Family : Changes in Family - Unhappy Children?

• Unhappy Children?

  Womack (2011) reports that Britain’s children are said to unhappiest in the West. Family breakdown is a cause of considerable childhood angst, with 1/3 of British 16 year olds living apart from their biological fathers.
• Unhappy Children?

  Womack- According to an international league table compiled by UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, children growing up in the UK are more prone to bad physical and mental health, failure at school, and have the poorest relationships with their parents and friends, suffer greater deprivation, and are exposed to more risks from alcohol, drugs, unsafe sex than those from any other wealthy country in the world. Teenage pregnancy is among the highest in Europe.
• Unhappy Children?

  Womack- At some point, 10% of British children develop a mental health problem and research suggests about half of adults with lifetime health problems first experienced difficulties in childhood.
• Unhappy Children?

  Research by Rees (2011) for the Children's Society found, in England, an estimated 9% of young people aged 14-16 run away from home overnight on at least one occasion each year, and 84,000 children under the age of 16.
• Unhappy Children?

  Neither should we assume that children themselves are the innocents they are sometimes made out to be. Figures collected from police forces in England and Wales suggest that around 3,000 crimes, including criminal damage, arson and sex offences, in which the suspects are under the age of 10 - below the age of criminal responsibility, and therefore too young to be prosecuted - are reported every year. Every year around 75,000 school-age children enter the youth justice system for various offences.
• Unhappy Children?

  Under-age drinking, drug abuse, anti-social behaviour and criminal activity are common complaints by older people about children and young people today, with parents often blamed for not socializing and supervising their children properly.
• Unhappy children?

   Some may interpret this behaviour of children as a way for them to assert some independence from the suffocation of child-centredness which maintains their dependency on and regulation by adults, but it does nonetheless suggest that family life is not necessarily as child-centred or happy as some may believe it to be.
• Unhappy Children?

  Internationally, the position of many children is a cause of grave concern, with reports of the sale and trafficking of children, child prostitution, child pornography, children involved in armed conflicts as soldiers and the illegal trafficking of children's organs and tissues.