Long life | 27 August 2015

We learn from a new report that children in England are among the unhappiest in the world — more unhappy, even, than the children of Ethiopia, Algeria or Israel. Why should this be so? Life is still quite good in England. It is generally peaceful and prosperous. Yet, in the admittedly rather haphazard list of countries surveyed by the Children’s Society and the University of York, the only one in which children were found to be more miserable than here was South Korea. The children of Romania and Colombia were all far happier.

The two main reasons offered for this despondency among English children were bullying in schools and worries, particularly among girls, about their appearance. The researchers found that more than a third of English schoolchildren between the ages of ten and 12 claimed to have been physically bullied during the previous month. More than half said that they had been cold-shouldered, taunted or belittled. The figures suggest that there are an awful lot of bullies around, but perhaps bullying doesn’t make you happy either.

The gloom among English children about what they look like — Colombian girls are apparently delighted with their looks — is partly attributed by the report to the popularity of social media in Britain. Children are said to compare themselves with the ‘perfect’ bodies they see online and feel inadequate by comparison. Here, I feel, the researchers are on to something, but are failing to grasp the full measure of it.

As I was writing here a month ago, excessive dependence on smartphones and other electronic devices has been established by hordes of researchers as a major cause of depression. And it is rare to find any English child of ten to 12 who isn’t glued to some device: texting, listening, watching or whatever — silent, unresponsive, and totally uninterested in whatever may be going on in the real world.