News Are you happy?

Happiness is different for everyone, but the feeling comes from within. Many factors influence your sense of happiness, and we were curious to see if the children with a smile on their face in our projects were actually happy.

Using the Children’s Happiness Scale from Children’s Rights Director, we asked 94 children in our special education programs, veranda schools and in the home care setting to answer yes or no to about 20 statements to gain insight into how happy they feel or do not feel. The highest possible score is 4.25 and the lowest is 1.68. A score of 2.88 is considered the average score by researchers. Almost all our children scored slightly above the average, at 3.08.

A large majority of the children (89) said their lives are good right now, while only thirty-six children said they have few worries. Eighty-two children reported having a lot of fun and 86 children said they have friends. Just under half of the children (43) indicated that many people are still prejudiced about their abilities and 23 children indicated that they are bullied. Seventy children are satisfied with the support they receive from their families and 73 children said they are proud of themselves.

This does of course only capture how they felt at the time and perhaps the questionnaire should be adapted to the context of Bangladesh even more, but we are happy to see that the children are happy in general and about their lives.