The decline of happiness commonly found among school children with age is explained.

What is it about?

Studies on the happiness of children are few and far between, as Beatton and Frijters (2012a) point out. Still, a common finding among the few studies on the happiness of children aged 15 and below (Beatton and Frijters, 2012b; Children’s Society, 2012, 2013; WTO, 2012) is that happiness declines with age. Given the concern, recently raised, that sampling bias may affect researchers’ conclusions about the happiness profile over the life cycle (Beatton and Frijters, 2012b) and the fact that happiness may be strongly affected by personality traits, the present paper is among the first to control the ‘mental capital’ of students. By enlisting entire classes to participate, we also minimize the self-selection bias. We confirm the finding that happiness does decline from around age 8 through adolescence. At the same time we discover that children’s measured mental capital, along the dimensions of love, insight, fortitude and engagement (LIFE), generally falls during this phase of their life cycle.

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Why is it important?

The study confirms the important role that mental capital plays in children’s happiness. This is consistent with the finding by Beatton and Frijters (2012b) that innate factors such as confidence in one’s social skills (‘social self-efficacy’) may be even more important to childhood happiness (Fogel et al., 2002) than circumstantial factors.

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