In today’s fast-paced, high-pressure world, the mental health and well-being of our children has never been more important. Schools have traditionally focused on academic skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, many educators are realizing that teaching skills related to happiness, life satisfaction, and emotional intelligence are just as crucial for preparing students for success. The concept of teaching happiness in schools may sound a bit strange at first. How can you teach something as subjective and personal as happiness? The key is focusing not on superficial notions of happiness as just feeling good or being cheerful. Rather, the skills that lead to deeper life satisfaction, resilience, strong relationships, and flourishing as a human being. These are skills that can be taught, practiced, and refined over time through systematic instruction, just like we teach academic skills. Just like reading, writing, and math, they provide foundational capabilities that will benefit students for the rest of their lives in all areas - academic performance, career success, relationships, and overall well-being. So what exactly are these crucial “happiness skills” that more schools should be prioritizing? Here are some of the key ones:
Emotional Intelligence
  The ability to recognize, understand, manage, and reason with emotions. This includes skills like being able to label one’s emotions accurately, regulate intense emotions, communicate feelings effectively, and consider others’ perspectives and emotions. Having a well-developed emotional vocabulary and high emotional granularity is important.
Self-Awareness
 Closely tied to emotional intelligence, self-awareness involves knowing one’s strengths, weaknesses, thought patterns, values, and drivers of behavior. A self-aware student can step back, reflect, analyze their responses, and course-correct. They understand what situations tend to trigger them and how to respond skillfully.
Growth Mindset
 The understanding that abilities and intelligence aren’t fixed, but can grow with effort, perseverance, trying new strategies, and learning from setbacks. Students with a growth mindset aren’t discouraged by failure, but view it as a chance to develop further. They believe in their potential for growth.
Optimism
 Optimism involves developing positive, resilient attitudes and expectations that make it easier to bounce back from adversity and persist through challenges. Optimistic students have an inner buffer against anxiety, depression, and hopelessness.
Gratitude
 The ability to appreciate the good things in life, the world around us, and the people who contribute positively. Gratitude helps foster happiness by shifting attention away from what’s lacking to what is present and fulfilling. 
Mindfulness
 Mindfulness simply means intentionally paying attention to the present moment in a non-judgmental way. It helps reduce rumination and anxiety about the future or past. Kids learn to be focused and calm, yet alert and aware. Mindfulness builds resilience.
Positive Relationships
 Strong, caring relationships with family, friends, mentors, and community are one of the greatest predictors of life satisfaction. Teaching communication skills, empathy, conflict resolution, and how to establish healthy bonds is key.
Meaning & Purpose
 Understanding what provides genuine meaning and matters to one’s existence. Learning about values, and causes greater than oneself, and cultivating an inspiring vision for the future. Finding uplifting reasons to apply oneself.
By systematically teaching these research-backed skills and mindsets, schools can go far beyond just imparting academic content knowledge. They can shape students’ whole perspectives, patterns of thought, drive, and vision for how they wish to travel the course of their lives. Of course, this isn’t meant to replace core academic instruction but to supercharge and supplement it. Studies show that happiness skills and traits like optimism, gratitude, growth mindset, etc. are correlated with improved academic achievement, test scores, grades, and engagement. Happy, confident kids who know their strengths and face challenges resiliently simply learn better. But the benefits go far beyond just academic performance. These lessons can serve as preventive measures against childhood depression, anxiety, bullying, substance abuse, and other mental health issues. They provide tools to flourish as healthy, caring, ethical people who have meaningful life paths. The positive effects can cascade for decades, making students more likely to have thriving relationships, find uplifting work, become engaged community members, and be sources of light for those around them. In this way, prioritizing happiness skills creates a better society for everyone.
  Teaching these skills is something that needs to be woven into everything a school does - not just in a weekly lesson or class. It requires rethinking how instruction is delivered, modeling behaviors, and truly embodying the principles in the overall culture and approach. For example, a mindfulness practice like breath work or meditation could start each morning to instill present-moment awareness. Students can be encouraged to keep gratitude journals. Teachers can provide narrative feedback focused on acknowledging growth, effort, and progress - not just grades.
 Social-emotional learning programs and curricula can explicitly provide instruction and opportunities to practice skills like emotion regulation, perspective-taking, and conflict resolution. Community service, purpose exploration, and ethics discussions can help instill meaning. In group work, team charters can articulate shared values and processes for dealing with challenges constructively. Schedule policies can encourage resilience by celebrating mistakes as learning opportunities. Books read and discussed in class can feature characters modeling key traits. Outside of academics, happiness habits can be encouraged through schoolwide challenges or “well-being weeks.” Poster campaigns can prime certain mindsets. Assemblies and guest speakers can inspire. And of course, teachers and staff must deeply embody the skills themselves. Crucially, any skills taught should be specific, measurable, and evidence-based - not just vague abstractions about feeling good. Applications in the classroom must be tangible, observable, and reinforced through accounting, scaffolded practice, and guidance for all students. Of course, implementing such a comprehensive program of happiness skills instruction would require investing significant time, energy, resources, and training. But the potential benefits make it well worth prioritizing. Just imagine future generations going forth into the world equipped not just with knowledge and competencies, but with the foundational emotional skill sets required to truly thrive. Kids growing up resilient, appreciative, emotionally aware, and purposeful.
 Happiness skills aren’t nicety - in many ways, they are the most essential skills of all. For individuals and societies to flourish, we must teach our youth how to attain and maintain positive mental health and life satisfaction with as much vigor as we instill any academic abilities. Schools have the power to raise truly accomplished human beings - both capable and good-hearted. It’s time we embrace happiness skills as an indispensable part of the curriculum and a core obligation in education.