Children who spent more than four hours chatting online had significantly lower mean scores for happiness with friends (8.26) compared to children who spent less than one hour online (8.63).
– The Good Childhood Report 2020
How happy are you with your relationships with your friends?
– The Good Childhood Index
Recently, as an online lesson concluded, students were asked as they usually are, if they had any questions before logging out. A boy speaks up and asks a question. “Hey X! Do you have Discord?” The one to whom the question is directed is silent. Though he has earphones on, he hesitates. His mother is behind him.
It turns out that Discord is a place where “just you and a handful of friends can spend time together” (Discord.com). This place is somewhere in cyberspace. Even so, the thought of being able to hang out with his friend makes him happy.
Two men held in particularly high regard have a somewhat similar notion in relation to their children.
One said years ago that the most important thing was that his kids were happy. He really believes this and he never strives. This was coming from a guy who completed his F Math paper during his A’ levels in less than half the time allocated because he had an appointment to keep at Sentosa. It was a friend’s birthday and he wanted to be there on time. He scored a distinction.
The kids’ room of the other has a floor to ceiling shelf with action figurines and other toys. He wants his boys to have whatever toy they want because he himself could not when he was young. This other person rose to become the top performer in his industry, new to him at the time, with aplomb.
Though both are no stranger to hard work having come up from humble circumstances, they still prioritise happiness (which one could suppose translates to not feeling the pressure of having to meet some external expectation) when it comes to their kids.
An article in Psychology Today Singapore states, “Attaining happiness is a global pursuit”. We know that childhood experiences determine adult life satisfaction. We would all agree that we want happy children. What makes them happy and are they happy?
These are the questions that the research team of The Children’s Society, a children’s charity in the UK, has been looking at for the past decade. The answers are published in an annual report, titled, The Good Childhood Report. The research is based on the experience of children in the UK measured through survey instruments such as The Children’s Society Household Survey which was administered to “just over 2000 children (aged 10-17) and their parent/carer from all four nations in the UK” and Children’s Worlds, International Survey of Children’s Well-Being administered to 128,000 children from 35 countries, aged 8, 10 and 12 (The Good Childhood Report) and the UK Longitudinal Household Survey (UKHLS) which contributed youth relevant data collected from 2800, 10 – 15-year-olds).
The Children’s Society Household Survey uses The Good Childhood Index which measures ten aspects of well-being. These are, Family, Health, Home, Time Use, Things, Future, Friends, School, Appearance and Choice. The UKHLS measures 6 areas of well-being which are, Life as a Whole, Family, Friends, Appearance, Schoolwork and School. Well-being encompasses “Affective Well-being” – emotions, “Cognitive Well-being” – overall perception of life satisfaction and “Psychological Well-being” – personal development and growth.
The publishers qualified the findings by pointing out that they may be reflective of trends which began before the changes wrought by the pandemic and that the specific effects of the pandemic would only become clear in later editions of this report.
The following are some key findings in this report.
Over the years there seems to be a sustained drop in overall happiness. Though the children surveyed report general satisfaction with their family and schoolwork, two areas stand out as possible causes of unhappiness.
These are appearance and friends. Though in the early part of this decade when this research began, a greater proportion of girls were unhappy with their appearance than boys, the number of boys reporting unhappiness with how they look appears to be on the rise. Other than the ten-year-olds, there was an increase across every age group and both genders in unhappiness about their friends.
Though the researchers say social media is “a central part of modern life” useful for “connection, companionship, inclusion and engagement in mutual activities” they qualify this by adding, that “the nature of communication online” is “superficial”. They said this to contextualise the finding that children who spent more than four hours chatting with friends online on weekdays were reportedly very much less happy with their friends than those who spent just an hour or so.
When asked what a good friend was, they had the following to say. There had to be a balance in giving and taking. They wanted to be listened to and be able to listen so having the time and willingness to just chat was important. They wanted companions who enjoyed the same activities.
Over half of the children surveyed reported having between one and 5 close friends. 9 in 10 children had between 1-15 good friends. There was a very small minority of children who reported not having any friend to talk to when they were in trouble. Boys reported having more close friends than girls and the researchers suggested this could be because girls may have higher expectations for close friends.
The researchers expressed concern that children in the UK were reportedly less happy than their peers in other countries in the European Union. They tried to understand why by checking if the following factors were the reason: time spent on digital devices, poverty and the fear of failure.
They found no unambiguous connection between time spent on digital devices and well-being. Though the kids in the UK spent 30 hours on average a week on the internet which was the second highest among the countries compared – the highest was 32, the kids in Croatia who had the highest life satisfaction score spent about 28 hours a week online which was close to the average. A report in 2018, stated that kids (8-12) in Singapore spend 35 hours on average with those who own mobile phones spending an average of 45 hours (Hio, 2018).
They found some evidence for a link between poverty and life satisfaction, adding that more research is needed to understand this link better.
They found conclusive evidence – “strong correlation” that children who feared failing were the least satisfied with their life. The data for this came from two surveys. One measured the amount of pressure children felt in relation to schoolwork. The other measured fear of failure through asking for graded responses to statements like, “When I fail, I worry what others think of me” and “When I am failing, I am afraid I might not have enough talent”.
Though the findings are specific to the UK, the determinants of life-satisfaction, a sense of well-being and happiness must be somewhat universal. In this regard, the findings of the Good Childhood Report are instructive.
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