The ‘How To Raise A Happy Genius’ Philosophy

Now that you know how we define a happy genius, it’s time to outline the underlying philosophy behind How To Raise A Happy Genius. Our philosophy is to help every child meet their full potential and become the person they want to become by ensuring that they develop the essential core skills they need to succeed, no matter what field of life they choose to enter, and by giving them the widest variety of opportunities and experiences to help them discover what they want to do with their lives. This gives them the flexibility to change fields, or take advantage of new fields that may open up in the future, rather than remaining on a single, inflexible trajectory throughout their entire life. After all, none of us know what the future may hold, and we need to ensure that we equip our children with the skills they need to be able to respond positively to whatever new opportunities it may arise.

We also firmly believe that the best way to help children develop these core life skills, and so meet their full potential, is not by pushing them in the direction that their parents think they should go, or by forcing them to spend long, tedious hours doing things that they don’t enjoy (which, many will know from their own experiences, is the best way to put any child off doing something for life!) Instead, we think a better approach is to communicate and educate them in a way that is open-ended, so they can decide on the direction they take, and that is as fun as it can possibly be. This ensures that they not only meet their full potential, but that they develop into happy, healthy, well-rounded adults. After all, there is no point in being a success at anything if it doesn’t make you happy!

Finally, we believe that the teaching of many of these core life skills is too important to be left to schools alone. In particular, while schools may be good at teaching traditional academic life skills, such as reading, writing and maths (although we would argue that for some individuals, they are actually pretty bad at this because they do not take into account the different ways in which different children may learn the same skill), they either fail miserably at teaching other types of core life skills, or even worse, fail to even attempt to teach them in the first place. Thus, in order to produce a happy genius, many of these core life skills need to be taught to children alongside traditional education by adults other than their school teachers.

Now, this may sound like a lot of hard work, but there is another aspect to our philosophy. This is that much of this teaching can be done in short bursts, especially at key moments in a child’s development, and that if done correctly, these can have dramatic, life-long impacts on a child’s life. This is based on a concept called Wise Psychological Interventions, but it is something that many people will already have experienced in life: that brief moment when they discovered something that changed their lives forever.

There is nothing particularly new or ground-breaking about this philosophy, but you would be surprised at how many people have either never thought about it, or who do not have the skills to put it into action in a meaningful and effective way. This is not a failure on their part, but instead, it usually reflects how they themselves were raised. In addition, in recent years there has been an increasing movement away from people teaching their own children anything. Instead, they are encouraged to leave all types of teaching to their school teachers. While this may be fine for academic skills, it means that kids are missing out on important life lessons in other crucial areas, and this is something that we believe needs to change if we wish to raise a generation of happy geniuses.

In our next post, we will go into our philosophy in more detail and outline the six key tenets that underlie it.

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About The Author: This post was written by Colin Drysdale, the creator of How To Raise A Happy Genius.

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