Family Relationships Key to Happiness for Poor in Bangladesh

I was in Tower Hamlets yesterday, talking with some of the community health and well-being team (not the actual title but a reasonable description). We talked about the role of healthy breathing in relieving some of the distressing symptoms of chronic illnesses. We also discussed the importance of happiness, resilience and having a Happystance.

One of the most vigorously discussed topics was that the western concept of happiness seems to promote individualism and independence above social interdependence and group obligations. A research group recently published a working paper that reported eight out of ten people in Bangladesh describe themselves as happy: they say that their relationships with their loved ones is the key to their happiness.

Whilst achievement of individual goals and personal wealth remain the most significant contributors to happiness in Europe and North America, in Bangladesh and other parts of South and East Asia it seems to depend more on the quality of social relationships.

This finding could provide a partial explanation for the lack of success of development interventions in recent years, many of which are based on assumptions about the initiatives likely to bring the greatest benefit to individuals.

The researchers summarised the key characteristics about good relationships that were identified by the Bangladeshi people whom they interviewed. They found that:

• Older mothers valued being treated affectionately by sons and daughter-in-laws as much as receiving material support
• Participation and consultation in decision-making was singled out as an important indicator of a happy marriage
• For younger women the most crucial relationship was with their husband
• A good husband provides for his wife’s and their family’s needs, and is also respectful and acknowledges her competence
• Younger women focused on the quality of their personal relationship with members of their husband’s family, primarily their husband’s mother, sisters, and sisters-in-law
• All the groups, apart from older women, made connections between happiness and a desire to be respected and/or influential beyond the immediate confines of family relationships
• Older men valued the ability to participate in and influence the affairs of the community

Dr. McGregor commented on the report's findings:

Some of the older people we spoke to strongly valued close and harmonious relationships with family members, to the extent that they even enabled them to ignore physical hardship. Even though at times they don’t get enough food to eat, these people were still happy because they have good relationships with the rest of their family.

Now, I think that this working paper is a fascinating social description of happiness in the context of extreme poverty. However, I do not see Happystance as part of the hedonic or individualist view of happiness. I have repeatedly argued that Happystance is about resilience and that there is a lot of fine research that shows that we have greater physical and emotional resilience when we have rich social networks - otherwise known as friends and family. In good relationships, resilience and support flow back and forth over time. There is not always an equitable exchange between any one pair of friends, but over a set of relationships, these exchanges do seem to even out.

I've written before about FEAR (False Experience Appearing Real) and Happystance. I do think that it is easy to confuse the advertising that supports various media with what is important to people. I also think that these advertising messages and the zeitgeist of what passes for social comment can also act as command hallucinations that seek to convince people of the validity of a particular vision of happiness. And yet...Many of the people that I work do not speak of material things or the stuff of hedonism when they speak about happiness. They speak about their hopes for the future. They talk about the happiness of children, other family members and friends.

Many people in the UK do describe themselves in terms of their relationships. They do recognise their interdependence with others and the many ways in which this is expressed in relationships. Yet, by many standards of measurement, they do have autonomy.

I recognise that many superficial accounts of happiness emphasise the hedonic and individual aspects. But I meet so many people who would agree with the following description of Ethics for a New Millennium:

Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.

I don't believe that there is a generalised lack of appreciation for this point of view 'in the West'. I do wonder if we need to move away from the idea that we generally accept the notion of autonomy and happiness expressed by Ayn Rand.

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as an heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Another paper about relationships in Bangladesh suggests that we need to be more flexible about our interpretation of autonomy. The authors argue that it is possible to have autonomy that co-exists with significant dependence. The authors draw on their findings from Bangladesh:

a poor country usually absent from cross-cultural studies and one where personal relationships of hierarchy and dependence are endemic. Argument and evidence is presented showing the coexistence of personal autonomy and dependence, and the relationship between collective action and autonomy. We also address some of the specific problems encountered in researching autonomy in a social context where it is mainly expressed in relational forms. We conclude that autonomy can be directed toward both personal and social goals, and can be enacted individually, or by participation in groups. Autonomy is a universal psychological need but its expression is always contextual.

I've written about the importance of context so I agree that we always need to consider the context, which is another variation on considerations about allostasis. I believe that allostasis implies cross-cultural relevance. I believe that Happystance has cross-cultural relevance.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project