Sad at the Happy conference

I went to the Happiness and its Causes conference on Friday afternoon. By the time I had registered and found my way in I just caught the end of Stephen Post's presentation on why giving makes us not only happy, but healthy too. He'd been on the show the day before and he'd been absolutely terrific as a guest. He heads the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, which for completely explicable reasons makes me think of this guy.

After Stephen Post had finished we had 20 minutes of Steve Biddulph. Actually it was supposed to be 20 minutes, it was more like 30 minutes. The first 12 of it was comedy. I didn't know he was funny - but he was very funny - he worked the enormous room like Robin Williams at the Met. He was brilliant. Then we had a bit on how we stuff up the under 5's and tiny bit on how we stuff up the 12-15's. Biddulph has some great lines: A 14 year-old-boy has so much testosterone that he will argue with a road sign! But we didn't hear much on adolescents because he had a fair bit to say about the SIEV-X tragedy and the memorial to it that Biddulph has been a prime mover for. There was even a short video at the end.

It's fair to say that at this point quite a few in the audience were sad at the happy conference. My own sad moment came later because I was struck at the time by how different this gathering was to say, an academic conference. For starters, there was a lot of love in the room - a huge amount of it for Steve Biddulph, but as I discovered later, a lot of love generally. A high baseline of love, you might say.

In that environment, Biddulph said one or two things that are contested. He denigrated 'controlled crying'. The audience was approving, even appreciative, of his position. Not a dissenting word was heard in that great chamber. More on this later.

Now, whatever your views on this issue, there's at least two points of view - hence the controversy. The reason it's quite a big controversy is that it's used a lot by desperate parents who can't get their babies to go to sleep any other way. Opponents of it won't like me acknowledging this technique in any way. But there you go, I've covered it enough as a journalist to know those two things: 1/ It's very controversial. 2/ Lots of people use it anyway.

After lunch, I moderated a panel entitled "Can Children be Educated to be Happy?" On it was Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology; Stephen Meek, the Principal of Geelong Grammar, which is using Seligman's techniques in the school; Michael Carr-Gregg, the adolescent psychologist; and Anna Patty, who is Education Editor at the Sydney Morning Herald. My job was to be a bit like Parkinson toward the end of his show - keep the conversation moving and make sure that everyone gets to speak.

Well the audience loved a lot of what Martin Seligman had to say. It loved what Stephen Meek had to say. And it loved the vast majority of what Michael Carr-Gregg had to say. But it did not like what Anna Patty had to say at all. She's a journalist and was there to give her broader based perspective and perhaps inject a bit of scepticism into the discussion. After all, what we're talking about - trying to inculcate resilience, an engaged life and well-being into young minds at school - is still an experiment. What Seligman and Meek are doing at Geelong Grammar is hugely ambitious and could result in all schooling being reconsidered, with well-being becoming a key educational outcome. That would be amazing. But nobody's done this yet and so we don't know if it will work, how well or whether there will be unintended consequences.

Anna Patty pointed some of this out and the audience did not like it. They did not like it a bit. Some of them made clear their position in a way completely unlike the rapturous applause we heard earlier for Steve Biddulph. In her closing remarks, there were boos and some yelling. I was just wondering if I should intervene when it stopped.

That was the moment when I was sad at the happy conference.