The Children’s Society 2024 Good Childhood report illustrates a worrying decline in children’s wellbeing. The charity’s report finds that 11% of children aged 10 to 17 ranked their wellbeing as “low” – with the cost of living crisis weighing most heavily on their minds.
The report indicated that on average, the life satisfaction of 15-year-old children in the UK is markedly low compared to their peers across Europe. In fact, levels of low life satisfaction are at least twice as high amongst UK 15-year-olds than compared to their peers in Finland, Denmark, Romania, Portugal, Croatia and Hungary. A quarter of UK 15 year olds have low life satisfaction, compared with 7% of Dutch children of the same age. Worse still for females in that age group, whom are showing larger proportions of low satisfaction compared to males – both on average across Europe and in the UK. Girls were significantly less happy than boys with their life as a whole, family, appearance and school – and the gap to their male counterparts is widening. The latest data from the Understanding Society survey showed that in 2021/22, 22.6% of females reported being unhappy with their appearance, with their average happiness with their appearance significantly lower than males.
“Alarm bells are ringing said,” Mark Russell, chief executive of the Children’s Society. “UK teenagers are facing a happiness recession, with 15-year-olds recording the lowest life satisfaction on average across 27 European nations. The UK ranks 4th highest for food poverty among 15-year-olds across 21 European countries, underscoring the severe impacts of societal inequalities on their wellbeing,” he added.
The Good Childhood Report 2024 is the Children’s Society’s 13th annual report on the wellbeing of children and young people in the UK. It explores what children and young people are telling us about how their lives are going – subjective wellbeing. The Children’s Society’s annual surveys include a minimum of 2,000 children and young people (aged 10 to 17) and their parent or carer in the UK. The children and young people who take part in the survey are chosen to match the UK population. In 2024, 2,056 children and young people took part in the survey (in April to June).
The Children’s Society charity are calling for urgent, decisive action and national leadership to overturn the decline in children’s wellbeing. Vital, as wellbeing is an indication as to “how we’re doing as individuals, communities and as a nation, and how sustainable that is for the future.” If the Good Childhood report is anything to go by, not that good therefore.
Considering the well being benefits of gardening and the mental and physical enrichment of being outdoors – even for a small amount of time, is there perhaps more of a role for horticulture to help ensure the wellbeing of young people?