A league table of child well-being outcomes: mental well-being
1 Netherlands 2 Cyprus 3 Spain 4 Romania 5 Denmark 6 Portugal 7 France 8 Greece 9 Italy 10 Croatia |
11 Norway 12 Finland 13 Switzerland 14 Slovakia 15 Hungary 16 Germany 17 Belgium 18 Bulgaria 19 Luxembourg 20 Iceland |
21 Austria 22 Sweden 23 Slovenia 24 Czech Republic 25 Latvia 26 Ireland 27 Chile 28 Malta 29 United Kingdom 30 Poland |
31 Canada 32 United States 33 Estonia 34 Republic of Korea 35 Australia 36 Lithuania 37 Japan 38 New Zealand |
Innocenti Report Card 16, UNICEF
https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/Report-Card-16-Worlds-of-Influence-child-wellbeing.pdf
2020年の UNICEFの調査で日本の若者・子どもの「精神的幸福度」は38カ国中37位だった。
UNICEF Report Cards measure child and youth well-being in wealthy countries. Report Card 16 shows that just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan was already worlds apart from other rich countries in providing healthy, happy childhoods for every child. Japan has some of the best economic, environmental and social conditions for growing up, but the poorest outcomes for children and youth.
Mental well-being
Mental well-being means not only the absence of mental ill-health but also a broader sense of positive functioning.6 We represent both of these aspects in the first league table.
Positive functioning encompasses various components including emotions such as feeling happy, satisfaction with life and a sense of flourishing. The league table includes a question about life satisfaction from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, based on the criteria for indicator selection (see Spotlight 1). Children aged 15 years were each asked to say how satisfied they felt with their life as a whole using a scale from 0 (worst possible life) to 10 (best possible life). In all countries, most children were reasonably satisfied with their lives (a score above the midpoint on the scale), but there was variation between countries in this regard – ranging from less than 55 per cent of children in Turkey to 90 per cent of children in the Netherlands.
The fact that most children are reasonably satisfied with their lives is encouraging. We still need to consider what these percentages mean in terms of the large numbers of children who have low life satisfaction. This is more than merely a question of momentary ‘happiness’. For example, a study in the United Kingdom showed that, compared with children with average to high life satisfaction, those with low life satisfaction were about eight times as likely to report family conflict, six times as likely to feel that they could not express their opinions, five times as likely to be bullied, and more than twice as likely not to look forward to going to school.7 Only 64 per cent of children with low self-reported well-being felt they had people who supported them, compared with 93 per cent of other children. And 24 per cent of children with low well-being said that they did not feel safe at home, compared with only about 1 per cent of other children.
There is a lack of reliable, comparable data on mental ill-health among children globally. As in previous Report Cards, we used the suicide rate among adolescents aged 15–19 years as the best available indicator. Unfortunately, data were only generally available up to 2015. Suicide rates in this age group were above 10 per 100,000 in Lithuania, New Zealand and Estonia, and lowest in Greece, Portugal and Israel.