There’s something depressingly familiar about the findings of Unicef’s latest report into children’s wellbeing, published this week, which ranked the UK 27th out of 41 high-income countries, directly below Slovakia, Romania and Iceland. UK children ranked a dismal 29th for mental wellbeing, and we were third from bottom of the table (behind Turkey and Japan) when it came to teenagers’ happiness. We should be used to this. Just last week the Children’s Society’s annual Good Childhood Report painted a similarly bleak picture of British childhood, possibly because it used some of the same data. It pointed out that British children felt a fear of failure more keenly than those in other European countries, and also faced among the highest levels of academic pressure.

Source: The Times September 04, 2020 16:14 UTC