The Good Childhood Report 2012

Many children in the UK are happy with their lives. However, substantial numbers of children do not feel so positive. At any given time, around 4% of eight-year-olds and 14% of 15-year-olds have low "subjective wellbeing". In total it can be estimated that around half a million children in the UK in the eight to 15 age range have low well-being at any point in time.

These levels of unhappiness with life are not simply part of the day-to-day ups and downs that everyone experiences. Children who report low levels of happiness, compared to other children, are much less likely to enjoy being at home with their family, to feel safe when they are with their friends, to look forward to going to school, to like the way they look, and to feel positive about their future.

This type of deep-rooted unhappiness with life must be a cause for concern not only
for its short-term impact but because of the evident potential implications for these children’s future life chances. We know, from research in other countries, that children who are unhappy in this way are also more likely to be victimised, to behave in ways that are risky to themselves or others, to have eating disorders, and to be depressed.

But this situation is not necessarily permanent or inevitable. In most cases, children only experience this level of unhappiness with their lives for part of their childhoods and, with support, they can regain their sense of well-being. This report is part of an ongoing programme of research to try to understand why some children feel so unhappy with their lives, and what can be done to prevent this happening and to support children who are in this situation.

The report shows that in some surveys, girls had significantly lower wellbeing than boys. Commonly-used indicators of poverty had a small but significant association with wellbeing.

Events such as a change in family structure or experiences of bullying had a notable association with wellbeing. Personality factors (such as how extroverted or emotionally stable a child is) may explain substantial amounts of the variation in levels of wellbeing.

There are percentage drops in wellbeing between the ages of 8 and 15 for the 10 index items. The largest drops are for school and appearance, where average wellbeing at the age of 15 is over 15% lower than at the age of 8.

We hope that this report makes a valuable contribution to understanding children's wellbeing in the UK today. We now have a substantial amount of unique information about overall levels of children’s well-being, how these levels vary according to key individual and household characteristics, and some of the key factors that impact on the subjective well-being of children. These findings already suggest a range of ways in which children’s well-being can be enhanced.

There is a need to explore in more detail the well-being of specific sub-groups of children who may not be well represented in general population surveys. More work is required to identify particular sub-groups of children who are at high risk of low well-being and to understand the factors involved in this.

There is a pressing need to undertake research that explores the connections between wellbeing and other issues in children’s lives. This a very important topic because it has been proposed theoretically that a period of low well-being puts people at increased risk of longer-term problems.

There is a need to learn more about ways in which children’s wellbeing can be enhanced. The findings presented in this report suggest that there may be a variety of actions which could be taken at individual, family, school, community and national levels which could improve levels of wellbeing.