Analyzing a TED Talk

The speech I chose to analyze was by Jennifer Senior titled ‘For parents, happiness is a very high bar.’  Senior gave this talk at TED2014.  I enjoyed listening to this talk, and I learned new facts about parenting I had never heard of before. 

Jennifer Senior presenting her TED Talk

Jennifer Senior did a very good job at getting her point across and relating her speech to the audience.  She told a story about the different books that are being sold on how to raise children and how much parenting has changed since she was a child.  She told another story about holding her first child in her arms and promising to never hurt him, made her speech more personal, and also related to how happiness is very hard to give to someone.  With this story she got her point across that her promise she made is an easier and more attainable goal than trying to make your child happy.  Throughout the whole presentation, Senior made it feel like she was having a conversation with her audience.  She used PowerPoint slides, which had only pictures or had very few words.  This helped to emphasize her points and was not too overwhelming for her audience.

Listening to this presentation, I learned many new facts about modern parenting.  One fact that surprised me was the shocking statistic that the United States was one of eight countries that do not have paid maternity leave; this makes it so much harder on mothers to be able to support their family and give their children the best life they can have.  She also presented the fact that mothers now spend more time with their children then they did decades of years earlier when not many of them had jobs.  So much has changed in the past few years, and so much will change in the years to come.  She pointed out that happiness is not something you are able to give to your children.  You just have to teach them and help them get to a point that makes them happy.  To make her speech livelier Senior put some humor into it.  She started her speech with a joke which pulled people in and helped them to focus on what she was saying.  Also throughout her speech she would put little pieces of humor, which helped her audience focus again and it helped defuse some of the seriousness of the talk.

Jennifer Senior was able to paint a picture through her words about her speech on happiness.  She used her own experiences and she was knowledgeable about her subject.  She used stories and images that her audience was able to relate to, and therefore they are about to visualize the story in their mind.  She did all of this is in 18 minutes, and having this time limit gave her enough time to cover her topic well and did not give her time to deviate from her track.  

These are some of the words that describe parenting

‘For parents, happiness is a very high bar’ by Jennifer Senior was a great TED talk.  It related to my service organization Step By Step, which helps single mothers and their children.  This talk made me realize how stressful it can be to be a parent, and how much harder it would have to be if you were young and on your own.  Parents want their child to be happy, but that is an unrealistic goal for the parents to give themselves.  There is no guidebook for the parents to follow they just have to do the best they can and hope that the child’s happiness will follow.