The Good Childhood Report 2019
This is our eighth report capturing the very latest information on the state of children’s wellbeing. It provides new and important insights into a wide range of issues affecting children’s wellbeing including family finances and children and young people’s feelings about the future.
84 pages
The state of children's wellbeing in 2019
Modern childhood is complicated. The vast majority of children are happy with their lives, but since 2009, children and young people have become increasingly unhappy with their lot. Our figures suggest about a quarter of a million children could now be unhappy with their lives. This is really concerning, but why is it happening?
Our research points to a variety of important factors. Children are increasingly unhappy with their friendships. For years, we have reported girl’s struggles with how they look, but this year we report a significant decline in boy’s happiness with their appearance since 2009.
The evidence about school is also concerning – surprisingly this is not necessarily to do with schoolwork and learning. Instead our findings point to wider issues like school culture, the experiences of those with low or strained family finances, and whether or not some children actually feel safe during the school day.
Too many children are struggling with their lives right now, and large numbers are also anxious about their future. Large proportions of children are worried about everything from money and getting good grades at school, to wider issues like crime and the environment.
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 does the report reveal?
What does the report reveal?
The latest trends for children aged 10 to 15 show that, between 2009–10 and 2016–17, there has been:
- A significant decrease in happiness with life as a whole and friends.
- No significant change in happiness with family, appearance or schoolwork.
- A dip in happiness with school in 2016–17 compared with other years. This change needs to be monitored to see if this is the start of a longer term trend.
The data also show the following gender differences for children aged 10 to 15 across the same period:
- Boys were consistently happier with their appearance than girls.
- Girls were happier with school work than boys.
- There were no consistent gender differences for happiness with life as a whole, family, friends or school.
The state of children's wellbeing in 2019
There was some overlap between some of the disadvantages reported in the four areas of children’s
lives examined. For example, experiencing crime/anti-social behaviour and reporting two or more neighbourhood problems.
It is possible that some of these measures are tapping into similar concepts and that a shortlist of disadvantages (based on these findings and our 2017 household survey) could be further developed and tested in a larger scale study with a view to building an index.
What we can do
This report further highlights the importance of children’s experiences/histories on their subjective wellbeing in the present. While experiencing multiple disadvantages in different areas of life seems to be associated with lower levels of wellbeing, our analysis suggests that even a single experience of poverty or financial strain may be related to lower life satisfaction and higher depressive symptoms at age 14. The report also provides insights into children’s key concerns for their own future and how they feel about wider societal issues(eg the environment and Brexit), which are likely to be intrinsically linked to their wellbeing.
Across the chapters of this report, the theme of school emerges as important for further focus. Not only are scores for the school domain of our Good Childhood Index consistently low, but more recent figures from Understanding Society suggest there may have been a dip in happiness with school. Our analysis on poverty and well- being also highlights connections between income poverty and financial strain and children’s feelings about school at age 14. Taking these findings at face value suggests that a key way of improving children’s subjective experience may be to improve their experience of school.
