The Good Childhood Report 2013
The Good Childhood Report 2013 found that absolute poverty has increased by two percentage points. We have shown in more recent reports that taking a more child-centred approach to poverty, by asking children themselves to report on their levels of material deprivation, yields much stronger links with wellbeing.
This report will provide an update on research and analysis we have undertaken in the 18 months since the publication of The Good Childhood Report 2012.
55 pages
The state of children's wellbeing in 2013
The state of children's wellbeing in 2013
Children’s wellbeing remains an important issue of debate in the UK. The recent UNICEF Report Card 11 showed some improvements in aspects of children’s wellbeing in the UK up to 2010, although there is still considerable room for further improvement in comparison with other wealthy countries. The media coverage of Report Card 11 also raised concerns that current national and global economic problems could adversely affect young people and put this progress at risk.
State of children's wellbeing
2013 presents a very different social and economic context to child wellbeing than
when we started this programme of research in 2005. The economy was growing, employment was at a post-war peak, social expenditure on children was increasing with increases in health, education and childcare spending. Child poverty and deprivation were falling. In comparison, the latest official statistics on child poverty for 2011/12 estimate that absolute poverty has increased by two percentage points and the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimate that relative child poverty will increase from 17% to 24%
by 2020.
This report will hopefully make a timely addition to this ongoing debate. It provides an update on research and analysis we have undertaken in the 18 months since the publication of The Good Childhood Report 2012.
What does the report reveal?
Children’s happiness with choice drops steadily between the ages of eight and 15, but then there is a marked rise at age 16/17, suggesting that there is a mismatch between the amount of choice that children in their early teenage years have and how much they would like.
Interviews with young people aged 14 and 15 about choice highlight a number of key themes for this age group, including: the role that friends and peers play in relation to choice, especially in relation to their appearance and self-expression; and the equal importance of having loving, supportive family relationships on the one hand, and being granted a reasonable level of choice/autonomy on the other.
We explored what life is like for children that are materially deprived, by which we mean that they lack five items or more from 10-item measure of deprivation. This group of children have markedly lower well-being than their peers for all of The Good Childhood Index domains, and are more likely to report low self-esteem, friendship problems, bullying and to be unhappy with their home.
The Good Childhood Report
The 2023 Good Childhood Report reveals that too many young people are unhappy with their lives. 10% of the children aged 10 to 17 who completed our household survey in May and June 2023 had low wellbeing, and almost a third were unhappy with at least one specific area of their lives. This is unacceptable. The Government must act now to protect every childhood.
How we can help
In the report we have picked up on another key theme from our initial research with young people in 2005. One of the issues that young people recognised was the way in which their own choices and behaviours could impact on their wellbeing. This is a theme we have only recently begun to explore and Chapter 4 presents important new evidence on ways in which children’s behaviours are associated with their sense of wellbeing.
This range of new evidence expands our understanding of what well-being means from a child-centred perspective. In summary, the evidence presented in this new report, together with other research being undertaken internationally, strengthens the case for all those concerned with children’s welfare to take account of children’s own feelings and evaluations of their lives.
At both a national and a global level this is a time of huge social, economic, technological and environmental change. Inevitably there are risks that these changes will adversely affect children. An ongoing commitment to monitoring children’s self-reported well-being is an important first step in mitigating these risks and safeguarding children in the present and the future.
