapt, positively transform, and return to their baseline despite being surrounded by stressors and adversity," says Dr. DeWitt. Empowering our kids to be resilient sets them up for positive, constructive experiences and helps them learn how to deal with hard situations. It can also help them bounce back, when stressors occur.

So what goes into teaching kids to be resilient? Dr. DeWitt shared a few skills that parents should be nurturing and encouraging in their kids every single day.

• Problem-solving : In school, in teams, and with friends, problem-solving is a skill that will stay with your kids.
• Autonomy and self-efficacy : Having control over their own decision-making and being confident in their decisions is life-changing. Teaching kids to believe in themselves is never a bad decision.
• Empathy : Being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes is a skill everyone should learn. Kids especially benefit from appreciating each other's differences and being understanding.
• Emotional regulation and impulse control : Depending on how old your child is, emotional regulation and impulse control might not be something they have mastered yet. But incorporating mindfulness into their routine and encouraging them to be aware of their feelings is a step in the right direction.

What Are the Benefits of Happiness, According to Research?

Being happy, proud, and fulfilled aren't just emotions that leave us feeling warm and fuzzy. Concrete positive outcomes are also associated with genuine happiness—and better school attendance, better academic performance, better self-esteem , and better overall health. There is also a lot of research showing that children who don't experience happiness or things like secure attachments, nurturing environments, or adults that validate their feelings, can be negatively impacted.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have a tremendous impact on future violence victimization and perpetration and lifelong health and opportunity.

A few examples of these experiences include (but are not limited to):

• Experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect
• Witnessing violence in the home or community
• Having a family member attempt or die by suicide
• Substance use problems
• Mental health problems
• Instability due to parental separation or household members being in jail or prison

These kinds of traumas can impact children's lives and experiences as they grow. But supporting them, validating their feelings that come with these experiences, and teaching them to process and be resilient despite these traumas will make all the difference.

How Can You Raise Happy Children?

While children need to feel supported (and be loved) there are other ways you can help them become happy and healthy. Below are five ways to instill joy in your child.

Foster connections

Parents should be involved in their children's lives, have conversations with them about what is happening, and help them to problem-solve difficult situations and understand emotions and boundaries. By talking through these hard situations, you help your child learn how to handle the problems they're facing now and that they will face going forward.

Model what happiness means to you

From practicing self-care to meditating, reading, and moving your body, engaging in activities that bring you happiness and joy will encourage your kiddo to do the same. Parents should ensure proper health, including sleep, nutrition, and exercise. One of the best things you can do for your child's emotional well-being is to attend to yours.

Practice gratitude

Parents can help their kids feel safe, secure, and happy by expressing gratitude. Harvard Health reminds us that in positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.

But how can you foster gratitude in children? Ask them to take time daily—before or during a meal, for example—to name aloud something they are thankful for. Then, make it a regular ritual. "This is one habit that will foster all kinds of positive emotions," says sociologist Christine Carter, Ph.D., executive director of the University of California at Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, an organization devoted to the scientific understanding of happiness. "It really can lead to lasting happiness."

Don't try to make your child happy

It sounds counterintuitive, but the best thing you can do for your child's long-term happiness may be to stop trying to keep them. "If we put our kids in a bubble and grant them their every wish and desire, that is what they grow to expect, but the real world doesn't work that way," says Bonnie Harris, founder of Core Parenting, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and author of When Your Kids Push Your Buttons: And What You Can Do About It.

To keep from overcoddling, recognize that you are not responsible for your child's happiness, Harris urges. Parents who feel responsible for their kids' emotions have great difficulty allowing them to experience anger, sadness, or frustration. We swoop in immediately to give them whatever we think will bring a smile or to solve whatever is causing them distress. Unfortunately, Harris warns, children who never learn to deal with negative emotions are in danger of being crushed by them as adolescents and adults.

Once you accept that you can't make your child feel happiness (or any other emotion for that matter), you'll be less inclined to try to "fix" their feelings—and more likely to step back and allow them to develop the coping skills and resilience they'll need to bounce back from life's inevitable setbacks.

Allow for failure—and success

Of course, if you really want to bolster your child's self-esteem, focus less on compliments and more on providing them with ample opportunities to learn new skills. Mastery, not praise, is the real self-esteem builder, says Edward Hallowell, M.D., child psychiatrist and author of The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness s. "The great mistake good parents make is doing too much for their children," Dr. Hallowell says.

While it can be difficult to watch our kids struggle, they'll never know the thrill of mastery unless we allow them to risk failure. Few skills are perfected on a first try. It's through practice that children achieve mastery. And through repeated experiences of mastery, they develop the can-do attitude that lets them approach future challenges with the zest and optimism that are central to a happy life.

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A Story From My Childhood: A Cherished Memory

Table of contents, the magic of a rainy day, the birth of a masterpiece, a symphony of laughter, in retrospect, in conclusion.

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Happiness Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on happiness.

Happiness is something which we can’t describe in words it can only be felt from someone’s expression of a smile. Likewise, happiness is a signal or identification of good and prosperous life. Happiness is very simple to feel and difficult to describe. Moreover, happiness comes from within and no one can steal your happiness.

Can Money Buy You Happiness?

Every day we see and meet people who look happy from the outside but deep down they are broken and are sad from the inside. For many people, money is the main cause of happiness or grief. But this is not right. Money can buy you food, luxurious house, healthy lifestyle servants, and many more facilities but money can’t buy you happiness.

And if money can buy happiness then the rich would be the happiest person on the earth. But, we see a contrary image of the rich as they are sad, fearful, anxious, stressed, and suffering from various problems.

In addition, they have money still they lack in social life with their family especially their wives and this is the main cause of divorce among them.

Also, due to money, they feel insecurity that everyone is after their money so to safeguard their money and them they hire security. While the condition of the poor is just the opposite. They do not have money but they are happy with and stress-free from these problems.

In addition, they take care of their wife and children and their divorce rate is also very low.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Happiness Comes from Within

As we now know that we can’t buy happiness with money and there is no other shortcut to happiness. It is something that you feel from within.

In addition, true happiness comes from within yourself. Happiness is basically a state of mind.

Moreover, it can only be achieved by being positive and avoiding any negative thought in mind. And if we look at the bright side of ourselves only then we can be happy.

Happiness in a Relationship

People nowadays are not satisfied with their relationship because of their differences and much other reason. But for being happy in a relationship we have to understand that there are some rules or mutual understanding that keeps a relationship healthy and happy.

Firstly, take care of yourself then your partner because if you yourself are not happy then how can you make your partner happy.

Secondly, for a happy and healthy relationship give you partner some time and space. In addition, try to understand their feeling and comfort level because if you don’t understand these things then you won’t be able to properly understand your partner.

Most importantly, take initiative and plan to go out with your partner and family. Besides, if they have plans then go with them.

To conclude, we can say that happiness can only be achieved by having positive thinking and enjoying life. Also, for being happy and keeping the people around us happy we have to develop a healthy relationship with them. Additionally, we also have to give them the proper time.

FAQs about Happiness

Q.1 What is True Happiness? A.1 True happiness means the satisfaction that you find worthy. The long-lasting true happiness comes from life experience, a feeling of purpose, and a positive relationship.

Q.2 Who is happier the rich or the poor and who is more wealthy rich or poor? A.2 The poor are happier then the rich but if we talk about wealth the rich are more wealthy then the poor. Besides, wealth brings insecurity, anxiety and many other problems.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Childhood Memories — A Reflection of My Childhood Memories of Going Outside, Being Happy, and Enjoying Life

A Reflection of My Childhood Memories of Going Outside, Being Happy, and Enjoying Life

• Categories: Childhood Memories

About this sample

Words: 665 |

Published: Jan 15, 2019

Words: 665 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Back in the Day…

Works cited.

• Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces. New World Library.
• Golden, M. (2001). Archetypes of wisdom: An introduction to philosophy. Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
• Kastenbaum, R. (2004). Encyclopedia of death and dying. Macmillan Reference USA.
• Kidd, D. C., Castano, E., & Cohen, N. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377-380.
• Lev Grossman. (2007). The Boy Who Lived Forever. Time.
• Naithani, S. (2012). J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Parry, S. (2013). The Monomyth and Harry Potter: A Hero's Journey. Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 3(10), 789-797.
• Rowling, J. K. (1997). Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Tolkien, J. R. (1965). The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin.
• Vogler, C. (1998). The writer's journey: Mythic structure for writers. Michael Wiese Productions.

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Essay Example on the Topic of Childhood

Even though the life of each individual is totally unique, it commonly consists of several stages. Childhood is the very first phase and perhaps the most important one.

If to compare life to a building, childhood is the foundation of the house and further development of the individual is the walls, roof and decorations. When the foundation is faulty, the whole house is in danger of improper functioning or even collapsing, especially if there are unfavorable weather circumstances. That’s why it’s so important for any person to have a healthy childhood. This part of person’s life doesn’t have to be ideal and probably it can never be perfect due to the unpredictable nature of life itself but the happier childhood of the person is, the higher the chances are for him or her to lead a happy and fulfilled adult life.

Feeling love and care is crucially important for the person during the childhood formative years. That’s the time when a person starts to crystallize who he is and what he is capable of. Parents are the significant ones to the child so the little person is susceptible to almost all that adults do and teach. A child fully depends on his parents and vigorously looks up to what they do and how they do it. That’s why it is very important for mom and dad to show a great example so that their offspring could inherit only the best of them.

Each child is born with the pure and kind heart but the set of circumstances which a little person faces when entering this world can make drastic adjustments. As a famous psychiatrist Eric Berne put it, “We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.” If a child is being raised in a dysfunctional atmosphere, it will be very difficult for such a person to adapt and function successfully in society as a grown up.

Childhood is a very tender age and maturing psyche of a little person absorbs the information around him like a sponge. That’s why it is so important to make sure that the child witnesses as many positive things as possible especially when it concerns the fragile forming individuality of a little human being. When a baby experiences love of those who are important to him, he grows up as a confident person who values himself and those around him. If any sort of abuse is present, the risk of a child turning into an adult with a dysfunctional psyche grows significantly.

Childhood must be remembered for the unforgettably pleasant and exciting events that took place during this important period of life. Obviously, traumatizing experiences can’t be completely eliminated but the abundance of unconditional love that child needs to be surrounded with will translate into the adequately formed person in the later stages of life.

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Describe a happy childhood memory

IELTS essay Describe a happy childhood memory

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75+ Happy Friendship Day Messages, Greetings, Wishes and Quotes for 2024

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By Armando Iannucci

Mr. Iannucci is a television and movie director and producer whose hits include the HBO series “Veep.”

As soon as President Biden dropped out of the race, leaving his vice president to take on the candidacy, a pile-on of news organizations tracked me down to ask for comment. They weren’t after any insights on Kamala Harris’s campaign (I have none) but instead wanted to know how I felt now that events were tracking the main story line of my HBO show “Veep.”

The show stars the unbeatable Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Vice President Selina Meyer. As the series progresses, Selina is suddenly thrown onto the main stage when the president decides not to run for a second term, leaving her to go into the convention as the new presumptive nominee. For 24 hours, the mainstream media asked if I was pleased with the comparison.

This is the first time I’m setting out a definitive answer to that question, and the answer is: No, I’m not. I’m extremely worried! Not about Ms. Harris. I’m sure she’ll inject much-needed sharpness into the campaign. What worries me is that politics has become so much like entertainment that the first thing we do to make sense of the moment is to test it against a sitcom.

In fact, I fear we’ve now crossed some threshold where the choreographed image or manufactured narrative becomes the only reality we have left. Look how the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which happened only two weeks ago, so speedily transformed from real-time tragedy into iconography. No sooner had Mr. Trump ducked for cover when some indefinable Trumpy-sense clicked on, calculating with acute precision how best to turn the moment of survival into a sequence of living memes, first by asking for his shoes, perhaps so he could be seen to exit at full height, and then raising a fist to the clouds, mouthing, “Fight, fight, fight.” Someone died in that mindless violence, but what does it say about the supremacy of the defining visual that Mr. Trump commemorated the moment at his party’s convention by caressing the victim’s uniform live onstage?

Which brings us to the Republican convention in Milwaukee. The convention was not so much the choosing of a leader as the transfiguration of one — the Donald reborn as the One who brushed off death as if it were some loser mosquito whack job. With humility he declared himself chosen and protected by God, the sly implication being that while Mr. Biden was slowly stumbling toward his end, Mr. Trump was most likely immune from his. For 20 minutes Mr. Trump spoke with saintly measure of how he was going to unite the country and then for an hour more made it clear he would do this by delegitimizing every alternative point of view.

Heretics, including Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, promptly repented, with conviction in their voices and deadness in their eyes, and a collective hosanna rose from the assembly, many wearing anointed ear bandages to cover the stigmata they prayed would one day afflict the sides of their own heads. The whole event was about making us believe in Mr. Trump’s Second Coming (or his third, if you’re one of those who think his second came in 2020 but that was stolen and everyone knows it).

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