Happiness, Happiness, the greatest gift that I posses
Posted by qmonkey on November 13, 2007
(Bonus points for anyone who knows the toothly comic who made the song famous)
Ok, I read the BBC news web site too much, and I watch too many news programs, and get agitated if I go more than a few hours without knowing what new things have happened in the world (or at least what ‘news worthy’ things have happened). I have a problem.
What is obvious, very quickly is that what is considered news worthy is really just a mater of what will get an emotional reaction from the viewers. In short… bad news and scare stories.
ICM did a recent survey for the BBC on family life in Britain, by all accounts it was exhaustive. The problem is that it didn’t give the right result. The right ‘news worthy’ result was of course the tragic decline in society and family life. However Ninety-three percent of us described our family lives as fairly or very happy. More of us considered that our parents did their best for us, thought of our families as close and are optimistic about their futures than felt those ways in previous polls going back decades.
The BBC’s home editor Mark Easton said “I think our expectation was that we would be measuring the extent to which people’s closest relationships were suffering as a result of the decline in traditional family structures. When the results came in, we had a surprise.”
Easton suggests several explanations for the poll’s cheerful findings and the anticipated tale of woe: our standards may have changed; we’re mostly better off; we can travel and telephone more easily, which means that family links can be better maintained. He also remarks on the boom in interest in genealogy and family trees. Perhaps this last point gives a clue to a much bigger reason why 21st-century families say they’re happier: it’s simply that they work harder at it these days.
The political conversation these days seems to be all about making families more stable. But I wonder what this poll says about that. Is stability really the Holy Grail for the family? Maybe flexibility and diversity is really what brings or families happiness.
[There's a wider post needed on the idea of our perception of reality, as given to us by news broadcasters. It's the old adage that everyone thinks the NHS is rubbish, but if you ask 10 people about their ‘personal' experience of the NHS it's usually glowing! TV tells them that it's rubbish, so they think... whoa I must have been really lucky, because I thought it was great! Maybe a similar thing has happened with the family survey.]
