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The French president Nicolas Sarkozy has a rescue plan for the national newspapers, who have serious financial problems since years already. He is going to fund a free subscription for every 18-year old in France. Sarkozy is convinced that young people get used to reading the paper and will automatically renew the subscription later in life. Very ambitious and also generous, but I doubt that this rescue plan for the written press is going to work. Young people are already more and more learning about the news via Internet and mobile phones. Paper news is old fashioned. Sarkozy can better invest in more modern ways of spreading news among young people. Waste of tax payers money.

By Springer science-business media

To make children happier, we may need to encourage them to develop a strong sense of personal worth, according to Dr. Mark Holder from the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues Dr. Ben Coleman and Judi Wallace. Their research shows that children who feel that their lives have meaning and value and who develop deep, quality relationships - both measures of spirituality - are happier. It would appear, however, that their religious practices have little effect on their happiness. These findings have been published in the online edition of Springer’s Journal of Happiness Studies.

Both spirituality (an inner belief system that a person relies on for strength and comfort) and religiousness (institutional religious rituals, practices and beliefs) have been linked to increased happiness in adults and adolescents. In contrast, very little work has been done on younger children. In an effort to identify strategies to increase children’s happiness, Holder and colleagues set out to better understand the nature of the relationship between spirituality, religiousness and happiness in children aged 8 to 12 years. A total of 320 children, from four public schools and two faith-based schools, completed six different questionnaires to rate their happiness, their spirituality, their religiousness and their temperament. Parents were also asked to rate their child’s happiness and temperament.

The authors found that those children who said they were more spiritual were happier. In particular, the personal (i.e. meaning and value in one’s own life) and communal (i.e. quality and depth of inter-personal relationships) aspects of spirituality were strong predictors of children’s happiness. Spirituality explained up to 27 percent of the differences in happiness levels amongst children.

A child’s temperament was also an important predictor of happiness. In particular, happier children were more sociable and less shy. The relationship between spirituality and happiness remained strong, even when the authors took temperament into account. However, counter intuitively, religious practices - including attending church, praying and meditating - had little effect on a child’s happiness.

According to the authors, “enhancing personal meaning may be a key factor in the relation between spirituality and happiness.” They suggest that strategies aimed at increasing personal meaning in children - such as expressing kindness towards others and recording these acts of kindness, as well as acts of altruism and volunteering - may help to make children happier.

It was my intention to write something about the children in the warzone in Gaza. But I can’t. It is all too awful and sad. Instead I found this quote.
“Even under the very worst conditions, happiness is not only something that is achievable but it’s what drives us to want to experience the next day. ” -Hector Gabriel Ramos Samanez

I studied the Enneagram years ago already and I decided to read the book again. The Enneagram symbol is thousands of years old, but the first written proof is from Pythagoras who lived 600 years before Christ. According to his theory (developed by many other psychologists afterwards) there are nine types of characters and this essence of your being is developed between the age of 6 months and 1 year. After that our upbringing, our parents, our school, our friends and everything else that can influence us, drives us more or less away from our essence. The enneagram can bring us back to this essence and makes that we understand yourselves and others a lot better. When you discover your true self at a young age, it will have of course a great effect on your self esteem.

Elizabeth Wagele wrote an Enneagram book for children with very nice drawings explaining the different character types.

An important group of young people born between 1980 and 1990, the so called Millennials, have a bright outlook on the future, despite the crisis, increasing unemployment, risks for the environment and other worldwide problems. This was the result of a research done by the Pepsi Optimism Project. 2000 Americans were interviewed and practically all surveyed (95%) agree that it is important for them to maintain a positive outlook on life.

According to the POP survey, Millennials spend more time enjoying life than worrying about it and this group is most optimistic about their overall well-being and relationships with friends and family. Other findings include:

•  With the season of good will upon us, 74% find that supporting causes make them feel more optimistic.

•  Despite recent job forecasts, 77% of Millennials report having a strong sense of optimism about their careers.

•  Nearly all Millennials (95%) make positive associations when they think of the word “change,” associating it with “progress” (78%), “hope” (77%) and “excitement” (72%).

•  Two-thirds of Millennials (67%) say that the election of Barack Obama is making them feel optimistic about the future of the country.

This shows the real American Spirit in this next generation. Hopefully this positiveness will blow over to Europe as well.