The belief that children and money will bring people happiness is one of life’s abiding illusions, a Sydney conference attended by 2000 seekers of happiness was told yesterday.

The scientific evidence shows people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy, said Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of the book Stumbling On Happiness. He said people’s happiness goes into steep decline after they have children, and never recovers its old level until the children leave home. As a source of pleasure, playing with one’s offspring rates just above doing housework but below talking with friends, eating, or watching TV, research has shown.

Yet people invest so much time and money in their children, and focus on the fleeting moments of joy they bring, rather than on the long periods of boredom and irritation, that most continue to believe children will bring them happiness, Professor Gilbert said.

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Are you happy with your life? Do you find joy in the things that you do? If not, how would you find joy and happiness? And once you find it, do you think you can keep it and be happy all the time?

An extremely powerful way is to take control of your thoughts; by actively choosing which thoughts to focus on.

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Last month the Journal’s Jonathan Clements that money alone doesn’t buy a lot of happiness. Here, happiness blogger Gretchen Rubin takes a different point of view.

Money can’t make people stay in love, connect with friends or enjoy a hike in the woods. But money, spent wisely, can contribute greatly to happiness.

Recent articles in the news media tackle the money-happiness connection. A study this summer in Science magazine showed that when participants were asked to record the previous day’s activities and describe their moods, being wealthier didn’t have great impact on their moment-to-moment experience.

A different sort of study presents another picture. According to a Pew Research Center 2006 report, the percentage of people who declare themselves “very happy” goes up as family income rises. People were asked: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Twenty five percent of people with incomes of $30,000 or less said they’re “very happy.” That compared with 50% of people with incomes of $150,000 or more.

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Watching those endless reruns of “Friends” and “CSI” may be compromising your happiness.

So says a team of five university professors who devised a scientific method to quantify people’s emotions during certain activities. What they found: Americans are not making the best use of their leisure hours.

While our standard of living has increased over the 40 years studied — with less time spent on mundane household chores and more minutes of “neutral downtime,” such as watching TV — our happiness levels haven’t.

Too much TV is to blame, according to David Schkade, a professor of management at UC San Diego.

The problem is that television viewing is often done in isolation. But more active, stimulating recreation and group activities are what help us feel connected and content, Schkade said.

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