Children Are the Happiest: A Myth?

(Here I will categorically exclude the children who suffer dishonorably and go through the most mortifying days of their lives. They are in my prayers and will forever be.)

I was watching a few street children playing with mud and smudging each other. I thought, they were the happiest creatures on earth today. Free, uninhibited and spontaneous. But then, that was just an onlooker's perspective and I had little idea what was going on in their minds! Even kids have their happy and sad times. They too have their share of down moments. They too go through peer pressure, pressures of task load and an incessant torture to do well in exams. And today, they are even a few steps ahead of our times. They have to have the right dress, right gadgets, right food, and sometimes the right hair day! They are losing their childhood so fast! But do they really know what bleak moments of life lead to the do-not-exist-kind of state! They don't. Then how could they be the happiest?

Do you really think that a kid knows what is it to become happy? Happiness to them is just a paper boat or being able to play in the sun or even sucking the cheapest lollipop. As a kid, how badly I wanted to grow up fast to earn my own money and become a doctor and help others! My friend wanted to become a pilot and fly in the sky!

It would be a matter of mere speculation that children are the happiest. Its only when that they grow up and know what it all takes to live it, that they realize the true meaning of happiness. Its then that they feel that they were better off as kids! Generally speaking and keeping aside all those children who live a degrading life, childhood may be the most secure and safe, but children might not just feel that happiness! We adults are in a position to compare for we have lived it all. A child cannot delineate for he has only seen the brighter side of it. Childhood is bliss and kids are relatively stress free, care free and are uninhibited. True! But how does that make them the happiest? We have to know the both sides of life, both happy and sad times to actually become the happiest. We may be blessed with most blissful childhoods, we may have all happy things on earth but as a child we cannot gauze at the depth of happiness for we have not seen the big bad world.

And that's essentially a grownup's point of view!