10 Steps To Happiness For Mothers

Submitted by tonyplant on June 28, 2006 - 14:37.

Happy mothers tend to have happy children but with the frenetic pace of combining parenthood with working and other activities means that many parents are neglecting their own well-being. The Daily Mail has an article about an interesting experiment to increase mothers' happiness.

Online support group, Netmums, ran the experiment. They encouraged mothers to follow an adapted version of the Happiness Manifesto that was popularised during the Making Slough Happy series. The women completed questionnaires to assess their baseline level of happiness before participating in the experiment.

On a scale of 1 to 100, the average score was 52. But after following the happiness principles for four weeks, the average score rose to 64 - a rise of over 10 per cent in just 28 days.

Of course, this is not even vaguely a scientific experiment; it is just data collection. However, it is a nice report and it serves to promote the idea that happiness is not mysterious, it can sometimes be a lot simpler than it seems to be. It does again provoke the question, if we had a Happiness Boot Camp, what would it look like?

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