Family conflict harms children’s happiness, says study
Children’s wellbeing is far more strongly influenced by levels of family conflict than by family structure, according to new research by The Children’s Society into what makes young people happy.
Young people who felt that their family got along well together had much higher average levels of wellbeing than those who did not, irrespective of the family structure they lived in.
In the first comprehensive investigation of childhood well-being – or happiness - from a young person’s point of view thousands of pupils were asked to respond to statements such as “My family gets along well together” and “Members of my family talk nicely to one another” scoring themselves on a scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. They were also asked questions exploring the impact on wellbeing of family structure, such as living in a lone or step-parent family.
The difference between a young person's family getting along - and not - explained 20% of the variation in overall happiness with life, whereas differences in family structure only explained 2%.
The power of family conflict to undermine children’s lives is just one of many findings in the groundbreaking new study, Understanding Children’s Well-being: A National Survey of Young People’s Well-Being, conducted by The Children’s Society in collaboration with the University of York and research organisation Ipsos MORI.
In the two-year study, a team of researchers put around 100 questions to just under 7,000 children aged 10 to 15, including just under 4,700 from secondary schools. They were asked to rate how happy they were on a scale from 0 to 10 with many aspects of their lives. This is a pioneering approach because previous surveys have tended to focus on problems seen by adults as measures of well-being, rather than the views of young people, as in this survey.
The aim of the research was to develop a more precise understanding of the factors that make young people happy and to create a benchmark “well-being index”.
The Children’s Society plans to use the index to measure how the wellbeing of UK children changes at two-year intervals.
