The Good Childhood Report 2018
Children’s happiness with their lives had risen steadily in the 15 years from 1995 to 2010. But this progress has now been reversed and children’s wellbeing is now as low as it was two decades ago. The Good Childhood Report 2018 took a closer look at the reasons why.
88 pages
The state of children's wellbeing in 2018
The state of children's wellbeing in 2018
Children’s happiness with their lives had risen steadily in the 15 years from 1995 to 2010. But this progress has now been reversed and children’s wellbeing is now as low as it was two decades ago.
The 2018 report identifies other disparities: for example girls are unhappier with their lives, more likely to have depression, and twice as likely to self-harm as boys.
And shockingly, children attracted to the same or both genders have markedly lower wellbeing and higher rates of depression than other children – with almost half of these young people self-harming.
The state of children's wellbeing in 2018
Our evidence shows that traditional gender stereotypes are still common and can be harmful to children’s wellbeing. The report highlights examples of young people struggling to fit in with society’s expectations of them, for example the damaging effects to girls’ wellbeing of being bombarded by comments about their appearance at school.
With children facing overwhelming and sometimes conflicting pressures about how they should look, who they should like and how they should behave, it should come as no surprise that many are struggling to have a happy childhood.
What does the report reveal?
The latest trends show that in recent years ie from 2009–10 to 2015–16, there has been:
- A significant decrease in happiness with life as a whole and with friends.
- A significant rise in happiness with schoolwork.
- No change in happiness with family or with school.
- No change in happiness with appearance: the marginal decrease that was observed in last year’s report has been balanced by a small increase in the latest wave of data. It will be important to monitor this indicator next year to see if it constitutes a trend.
The longer time series – which combines data from the British Household Panel Survey with Understanding Society to cover the period from 1994–5 to 2015–16 show that there were:
- Significant increases over the long-term in children’s happiness with family, school and schoolwork.
- No changes for happiness with life as
a whole or friends over this period. However, for both these measures the longer-term trend masks a significant increase between 1995–6 and 2009–10, and a significant decrease between 2009–10 and 2015–16. - No change for happiness with appearance over this period.
Data from the Millennium Cohort Study when children were aged 14 years old reveals that characteristics such as gender, sexuality and long-standing (physical or mental) illness are important factors predicting wellbeing.
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.
What we can do
The common thread running through this report is that children’s interactions with those around them – and the way in which children make sense of those interactions – are fundamentally important to how they feel about themselves and their lives. If children feel supported by the people around them and feel at ease with how their emerging identity ‘matches up’ to the norms of gender and sexuality that they perceive to be important within their social circles, they may be able to retain a positive view of themselves and cope withthedifficultiesofgrowingupandbuilding an identity that they feel comfortable with.
On the other hand, if they have internalised gender norms that are at odds with their emerging identities, and witnessed negative interactions and bullying about identities that are different to the norm, retaining a positive view of themselves will be harder. In case we needed any more reason to address the powerful norms of gender and sexuality that pervade children’s lives from a young age, this report provides more evidence to do so. The finding that at age 14, 1 in 5 girls – and almost half of children saying that they have been attracted to the same or both genders
– have self-harmed is deeply worrying. Children should not be expected just to ‘brush off’ criticism and bullying related to being different. This does not need to be part of growing up.
