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.