I have been obsessed about understanding the deeper meaning of life and especially in understanding what makes life happy and meaningful. After years of reading on the subject, here is a story that I feel illustrates my learning on the subject in the most simple way.

Two men graduate from Harvard. One of them dreams of becoming a writer. During the Second World War he keeps a diary, and he plans to turn it into a book someday. But his mother falls ill, so he goes home. He becomes a teacher.

The other man does exactly what we hope our own children will do. He builds a serious career in law. He earns the name, the status and the money, everything we usually mean when we say someone “made it.”

Now the question: which of them was happier in life?

The two men

Both were participants in the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938 and has followed its participants for more than 85 years. Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, who now lead the study, tell their story in a book called The Good Life. They call the lawyer John Marsden and the teacher Leo DeMarco (the names are changed to protect their privacy).

John was far more successful by every conventional measure. Yet he reported feeling disconnected and sad for much of his life. He was one of the least happy men in the study. His marriage was a struggle, his bond with his children was strained, and his career came first.

Leo earned much less, and he never wrote his book. But he was one of the study’s happiest men. He had a purpose. The authors write that Leo found his work meaningful specifically because he took pleasure in the benefit others got from his teaching. And his relationships kept growing: with his mother, his wife, his children, and his students.

What the study actually found

The central finding of the Harvard study is stated almost embarrassingly plainly: good relationships are what keep us happier and healthier. Not career success. Not income. Not status. Waldinger’s own short definition of a good life is “being engaged in activities I care about with people I care about.”

The uncomfortable question

I write a lot about children in India, and I keep returning to what we put at the centre of their lives. Marks. Rank. Percentile. Package. All of it matters, and I would never argue otherwise. But how much time do we spend teaching our children how to be in a relationship with other people? Are we teaching them to be happy, or only to be successful?

John had every one of the things we are working so hard to give our children. What he did not have, in the places that counted, was people.

The good news is that relationships are a skill, and a skill can be taught. Here are four ways to start, drawn from the study’s own findings and from how Waldinger, Schulz and other researchers talk about them.

Strategy one: Be the one steady adult who cares deeply about them

Waldinger, citing the developmental researcher Michael Rutter, says a child needs at least one consistent, caring adult who is “crazy about them.” That is the foundation. A child who knows they are loved without conditions learns that relationships are safe, and that is the starting point for every other relationship they will have.

The book makes a related point: as children, we learn from our families how to handle emotions. So the second half of this strategy is modelling. Children copy what they see far more than what they are told. Let them watch you call an old friend, visit a grandparent, or apologise first after an argument. If every conversation they see is about work and money, that is what they will learn matters.

Strategy two: Protect regular, screen-light time together

The authors recommend regularly set family time, such as shared meals, or video calls if you live apart. They also suggest minimising the damage of screens by prioritising communication over browsing and creating screen-free time.

Choose something small and keep it. One meal a day with phones in another room. Fifteen minutes before bed that belong only to your child, with no agenda and no homework talk. Regularity matters more than length. Children come to trust time that is reliably theirs.

Strategy three: Teach curiosity, and reaching out first

Waldinger encourages staying curious even with people you know well, with a question such as “What’s here that I have never noticed before?” Questions tell people you are interested in them. The authors also suggest paying attention to the people you already see regularly but don’t know well, and being open to the possibility that they will surprise you.

Ask your child one real question every day, and listen to the whole answer. “What was the best part of school today?” is better than “How were your marks?” Then give them small reaching-out tasks. Ask them to spend time with their dadaji/dadiji/nanaji/naniji whenever they feel like, or to message a friend they haven’t spoken to in a while. The first message is always the hardest, and children who practise it early find it much easier later.

Strategy four: Teach them to repair, and to be themselves

Disagreements are part of every close relationship. What matters is what happens next. Waldinger says the relationships people value most are the ones where they feel they don’t have to stifle, suppress or hide parts of themselves, and that arguments are fine as long as you still feel respected. The authors also encourage leaning into vulnerability rather than hiding your feelings during conflict.

When your child fights with a friend or a sibling, don’t only settle the argument. Help them find words for what they felt (“I felt left out”), and show them how to apologise and move on. Do it yourself too: when you lose your temper, come back later and say “I’m sorry I shouted.” A child who learns that a relationship can survive a fight will not be afraid of closeness.

Why this matters

Leo Eventually never wrote his book. His life turned out to be the thing worth writing about, because of the people in it.

If a Harvard graduate can reach the top of his profession and still end up lonely, then success alone cannot be our goal for our children. It can be one of the goals, and a good one. But a child who grows up able to love, to ask, and to reach out has something no rank list will ever show.

Three books, if you want to go further

The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz is the source of this story, and the best place to start. It is accessible, warm, and backed by more long-term data than almost anything else on happiness.

The Happiness Files by Arthur C. Brooks collects short, practical lessons on work and life from a Harvard scholar of happiness.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Read the first half, Frankl’s account of his years in concentration camps. It is a powerful look at why having a purpose, and people to live for, can carry a person through the worst conditions.

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References

Brooks, A. C. (2025). The happiness files.

Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). Man’s search for meaning (Part One: Experiences in a concentration camp). Beacon Press.

Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.

Robert Waldinger. Author talks: the world’s longest study of adult development finds the key to happy living (study start in 1938, cohorts, sample limits).

Robert Waldinger. Forget regret: how to have a happy life (definition of a good life).

Rise with Drew. Lessons from the Harvard study of happiness and A Wealth of Common Sense, post on the Harvard study(John Marsden and Leo DeMarco).

Tricycle. Robert Waldinger on happiness (the consistent caring adult, curiosity).

Shortform. Summary of The Good Life (family time, screens, attention, curiosity; secondary summary, to be checked against the book).

If you were born in the 80s, 90s or before in India, this will sound familiar: a teacher’s danda across the palm, a parent’s chappal reaching for you mid-argument. It wasn’t cruelty, as most of us understood it growing up – it was just discipline. Normal. Expected, even.

I believed that too, for a long time. But the research on this – and there’s a lot of it – tells a very different story.

What the research actually says

The most comprehensive body of work on this question comes from Elizabeth Gershoff, a researcher at Columbia University. Her first major meta-analysis, published in 2002, reviewed 88 studies and found corporal punishment associated with ten negative outcomes in children – increased aggression, poorer mental health, weaker parent-child relationships, poorer moral internalization – against exactly one desirable outcome: increased immediate compliance (Gershoff, 2002).

In 2016, Gershoff and her colleague Andrew Grogan-Kaylor went further, analyzing 75 studies spanning 50 years, 13 countries, and 160,927 children. The finding held: spanking does not improve children’s behavior in the long term. It’s not linked to better moral internalization, not linked to reduced aggression. If anything, it’s linked to worse outcomes across the board (Gershoff & Grogan-Kaylor, 2016).

This is correlational research, not a randomized controlled trial – you can’t ethically randomize which children get hit for a study. But the consistency of the finding across five decades, a dozen-plus countries, and multiple independent research teams is about as strong as correlational evidence gets.

So if punishment doesn’t actually improve behavior – why does it cause harm? The answer lies in how a child’s brain responds to stress.

Not all stress is bad – but some of it is dangerous

I first came across this framework while studying at Harvard myself. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, led by Dr. Jack Shonkoff, has done foundational work on how children’s stress response systems develop. Their framework identifies three distinct types of stress, not a simple good/bad binary:

• Positive stress: brief, manageable challenges such as the first day at a new school, or an injection at the doctor’s office. With a supportive adult nearby, the child’s stress response activates briefly and returns to baseline. This is a normal, even necessary, part of healthy development.
  
• Tolerable stress: more serious difficulties such as the loss of a loved one, or a frightening injury. If it’s time-limited and buffered by a caring relationship, the child’s brain and body recover without lasting damage.
  
• Toxic stress: strong, frequent, or prolonged activation of the stress response – without a supportive relationship to buffer it. This is what causes lasting harm to developing brain architecture (Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, 2020).

Punishment delivered in fear, especially repeated punishment without a secure, connected relationship to buffer it, risks pushing a child’s stress response toward the toxic end of that spectrum – the one Harvard’s own research identifies as damaging, not the manageable kind that’s a normal part of growing up.

Discipline through connection, not punishment

None of this means discipline itself is the problem. Children need boundaries – that part hasn’t changed. What the research actually challenges is the method: punishment versus connection.

Listening to a child. Understanding what they’re actually feeling. Relating to them instead of just correcting them. This is what the evidence points toward as the thing that actually works.

Here’s why the early years matter so much: India’s own National Education Policy 2020 states it plainly, in its opening section – “over 85% of a child’s cumulative brain development occurs prior to the age of 6, indicating the critical importance of appropriate care and stimulation of the brain in the early years” (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2020, Section 1.1).

This is precisely why the policy places such heavy emphasis on Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) as a foundational pillar of India’s education system. Whatever the exact figure, the underlying point holds: the foundational years of a child’s life shape everything that follows. That’s precisely why how we respond to a child in those years – with punishment, or with connection — matters more than almost anything else we do as parents.

Two books worth reading

If you want to go deeper on this, two books are worth your time:

“The Whole-Brain Child” by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson – a genuinely actionable guide to how a child’s brain develops and matures, with practical strategies grounded in neuroscience.

“The Danish Way of Parenting” by Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Dissing Sandahl – an exploration of why Denmark consistently ranks among the happiest countries in the world, and what its parenting culture (built around empathy and connection rather than punishment) might teach the rest of us.

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References

Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University. (2020, January 6). A guide to toxic stress. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/guide/a-guide-to-toxic-stress/

Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviors and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 128(4), 539–579. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.4.539

Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new meta-analyses. Journal of Family Psychology, 30(4), 453–469. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000191

Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. (2020). National Education Policy 2020 (Section 1.1). https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf (The ministry was renamed the Ministry of Education shortly after NEP 2020’s publication, in August 2020.)