Exclusive: What do children need to be happy?

What do children need to be happy?

Shonette Bason-Wood, one of the best motivational speakers for teachers in UK was in Bucharest and delivered a true, most simple answer.

“Children need happy adults”, the happiness speaker told the early years education conference 2016: HAPPINESS IS LEARNT IN CHILDHOOD organized by Acorns Foundation in Bucharest during May 11-13.

“The problem is that many adults aren’t happy and the main challenge of the educational system is to make the staff working with children be happy. Parents also need to be happy because it’s not easy to be a parent in the modern world,” Shonette told Romania Journal, who is among the conference’s media partners.

The famous British speaker believes that when both teachers and parents are happy and deliver the child with this state of mind, the child “will thrive more than never before”.

Shonette advised Romanian teachers “to have a look out on what other people are engaged in” and look out in the world via social media channels like Twitter and Facebook and also “to share their own good practice and show what great things they do in Romania.”

And with #spreadthehappiness as her job, Shonette does know how to make you feel happy. She came from UK, where she teaches 5-year-old kids, to Bucharest on Thursday to lecture Romanian teachers, carers and teacher assistants or psychologists about the miracles of just being happy during the day, about how to fight so called “lemon soakers” (the persons around us who are soaking the energy out of us). “I am here to give you lots of exciting ideas and techniques and also to give you a little bit of happiness therapy,” she told the audience gathered at the Capitol Hotel on a Thursday little bit rainy morning.

Shonette’s main idea was that sometimes the old traditional education might be out of date and that teachers must train and educate children with the kids’ own stuff and tools so that the educational goal should be efficient in the end.

And that’s perfectly available also for teenagers who are now living in a completely different world than us, where to twit or to google seem to be the verbs in the pipeline.

“The world is very different now and the children that we working with are mentally developing very differently,” the British trainer said.

Shonette believes that many people around us can soak your happiness, like husbands, boyfriends, bosses, mothers-in-law or even mothers, grandmothers or your own children, and amid all these it’s important you stay happy so that you spread your joyful state of mind to others and don’t let anything and anyone gloom your day.

According to Shonette Bason-Wood, it’s vital for a teacher to know how to become and stay happy throughout the working hours, as no educator watching the clock all the time and praying for the time to go by is worth working with children.

“My belief about education is that the people working with children have to be happy in the first instance, otherwise the children are not going to thrive (…) The happier the kids’ environment is the more chances are they are going to thrive. And that’s not going to happen unless you are happy,” the UK speaker confessed, also revealing that when ‘you lose your happiness your are ten years older.’

And what are the best ways to learn how to be happy than to actually act like a happy person?

Shonette gave the Romanian teachers attending the Acorns’ early years education conference a live interactive lesson where they became the players themselves. She put them measure their happy level on the happiness altimeter, clap their hands, wear moustaches, use the magician rod to chase complaints away, sing merry songs or play dough games (by the way don’t forget about the International Dough Disco Day celebrated on June 9^th).

And one last hint from the nice happy speaker, don’t forget to make your happiness visible to others and thank them for making you happy at a given moment, which is precisely what I am doing right now myself.