The Good Childhood Report 2015

Thankfully, we are beginning to see a shift in these attitudes. Over the 10 years that we have been exploring children’s subjective wellbeing, we have seen greater acceptance of the importance of this topic – as seen in the fact that there is now a national measure of children’s subjective wellbeing.

Though it is easy to slip into a shorthand of happiness, wellbeing is about so much more than this. It is about how young people feel about their lives as a whole, how they feel about their relationships, the amount of choice that they have in their lives, and their future. Wellbeing matters as an end in itself, but also because it is correlated with other outcomes in life such as physical and mental health. Around 10% of children in this country are experiencing low levels of wellbeing and they need our support.

In this year's report, there were significant gender differences in terms of mean scores and the percentage of children
with low wellbeing, for four items in The Good Childhood Index – appearance, time use, friends and health.

We used the BHPS and the Understanding Society survey to explore trends over the period from 1994 to 2011 in children’s satisfaction with four aspects of their lives – school work, friends, family and appearance. The analysis found that:

• Children’s satisfaction with family had been relatively stable
• There had been an increase in children’s satisfaction with friends between 1995 and 2007 but this trend appears to have been reversed up to 2011 
• Children’s satisfaction with school work had increased a little between 2001 and 2011, although it was stable in the most recent few years of that period – girls’ satisfaction with this aspect of life had been fairly consistently higher than boys’ during the period from 2003 to 2011
• There was no clear overall trend in children’s satisfaction with appearance, but from a position of approximate equality
  in 2002, there had been a split in average levels of satisfaction for boys and girls. Boys’ mean scores increased between 2002 and 2011 while girls’ mean scores dropped.

The idea of improving children’s lives might on the face of it seem to be uncontroversial. But when we embarked upon this research programme in 2005 much of the public discussion about children’s wellbeing in the UK seemed to focus more on their wellbeing as future adults – or "well-becoming" – than about their current wellbeing as children. The Children’s Society’s belief in 2005 was that it was also important to focus on childhood as a life stage in its own right, rather than just as a preparation for adulthood, and that children’s subjective experience of childhood was important in addition to (not instead of) their future prospects. 

The discussion about children’s wellbeing in the UK in 2005 was also largely one that was being conducted between adults, with children’s own views remaining relatively unheard. The Children’s Society’s main goal in initiating the well-being research programme was to involve children more fully in this debate and ensure that their views and experiences were understood and taken into account.