Survey paints grim picture of UK childhood happiness

Teenagers in the United Kingdom are falling victim to a so-called happiness recession after new research by the charity The Children's Society revealed British youngsters have the lowest life satisfaction levels in Europe.

The study, called the Good Childhood Report, looked at youngsters in 27 countries and highlighted how girls are particularly badly affected, and also those from poorer backgrounds, with poverty a significant contributory factor.

"Children and young people deserve better," the report observed. "Decisive action and national leadership are needed to overturn the decline in children's wellbeing. We know that these experiences are not lived in a vacuum… The pandemic, rising levels of poverty, concerns over young people's safety, the climate emergency and other stresses have put a strain on young people's lives and can prevent the experience of a happy and fulfilled childhood."

In 2021/22, children aged between 10 and 15 were asked to score levels of satisfaction with their quality of life in general, and also their school, schoolwork, friends, and appearance.

Lower levels of satisfaction were found to be at least twice as high among UK teenagers as they were among youngsters of the same ages in Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Portugal.

Of those questioned in the UK, 41 percent of children and young people were "very" or "quite" worried about the cost of living, and, ranked against their peers in Europe, the UK was found to have the fourth-highest rate of food deprivation, the fifth-highest rate of physical inactivity outside school hours, and the second-highest level of bullying.

The report comes in the same week that it was revealed that each day more than 500 children in England are being referred to the National Health Service's mental health support teams because of anxiety, figures that are more than twice those from before the pandemic.

In 2023/24 there were 204,526 new referrals of patients aged 17 or younger, compared to 98,953 in 2019/20, before the pandemic began. There is an even sharper contrast with the year 2016/17, where the number was just 3,879.

Andy Bell, chief executive of the Centre for Mental Health, told The Guardian newspaper there were many factors at play, including poverty and school concerns.

"Our research indicates that academic pressures, particularly those related to exams, have intensified in the last decade. Evidence also suggests that online harms, such as cyberbullying and pressures around appearance, are relentless and can fuel anxiety in children," he said.

"The pandemic has amplified these pressures on children and young people by disrupting their routines and increasing feelings of isolation and uncertainty about the world and their futures."