Macedonia is home to the happiest children, with the UK and USA at the bottom end of the rankings.
Last year a survey carried out on children’s well-being, indicated that Dutch children were the happiest in the world. Nevertheless, the 2014 Good Childhood Index crowns Macedonia ahead of the Netherlands as the home of the happiest children in the world this year. Countries not faring so well in the Good Childhood rankings include Turkey and the USA.
The international study used 10 different aspects of children’s lives to calculate which children are the happiest. In total, 50,000 children over the age of nine were asked questions, including how they felt about their appearance, family and school. Factors such as poverty were taken into consideration to see how they also affected well-being.
The study focused on comparing British children to those in other countries. In England there was a general increase in the well-being of children from 1994 to 2007, however as of 2008 this trend has levelled off.
In comparison to other countries, children in England seem content with their home life, friends, and issues such as money and possessions. Nevertheless, English children marked low in the rankings regarding their appearance, out of 11 countries England came in 10th place for self-esteem. Furthermore, there were gender differences whereby 18% of girls were unhappy about their physical appearance in comparison to 9% of boys. In addition, girls were also more likely to be worried about their future than boys. On the other hand, girls tended to be happier with school life than boys.
Other factors were also included in the study, for example well-being was generally lower for children who had aspirations to be famous or to have a lot of money in the future than for those who had aspirations to be in a worthwhile job. A similar finding was where children with a severely depressed parent or coming from a family in poverty tended to have lower overall well-being. Children with low well-being were more likely to be bullied or to do badly in school, so it is an important issue to address.
Although the majority of children in England are satisfied with their lives, there still remains 9% who have low levels of life satisfaction. In fact, of the 39 countries studied in Europe and North America, England was ranked at 32 for children’s well-being. Despite being beaten to first place by Macedonia, The Netherlands still has one of the highest levels of life satisfaction amongst its children, followed by countries such as Armenia and Iceland.