What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you could invest in just one thing that would help you and your family thrive, where would you put your time and energy?
These questions might seem simple, but their answers hold profound implications for how we live our lives and raise our children.
Science gives us a surprisingly clear answer: the quality of our relationships matters more than almost anything else.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938, represents the longest investigation into adult life ever conducted.
Over the decades, these researchers studied every major domain of life: mental health, physical health, work, relationships, and ageing.
After following thousands of people from their teens through their eighties and nineties, examining data from their twenties, thirties, and forties to predict who would stay healthy and live longest, the researchers discovered something remarkable.
The best predictor of who would live a happy, healthy life wasn’t blood pressure. It wasn’t cholesterol levels. It was the quality of their connections with other people.
The people who were more connected to others stayed healthier and were happier throughout their lives. And it wasn’t simply about seeing more people each week.
It was about having warmer, more meaningful connections. Quality trumped quantity in every measure that mattered.
It makes sense that warmer relationships can make us happier, but how can they also help to protect us from various diseases and health conditions?
As other studies began finding the same patterns, scientists started understanding the powerful biological pathways through which human connection influences our health.
Much of it relates to stress regulation: good relationships help us to find balance and manage the inevitable stresses of life, preventing them from breaking down our bodies over time.
The implications extend across generations. People who developed strong social and emotional skills in childhood maintained warmer connections with their spouses six decades later, even into their eighties and nineties.
This demonstrates that these skills are not only teachable but have remarkably long-lasting effects.
Teaching children to better understand both their inner and outer worlds sets them up for a lifetime of healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
But if connection is the key to human thriving, we face a concerning reality: every social trend is moving in the opposite direction.
For the past 70 years, we have been investing less and less in each other. We are less likely to have dinner together as a family – something we know has an enormous impact on child development. We are less likely to have friends over. We are less likely to join clubs and community groups.
Perhaps most troubling of all, more people than ever report having no one they can confide in about what is going on in their life.
We live increasingly lonelier lives, which research shows is toxic to human health, and it’s our young people (aged 16 to 24) that report being the loneliest of all – the very generation that should be forming the relationships that will sustain them throughout life.
While new technology has many benefits, we must also acknowledge that it plays a complex and often troubling role in this epidemic of disconnection.
While digital devices promise to keep us connected, they frequently do the opposite. Our smartphones, tablets, and computers have become sources of constant distraction, fragmenting our focus and preventing us from giving others the undivided attention that relationships require.
We sit together in the same room while our minds are scattered across dozens of apps, notifications, and feeds. We’re physically present but mentally absent, unable to fully engage with the people right in front of us.
This technological interference strikes at something fundamental: our undivided attention is the most precious gift we can give another person. Yet, increasingly, it’s the most difficult gift to offer.
When we check our phones during conversations, scroll through social media during family dinners, or respond to e-mails while playing with our children, we’re not just being distracted, we are withdrawing the basic form of love that human connection requires.
The challenge is particularly acute for today’s babies and young children who have been born into a world immersed in digital technology.
Neuroscience has shown us that early childhood is the golden opportunity to build strong foundations for future life outcomes.
Pregnancy to the age of five is the fastest and most profound period of brain development in our lives, with an astonishing 1,000,000 new neural connections being formed every second.
The brains of babies and young children are at their most malleable and open to change, as they constantly adapt to their interactions with the outside world.
Children who are raised in environments rooted in love, safety and dignity, are better able to develop the social and emotional scaffolding required to form healthy relationships, resolve conflict and grow into adults capable of building loving partnerships, families and communities themselves.
Ultimately, by nurturing the development of social and emotional skills in early life, we will be equipping children with the capacity to love and be loved.
These skills will influence their success far more than academic achievements alone and will touch every part of their lives, from how they form friendships, to how they raise their own children, to their values and the decisions they make.
Honing these skills could be transformative as we look to the future and imagine a very different world.
The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood’s Shaping Us Framework and the series of animated films launched this summer are designed to showcase the many ways we can support the development of the social and emotional skills in our youngest children.
These films can help everyone understand the remarkable value of routine interactions in forming loving relationships.
They celebrate the everyday moments of connection, shared in every story, cuddle and whispered word of encouragement.
Providing this kind of nurturing environment is not always easy. It is important to acknowledge that adults are best able to care for a child when they have good social and emotional skills themselves; when they are healthy and have the resources and assistance they need.
Those who have experienced significant adversity, including in their own childhoods, may understandably need more support.
Likewise, it is a greater challenge for those facing difficult personal circumstances, whether financial, or due to poor health or social isolation.
But just as science is confirming the lifelong importance of connections, we exist in a world that is more distracted than ever.
For babies and young children, the pull of screens will be even stronger than for older children and adults, the habits more deeply ingrained as they grow.
Yet this is precisely the period when children should start developing the social and emotional skills that will serve them throughout life.
We’re raising a generation that may be more “connected” than any in history while simultaneously being more isolated, more lonely, and less equipped to form the warm, meaningful relationships that research tells us are the foundation of a healthy life.
So, what are we to do about these trends driving us away from human connection?
The answer begins with recognising that attention is something we can choose to give each other in every moment – at home, at work, in our communities.
It requires conscious effort to be fully present with the people we care about. It means protecting sacred spaces for genuine connection: family dinners, conversations, moments of genuine eye contact and engaged listening.
For parents, it means understanding that the foundations for this are laid at a remarkably young age – in fact, before we are even born and in the earliest weeks and months of our lives when our brains undergo the fastest and most profound period of brain development.
It means modeling these behaviors for our babies and children and teaching them skills they will need to navigate a world filled with technological distractions.
It means helping them understand that true connection requires presence, that relationships need tending, and that the quality of their connections will shape not just their happiness but their health for decades to come.
These social and emotional skills are teachable, and teaching children to better understand both their inner and outer worlds and how to best manage them sets them up for a lifetime of more loving and more fulfilling relationships.
This may be the most important investment we can make in ourselves, our families and in the future of humankind
The evidence is clear: if you could invest in just one thing to help you and your family thrive, invest in the relationships you have with each other.
This is not just about creating a more loving environment for our children. It’s about creating a more loving world. And that begins with a simple, deliberate act.
Look the people you care about in the eye and be fully there – because that is where love begins.
For babies and children who are raised in attentive and loving environments are better able to develop the social and emotional skills that will allow them to grow into adults capable of building loving partnerships, families, communities.
This is our children’s greatest inheritance.
