Why are UK teens the least happy in Europe?

Children and young people in the United Kingdom are unhappier and have lower life satisfaction compared with others in their age group in the rest of Europe, a report published by a British charity says.

According to The Good Childhood Report 2024, published by The Children’s Society, 11 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 17 said they had low wellbeing, while one in six young people in the age group living in households affected by the cost of living crisis had low life satisfaction.

We look at potential reasons why children in the UK are becoming less happy than previous generations:

Why are UK children so unhappy?

The report, compiled from three different surveys, including a 2024 survey by The Children’s Society, says two in five children and young people were concerned about rising prices in the UK.

More than 14 percent of children reported being unhappy with school, says the latest annual report, first published in 2009.

The dissatisfaction with life is particularly prominent among girls in the UK, and British children in general have grown unhappier over the years, says the report.

“This is without doubt the most shocking report we’ve published,” Mark Russell, chief executive of the charity, told Al Jazeera.

Since the 2009 report, children’s overall happiness has fallen significantly in terms of life in general, friends, their appearance, school and school work. Only their happiness in terms of their family remained largely unchanged.

During 2021-22, children were most happy with their families and least happy with their appearance.

Russell attributed this to the rising use of social media. “Children are seeing lots of images and they’re comparing themselves to other young people.”

More than 50 percent of parents and carers surveyed said they struggled to afford a vacation away from home and more than two in five said they could not manage to pay for activities of their children outside of school.

Why are UK children the unhappiest in Europe?

Factors including the COVID-19 pandemic and social media have “had a massive impact on children’s lives, but it also had an impact on all the other 27 countries”, Russell said.

So, why are teens in the UK doing worse than others in the rest of Europe?

About 25 percent of British 15-year-olds reported low life satisfaction compared with 7 percent of Dutch 15-year-olds.

“Proportionally, we have more children in poverty than other European countries,” Russell pointed out. According to Save the Children, 4.3 million children in the UK, or 30 percent of all British children, are in relative poverty.

A child is said to be living in poverty if they live in a household with an income below 60 percent of the median income, according to UK charity Child Poverty Action Group.

In the Netherlands, 12.7 percent of children lived in poverty as of 2021.

British children are doing worse than the other European countries because the UK as a whole has been facing economic woes, worsened by years of austerity measures introduced by the previous Conservative government, according to economists and a case study by Oxfam in 2013. These measures, which essentially entailed budget cuts, scaled back public funding to schools, and the health sector, among others.

This led to the closure of spaces that offered people community, social enrichment and knowledge such as libraries, community and youth centres, Philip Alston, former UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights reported in 2018.

Additionally, the UK education system “doesn’t work for all children”, Russell said.

“Lots of children feel a great deal of pressure because we test and examine children way more than countries like Finland and Holland,” he said.

“We need to value vocational education as much as academic. All schools should prioritise emotional and social development alongside academic progression, to ensure that the wellbeing of all students is at the heart of school life.”

Girls are disproportionately unhappy in the UK

The report says during 2021-22, girls were “significantly less happy on average than boys with their life as a whole, their family, their appearance, and their school”.

One of the data sources used for the analysis of this report, compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2022, found that in the UK, 20 percent of boys and 31 percent of girls reported low life satisfaction.

“Girls’ unhappiness needs to be looked at further so that it can be understood and addressed,” the report said.

“I would also say we’ve seen the impact of certain influencers online, how they speak about girls has had a real impact on how boys speak to girls,” Russell speculated.

He added that there needs to be dialogue on “how we help reduce that sense of toxic masculinity.”

The report and Russell pointed out that the unhappiness of girls is a call for further investigation. Further research needs to be done to investigate the reasons behind the unhappiness of girls.

How is happiness measured?

There is currently no nationwide database with information about children’s subjective wellbeing in the UK. The Children’s Society, which works among children facing abuse and neglect, has called on the government to prepare comprehensive data.

This year’s report is prepared after combining information from three sources:

• Understanding Society – The UK Longitudinal Household Survey, which was completed by 1,766 children in 2021-22;
• The Children’s Society’s annual household survey, which 2,056 children responded to in 2024;
• The OECD’s Programme for International Student Development, where 12,972 students in the UK were surveyed in 2022.

The last available data from the UK Longitudinal Household Survey and the OECD programme was from 2022, which has been used in the report.

Chris Coates, the research impact and project manager at Understanding Society, explained that the UK Longitudinal Household Survey comprises a questionnaire for children aged 10-15, including “several questions on subjective wellbeing, including how they feel about life as a whole, and about family, friends, appearance, school, and school work”.

He explained that the respondents answer on a scale of one to seven “from ‘completely happy’ to ‘not at all happy'”.

What are the recommendations?

Besides the report, the UK charity published a document urging the government to remedy the crisis of unhappiness among UK teens. Some of these policy recommendations include:

• Introducing a national measure of children’s wellbeing.
• Delegating mental health professionals in every school in England. In December 2023, Keir Starmer, who became the UK prime minister in July 2024, posted on X promising his government would “provide access to mental health professionals in every school to cut NHS [National Health Service – the publicly funded healthcare system] waiting lists”.
• Improving the wellbeing of girls by understanding why through research, and approaching wellbeing intersectionally.
• Introducing legislation directed at tackling financial disadvantage among children.
• Scrapping the two-child limit and benefit cap. The two-child limit stops households from receiving additional universal credit or child tax credits for a third or subsequent child. About 1.6 million children in the UK are affected by the two-child limit, according to the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), as of April 2024.
• Reforming the school system by tackling bullying and enabling better assessment methods than testing.
• Creating more opportunities and avenues for children to engage in play and socialisation.

Russell reflected on the charity’s work, saying it shows that young people need trusted adults, who are not teachers or parents, in their lives.

“For too many children, those safe spaces, aren’t there for them any more. In the absence of that, they turn to social media, for their advice and for their counsel,” he said.

“I think we need to be investing in spaces where young people can talk and be heard.”