As programme directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, Dr Waldinger and Dr Schulz are the current custodians of the world’s longest and richest study of human lives, and their book brings together over 80 years of research to reveal the true components of a happy, fulfilled life.

Built on a bedrock of scientific research, we should sit up and take note when one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity. And that one factor, which has continuously demonstrated its broad and lasting importance regardless of how much the world has changed over the course of the study; is good relationships.

We can only imagine what type of world our Prep School children will inhabit as elders and grandparents in 80 years’ time, but the science is clear - if they choose again and again to cultivate warm relationships, of all kinds, along the way; it will be a key determinant of the happy and healthy lives we hope they’ll have lived by then. Of course, for children and young people to make such beneficial choices repeatedly they must know how to see through on them… and that is very much down to us.

Children are hypersensitive to their environments, weathervanes who intuit ways in which even our nonverbal emotional winds blow. When seeing us cultivate, manage, build, and manifest good relationships in our engagements all across the Prep School they bank the how, in more ways than we or they can explain in words. It’s easier for them to act their way into a new way of thinking than it is for them to think their way into a new way of acting by doing what we do - because the children, like all children everywhere, learn what they live.

Each day in the Prep School is a friendly day, and a gentleness pervades across the campus amid smiles and laughter. The children know they are understood, deeply cared for and listened to. They see the adults across our community have very positive interactions with each other, consolidating further their expectations of what good relationships look like and, most importantly perhaps, what they feel like.

Even when the adults in our community don’t always get everything right – we can’t and don’t – we do the children the greatest of favours by modelling how to deal with that. Teaching children how to stay friends is as important as teaching them how to make friends. I’m so grateful to be part of a community where courtesy, kindness, warmth of engagement and authentically positive connections are culture-defining, not just because it feels as good as it does to be part of it but also because we are a community that prizes good relationships.

I’m grateful too for the science that proves how central those good relationships, all across the Prep School, are to helping our wonderful children build enduring joy and flourishing lives.