Focus on Happiness - Values Education for Children and Young Adults

LVE is a comprehensive values education programme. This innovative and global programme offers teachers and facilitators a variety of experiential values activities and practical methodologies to enable children and young adults to explore and develop 12 key values: Cooperation, Freedom, Happiness, Honesty, Humility, Love, Peace, Respect, Responsibility, Simplicity, Tolerance and Unity. LVE also has special materials for use with parents and caregivers, children affected by war, children affected by earthquakes and street children.

LVE's main series of Living Values Activities books is published by Health Communications, Inc. In each newsletter we bring into focus one of the values explored by LVE, excerpting from this award-winning series selected ideas and activities on each value. In the last edition the focus was on cooperation; this edition focuses on happiness.

Think of the moments in which you have felt full of happiness. What really gives us happiness? What gifts within allow us to give happiness to others? Each one of us explores these questions within our own life. Moments of joy are treasured. Are values the key that opens the door to happiness? Explore the Reflection Points on Happiness below in the light of your own experiences.

Reflection Points from Living Values Activities for Young Adults, Happiness Unit:

Give happiness and take happiness.
When there is love and peace inside, happiness automatically grows.
When there is a feeling of hope and purpose, there is happiness.
Having good wishes for everyone gives happiness inside.
Happiness cannot be bought, sold or bargained for.
Happiness is earned through pure and selfless attitudes and actions.
Happiness of mind is a state of peace in which there is no upheaval or violence.
Kind and constructive words create a happier world.
When one is content with the self, happiness comes automatically.
Happiness follows giving happiness, sorrow follows giving sorrow.
Lasting happiness is a state of contentment within.
When all resources are focused on socio-economic infrastructure at the expense of the development of the character, then priorities in life are misrepresented and there is a gradual erosion of happiness.
Values help people assess priorities and allow for active and preventive measures to be initiated at opportune moments.

You can read an excerpt on Happiness from Living Values: A Guidebook to stimulate thought; please click as indicated below for activities on Happiness for Parents, Children and Young Adults. Young adults may wish to explore a few of the ideas with family or friends while parents may wish to take up some of the activities with their children. And do let us know how you get on or if you've got other experiences or activities you'd like to share!

"Looking at that future of fears and hopes, one cannot eternally remain in the hesitant posture of Hamlet, vacillating between 'to be' and 'not to be.' The future of justice and peace must be conquered by work, by patience, by vigorous enthusiasm, by constant energy, but over and above all by strengthening the moral fibre and force of mankind which this Assembly embodies."

Mr. Leopoldo Benites,
President of the Twenty-Eighth Session OF the UN General Assembly,
September, 1973

Focusing on the Value of Happiness