In July, I ended my service as president of Gross National Happiness USA, an organization focused on changing the way we measure progress and success in the United States.
In the six years I have served on the board of the organization, I have learned a lot about the protective factors that contribute to high levels of subjective well-being among people. In layman’s terms, I have learned a lot about what research says makes people happy.
In our 2022 survey of happiness in the United States, far and away the most-mentioned contributor to happiness by people surveyed was “family.” A total of 45% of respondents mentioned family in their free response about contributors to happiness. The next most common was “health,” which 6% of respondents mentioned.
This is just another datapoint in a large body of research that underscores the key role of social connections in driving happiness among individuals.
This poses a problem for policymakers. As we consider the tools at the hand for policymakers, few are effective at building social connections between people. While governments like the UK are spurring new initiatives to tackle loneliness, initiatives in the U.S. to preserve marriages have not been successful so far.
My reading of the evidence is that there is hope on this dimension, though. While many of the initiatives that have failed before have focused on relationships between adults, there does seem to be evidence that relationships can be built early on for children.
I thought of this recently while reading about an evaluation of the long-term effects of a randomized controlled trial in Bogotá, Colombia. The program, Kangaroo Mother Care, is an intervention aimed at increasing skin-to-skin contact between preterm infants and their mothers. This specific evaluation showed that at age 22, infants who were randomly assigned to groups to receive this skin-to-skin contact had better socio-emotional skills than those who were not.
This follows some of the evidence we have on impacts of programs like home visiting, which give week-to-week counseling to expectant and new mothers. Giving parents tools to have positive interactions with their children can lead to long-term benefits for those children in the form of socioemotional development and eventually in test scores, criminal justice involvement, health, and earnings.
Other similar programs have been shown to have positive impacts on child development. A group of pediatricians and psychiatrists evaluated a program where therapists coached parents as they interacted with children, viewing their interaction through a one-way mirror and providing coaching through a radio earphone. The program was very effective at reducing cases of child abuse and neglect. Estimates by the Washington Institute for Public Policy found the program could have large impacts on future labor market earnings, criminal justice system savings, less spending on special education, and less PTSD.
Some public health researchers are saying now that we are in an epidemic of loneliness. We may yet find a “cure”--a killer public policy intervention to improve connections between adults today. But until then, we do have one tool to fight this problem: building relationships between parents and children.