1. Happiness

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Nice, isn't it? The sound of happy, happy children. These two are playing peekaboo. We can hear the joy in that back and forth, the rhythm and surprise, the fun. the ease. But don't let the simplicity of this little game fool you. There's so much going on here. Peekaboo is a conversation. It's about connection with another human. It's got the setup, expectation and surprise elements of a joke.

It's also thought to be a crucial part of learning that when people or things disappear they continue to exist. But at the end of the day it's just fun. I've played it so much with my own kids during a screaming nappy change or a boring car ride because it makes them happy. And that is what we want, right? For everyone to be happy.

But that constant search for happiness, it can feel so hard for all of us, no matter our age. And if we really want to see this battle play out, we need look no further than the toddler. The toddler. If you've had one or encountered one, you'll know that they exist in an intense and fast-changing world of emotions. They are constantly responding to their surroundings, their experiences, their stomachs.

And that's because there's a huge amount going on in the mind and the world of a toddler that we are only just beginning to understand. Indeed, we describe the toddlers as the black hole. developmental cognitive neuroscience. We keep being surprised by how different their understanding and perspective of the world is.

We went from the embryo through pregnancy and birth to the little scientist of the one-year-old baby, learning and discovering. And now for series two, we are into the next stage of childhood. We're examining ages one to five. Their world, their minds, and their feelings. The joy is so delicious and genuine. When I look at the world through their eyes, everything is new.

If you like me spend any time with toddlers, then you will know that they are silly messes, fountains of unadulterated wonder, but they are also insufferable balls of feelings. They can be very hard work. There is increasingly, over the last 50 years or so, pressure put on parents suggesting there is a right way to parent and so forth. So we're all looking for the silver bullet.

Toddlerhood is the seat of some of the most complicated learning the human brain can do. And it's the perfect time to scrutinize something huge that affects us all. The roots of most of our personalities are formed in childhood, particularly in early childhood. And so when I'm working with an adult, I'm always thinking about the child in the adult. So now we're taking hold of their hands, and of yours too. and taking a cold water plunge into the world of emotions.

In this eight-part series, I'm going to explore what it is, what it even means to be happy, afraid, angry, sad, surprised, anxious, full of awe and wound up in love. But I want to... to really question what we understand about these words. I'm India and I'm an emotional person. I've got big feelings and thoughts and they've come at me left, right and centre as long as I can remember.

And having kids was a whole new emotional journey. I had no idea what the toddler years would hold, how often I would be... screamed at for peeling a banana wrong, that a picture of four blobs and a green squiggle would make me sob. A lot of advice for parents, and for all of us really at the moment, is to get on top of emotions. Name them.

Contain them. But with what? What even are they? I never really stopped to question the science and stories being directed at me as a parent. But when I did, I realised something. Hidden in the world of emotions are tricks, myths, and dangerous assumptions that have shaped so much of our world.

believe that you are reading emotion in your children or in another person, you are using certain assumptions about the nature of reality that you may be completely unaware of and that probably are wrong, actually. We're picking a key emotion to explore a child's journey through early life and all of our understandings of emotions. And we're starting with a big one, one we all strive for.

It drives so much of our modern lives. It's been written into the basic rights of many of us. It's what we all want our kids to feel more than anything. I'm India Rackerson. You're listening to Series 2 of Child. And this... is happiness.

On a rainy day in London, I really happily step into the sanctuary of quite an exciting building to begin my journey into the toddler mind. So each floor is a lamp designed to resemble different environments. OK, so this quite new lab is a five-storey building full of rooms that are full of cameras and wireless headcaps that make it possible to measure brain activity in young children. Because up until recently, that's been really tricky.

I don't know if you've noticed, but sitting still isn't really a toddler thing. Children just hate it. They pull off our equipment and they run around. So studying these tiny people has been a real mystery to crack. Denny Marichal, director of the Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, which includes the world's first toddler lab. It comes straight into the home lab, designed to resemble a front room in a house.

So we don't all grow up in a vacuum. We grow up in a house with siblings, dogs, televisions, and so forth. Here, in this environment of more natural settings and wearable wireless tech, researchers are beginning to understand so much more about just how huge the experience of being a toddler really is. Yes, so again, this is the preschool lab. I wanted a water corner and a sand corner, but they said that wouldn't work with the technology. Yeah, I guess the sand might get in the way.

Between, say, one and four or five, children's motor abilities increase dramatically. Language often explodes. They might go to nursery or preschool. And they have to learn to navigate all of that. It's also an age at which there are incredibly impressive changes in...

the executive functions of the self-regulation abilities of children at that age. It's a really explosive time, isn't it, for kids? It is indeed. What do you think might come out of the toddler lab that would challenge how we see a toddler? Historically the view of young children has changed a lot. Hundreds of years ago there was a belief in Europe that actually childhood didn't really exist. They were just adults with less knowledge and experience but we've realised that a lot is going on.

Small children are experiencing the world and thinking about the world in dramatically different ways from the ways that adults do. OK, so it's a brain with a lot of unique thinking and power where learning is happening at a pace.

unparalleled at any other time of life. Here's another person getting a handle on the brain of a toddler. If we just look at the number of cells and the number of connections or synapses that those cells are making, a young infant way outnumbers an older individual. Nim Tottenham is a professor of psychology at Columbia University and she runs a lab studying how human emotions develop. What happens early in life is that the brain overproduces cells and overproduces synapses.

You can imagine an untamed rosebush in your backyard. And then systematically throughout childhood, the brain is pruning back some of those connections. Take a look. There it is. The ever-changing brain of a child. Overproducing cells and synapses which store and then connect memories. They learn patterns, process information.

And it's experience that determines which connections are pruned, which are strengthened, which memories are easily accessible and which patterns become the most important. We say that the brain is highly plastic early in life. That means the brain is really changeable. It's really responsive to the environment. Since the beginning of time, people have been thinking about...

nature versus nurture, right? It's really impossible to separate them. But when it comes to humans relative to other species, The evidence seems to suggest that the scale is definitely tilt more towards the brain expecting the environment to do a lot of that sculpting.

Looking into the brain can feel like a magic mirror into who we are. But I think all neuroscientists would be the first to warn you that that's not necessarily the case. Because sure, we can see a scan of a brain. But what those images mean... Well, that still needs to be interpreted and inferred by the scientist. Take this example. A very classic theory in neuroscience is that the brain has set circuits that are the same in everyone.

So let's say that you run an experiment showing people something to make them happy. You show them a laughing child or a video of a sneezing panda or whatever, and parts of the brain will light up in reaction. They might be similar parts of the brain, even the same parts of the brain, and that similarity might infer a reaction that is shaped by genetics, something hardwired in all of us. This, you could say, aha, this is where happiness is.

But is that the case? How similar are our brains, really? Well, as you're going to see over the series, the brain of a child is a really good place to examine all of this because the earlier you get to a brain, the less experience the world it's had. A child doing pretty much anything is strengthening and pruning connections. This constant moulding, adapting, it's called brain plasticity.

And in humans, it looks like this is a process that can take over two decades. There's got to be a big payoff. And one argument that many scientists find compelling is that the payoff is you're affording the child. a long childhood, and childhood is synonymous with brain plasticity.

This plasticity is not just about learning to play the oboe or tie your laces, speak different languages. It's also about the tools for surviving our encounters with the rest of our incredibly social species. It's about our emotions. So we can think about caregivers as really providing this external... scaffolding in a way to the human infant's brain during a time when it's busy learning about the environment, but still really in need of that mature structure to ensure that.

The system is developing in a way that makes sense for the environment that we're bringing it up in. So the relationship a child has to their caregivers is integral to their future. You might even say to their happiness. I mean, you tell me. If you were to imagine a happy child, what do you see? Eyes wide? Smiling face, perhaps? Laughter? Jumping? And what do you do when you're happy? What does it feel like?

Is it fleeting? Is it an overarching thing for you? Is it buzzy in the fingertips? Or maybe like a low hum through the whole body? Can you pin it down? Could you put it in writing?

Hundreds of years ago, on an August day in Philadelphia, 56 men and their companions hurried into a grand room in what was known then as the Pennsylvania State House. It was going to be a momentous few days. So in 1776, the American colonies sat down and wrote the Declaration of Independence. They were there to finalise and sign a vision for the future of America. Many things went into this declaration.

including the word happiness. They said that everyone had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And so that is foundational to one of the great documents of Western history, the pursuit of happiness. We can look on this now, these words, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and maybe feel quite warm about that. How good of them to include the idea that people should be happy. And I think that is...

potentially misunderstood as being about the pursuit of smiley face you know the pursuit of feeling happy all the time and in that document at least that is not what it meant. Happiness is a slippery customer. It hasn't always meant the same thing. The kind of happiness that the founding fathers of the United States had in mind was what we might call kind of flourishing or good fortune. It's about doing well in life. It's not very emotional at all.

Talking to historians of emotions like this man, Thomas Dixon, is fascinating, but also a little confronting. By looking back, we can assess where we are today with our understanding of emotions and what they even are. It puts the humanity back into the whole subject and asks what was it like to grieve in the Middle Ages? What was it like to feel joy during the French Revolution? This idea of the word happiness not being emotional.

is really, really alien to us today. I think it's since approximately the 1960s that in Western culture, there's been a preoccupation with happiness as an aim of life. And that... was part of this broad trend towards interest in feelings and your own feelings, which would include but not be limited to happiness. The word happiness went into the Declaration of Independence nearly 250 years ago.

And countries are still zoning in on the word. In 2013, amidst economic turmoil, the then president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, launched a vice ministry of supreme social happiness. He said it was aimed at reducing poverty. In the United Arab Emirates, they have the Ministry of Happiness. And you can't have missed the headlines that regularly come out about the world's happiest countries. I mean, how often have you rolled your eyes at Finland topping the charts yet again?

Surveys measuring the happiness of citizens can have this kind of Orwellian feel to them. On one hand, great that a government is measuring ideas of well-being, but some are really wary of a type of happiness policing.

especially with something that is so hard to measure. We can be critical of governments attempting to measure happiness, but it's a difficult line to tread, isn't it? Because in the world of parenting, something quite similar has happened. There's this pressure to keep your children happy within every moment. I feel like I am constantly bombarded with different methods or foods or toys to keep my child happy.

Time in nature, time with dad, being a little bit squashed under a pillow, blowing in a tube. It is a never-ending feed of what? I mean, what does make them happy? I say, mommy and daddy. Ted, what makes you happy? Stay the whole day with mama. A lollipop. You could do anything for a lollipop. Young children know how to be happy. Just give them what they want. No, that's actually not the answer. This is Tova Klein, and she's been thinking about the experience of the child for decades.

I was a child and then I grew out of it. And I had this thought often as I was growing up of like, the adults don't really understand us. Until very recently, she was the longtime director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development in New York City, known as the Toddler Whisperer. She's also the author of How Toddlers Thrive and Raising Resilience.

She knows that the pursuit of happiness in kids is an impossible task. Their emotions are up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. Like sometimes people say, oh, toddlers are moody. which has, you know, like a negative connotation. The reason that they're moody is because those emotions are new and their brain is new at it and not good at it yet. And the parent is the one there.

doing what we call regulating them, right? But there's a lot of intense emotion for a parent. So here's a good example of how the toddler world from the toddler point of view is so different than our adult world. Okay, so a toddler could be having a great day, a lovely time. They are happy. But then the hour hand starts to dip down past the six, back up to the seven. And here comes bedtime. For the adult, it's like, good night. I'm done. I need a break. I need my downtime.

We have got pasta on the brain. We've got some last minute work to do. We're wondering if the faithfuls are going to catch a traitor. But for the toddler, going to sleep and good night is goodbye. It's separation. once again. And often they've separated during the day. So this is another goodbye at the end of the day when it's dark. Because with happiness and security inevitably comes separation.

Missing. Loss. So we often remind them, you're going to sleep, mommy's going to sleep, daddy's going to sleep, and I'll see you in the morning. I always do. And I remind parents, You need to remind them there's going to be this coming back together. The learning about the emotional rhythms of the world is huge. The lows can be really low, but the highs are so high.

But really what makes a toddler happy is comfort, safety. It's a sense of trust. If I mess up, which toddlers do all the time because they don't really know how to live in our world yet. It's our role to help children through the hard parts, through the negative feelings. So happiness is wrapped up in difficulty too. And that's okay. It's inevitable.

as long as ultimately they feel secure, they know someone is there for them. Loads of research has shown that this can have a very protective effect for children going through difficult times or experiencing trauma. So that is the big, vital picture.

But then what about being a parent, which in itself can be a pretty difficult, tiring experience? India, when an African is moving to the Western world. However educated, however privileged, you just imagine life is going to be better. Parenting, everything is going to be easy.

Patience Okumu is a lawyer, an award-winning journalist and an activist. Last year, she was offered a dream job and she moved her family of four from Uganda to Switzerland. It was supposed to be perfect. I was supposed to raise... good family in Switzerland. But the reality was anything but a happy experience. I heard about it when I read an article she wrote for The Guardian early in 2025.

I wrote the article from a point of exhaustion from trying to get my life together without the support systems that I am used to in Uganda. And from a point of shock, just the realization that women in the Western world have been raising their children without the systems that I have taken for granted for so long.

Check this out. Evidence from across loads of countries suggests that parents today are spending a lot more time with their kids than they did 50 years ago, despite participation in the workforce being a lot higher. So the strains... OPEC. It's just a certain kind of servitude when it comes to the nuclear family. In Uganda, you know, you'd have your aunties. I stay near my mom. I drop my children there anytime. It's normal for you to knock at the neighbors without an appointment.

You don't even need to be going somewhere important. You can say, I'm going to the saloon to do my hair. Here are my five children. Please watch them. Oh, yes. That's amazing. There are statistics every day about how hard it is for mothers in Africa. They're carrying heavy loads. But there is also some good practices, especially when it comes to supporting mothers.

Oh, I wish I felt that more here. I don't that much, even though in my own small way, I try to create it. I keep trying to... this sounds terrible I keep trying to offload my baby onto randomers in the park in that like I've got the older boy and he's like I need a poo and I'm in the park and you've got a baby and um I just choose a friendly looking granny and I'm like he'll be fine

Hold the baby. And they will. They love it. They absolutely love it. But they always look really shocked, to be honest. For you, India, you see you're disrupting that system that thinks babies are for one woman only. I feel like if this goes out on air, I might get arrested or something. Am I going to get arrested?

Good luck with that. This lack of support that patients identified is not unique to Switzerland. We see it across many countries in the global north, where something called the parenting Happiness Gap has been recorded. I'm Camila Michelski. I'm an epidemiologist by trade and I work at the Happiness Research Institute. The Happiness Research Institute. What a name.

It's an independent think tank. It's based in Denmark, which coincidentally is one of the apparently happiest countries in the world. What's it like inside?

wanted to come and visit our budgets didn't stretch we will have sometimes just people pop into the office because they're also just curious and i think we always disappoint them it's just an office with desks i crunch numbers i'm an analyst most of the day So first question to her is obviously, why even have an institute dedicated to happiness?

I think there's like a big trend where happiness is presented as like an individual burden for us to pursue our own happiness. I think that's true to some extent, but as the happiness research shows us. So much of how happy we are in life is determined by our environmental conditions. So like what policies our government can have, what neighborhood we live in, who we're married to, what job we have. So I always like to present.

happiness and the pursuit of happiness as like a community burden tell me about the parenting happiness gap we're really interested in this is it real is it global what's going on Yes. So the parenting happiness gap, it is real. And it's somewhat global. About 10 years ago, the World Happiness Report, which is this annual publication ranking countries by their measures of well-being.

It dedicated a chapter of the report to parental happiness. Of the 100 or so countries surveyed, about two-thirds of them... have this gap, wherein parents tend to score a little bit lower in terms of happiness than people who aren't parents. It's interesting because I think people tend to associate parenthood with a lot of joy.

And yet there's this gap, and it makes sense. The additional financial stress, the loss of time, sleep, maybe the loss of self. Now, the gap isn't always huge in countries, and it's not always even there.

So what are some countries doing right? We see trends like where the gap is smallest or non-existent in countries where they are really supportive. parental leave policies. And we know that if people are supported, whether that's institutionally or socially because of, you know, multi-generational households or cultures where neighbors help out with child care a lot.

That gap isn't there. Importantly, what I'm hearing is it's not about the kids. Exactly that. Because, you know, you can talk about a parenting gap, happiness gap, and some people might say, oh, well. your bed you chose to lie in it get on with it parenting's hard but actually genuinely without the support proper support it's just really hard full stop and we have the evidence and the data to show us that

Yeah, that's like the crux of why happiness research. It's exactly this. We find the gaps and the story doesn't end there. It's then about, well, how do we close this? Like, well, if we introduce these similar policies, we have evidence to show the gap would close. In the end, living in Europe just became too much for patience and her husband. We decided that he should return.

to Uganda with the kids where they can be with the people who can contribute to raising them who can contribute to shaping them who can create that village that community They're going to thrive because they are surrounded by people and they are happier. So, happiness. An internal, fleeting feeling. Something for us to pursue.

or the role of governments and society. I think it's helpful to know that whilst this word is a soft, cosy blanket to snuggle into, it's also a suffocatingly hot duvet that we should just chuck off when it all gets too much. Happiness's meaning has morphed. It's been used as a tool to help but also direct people, both as kids and parents.

We know those first five years are so important and our kids' happiness can feel like the weight of the world. It is a word that can constrain us as much as liberators. Though perhaps in that respect... It's not a scratch on our next emotion. Next time, we're in the hair-raising, heart-thumping world of fear and tiptoeing through a house of mirrors to show you an image of the emotional brain. that might turn your world upside down. I'm India Akson, and you've been listening to Child.

If you want to be notified when the next episode drops, just subscribe to Child on BBC Sounds and make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. A couple of questions for you, if you don't mind. So how much do you think you really know about the menstrual cycle? Beyond the period bit. Did you know, par exemplar, that the hormone oestrogen makes you smell better?

Or that your hormones change the way your brain works hour by hour. And that you could even biohack them to maybe, I don't know, bag a job or run a PB. Nope. Well, that's not surprising, you're not alone there. The mysterious workings of the womb have been a dark secret for centuries. The ancient Greeks thought the womb was a mischievous moving creature that wreaked havoc on the body. And the Victorians, well...

They thought that if you examined a woman's vagina, she would devour you in a mad fit of sexual rage. As you can see, we are really on the back foot here. All of us. I'm India Rackson, and when I found out about the amazing things that happen in our wombs and brains through the cycle, my mind was so blown that we got to work making this podcast. 28-ish days later for BBC Radio 4.

28 episodes, each charting every day of the very approximate 28-day cycle. It looks at the science of our bodies and the way that we've been treated through history and discovers how understanding our cycle can change our lives. Fancy. Striding back into your powerful menstruating self. Me too. And you can listen to 28-ish days later now on BBC Sounds.