Children's Subjective Well-Being

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane]

The cost will be huge in terms of the individual, society and the economy.

When we look at mental illness, we find that certain groups are affected more than others: 45% of looked-after children and 72% of those in residential care suffer with mental illness. Some 1.5% of children are hyperactive; 0.3% have eating disorders; 5.8% have conduct disorders; and 3.7% have emotional disorders. Those figures might sound low, but at any one time 10% of children between the ages of five and 15 are suffering with a mental health disease. That is 850,000—almost 1 million—children.

We have to look at the reasons why that has come about. As I suggested earlier, something happened in the 1980s. The Government often talk about the broken society and broken Britain, but I honestly believe that the problem started to ramp up in the “loadsamoney” era, when there was no such thing as society and atomisation and isolation were rampant.

We have also seen the decline of those institutions that did believe in a big society and in social cohesion, such as the Church and the trade unions. Stable minds equal a stable society, but even Labour used the terms “producer” and “consumer”. We did not use “citizen”, and that is what we need to get back to—to viewing individuals as citizens and as part of society.

The Government can take many kinds of action, and many programmes have been tried, tested and proven. The roots of empathy classroom programme in New Zealand is a big success; the Swedish Government banned advertisements to children under 12, and that, too, has been a big success; and the Welsh Assembly Government introduced the foundation phase, with children learning through play until the age of seven.

My local authority of Denbighshire has had quite a few initiatives, including one by Sara Hammond-Rowley, involving simply sending out information sheets to parents, teachers and social workers, and giving out books, readily understood by parents and teachers, that can help with emotional disorder. We have had volunteering days in the local school in Prestatyn. Thirty-eight local volunteering groups aimed at children were there. The children were let off, one year at a time, to join them in friendship groups. It is about increasing volunteering and getting children away from the TV and computer and into socially interactive and physical activity. That is all to the benefit of those individuals and society.

The curriculum needs to be rebalanced. The national curriculum was introduced by the Conservatives. I was a teacher for 15 years and we followed the curriculum religiously, but we need a review. Have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater? We need to go back to stuff such as gratitude, empathy, discernment, reflection, silence, mindfulness, resilience, centring—the softer, gentler, more emotional approach to the curriculum, heavily present in the Catholic school in which I taught and in many religious schools. That would be a means of countering the advertising, media, peer pressure, consumerism, materialism and individualism.

A number of key statistics are not being monitored by the Government. I have tabled parliamentary questions asking what monitoring there is of advertising’s impact on children; there was no assessment. I have tabled questions about the number of fictional acts of murder that a child will watch, but there is no assessment and no figures are kept.

A young child will see tens of thousands of fictional acts of murder and violence, which do not correlate to their own, natural world. What is most disturbing is that the Government do not collect statistics on self-harm, eating disorders, mental illness, hyperactivity, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or transient children. The statistics are out there; they are often compiled by research departments or voluntary organisations.

I pay tribute to two reports in the past week, one of which—“Promoting Positive Wellbeing for Children”, came out last Thursday and is jam-packed full of practical steps that local and central Government can take to promote positive well-being for children. This afternoon, the Action for Children campaign on neglect was launched; the Minister was there and spoke well. Those reports are excellent documents, but what use do the Government make of them? When the guiding association found out about the speech that I was making today, it sent me a briefing about its research on volunteering.

The Prime Minister talks about the big society and volunteering and I back that 100%. But we need to make sure that his words are backed up with action. This is a quote from the Prime Minister in 2006:

“It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB—general well-being. Well-being can’t be measured by money or traded in markets. It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society’s sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times.”

I share every single one of those sentiments.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Earlier, the hon. Gentleman touched on child poverty. Does he feel that the Government’s proposed changes to the benefits system will directly impact on families in child poverty now and those who will fall into it? Does he feel that the Government should be giving priority to address child poverty across the whole United Kingdom?

[Chris Ruane]

I absolutely concur with every word of that, and I shall come to those points in more detail in a moment.

I want to spend a few minutes on the Children’s Society’s excellent report on children’s subjective well-being. It gives the definition of subjective well-being, which focuses on how people are feeling, whereas objective well-being focuses on conditions that affect those feelings, such as health or education. The report looked at 10 areas: relationships with family, relationships with friends, time use, health, the future, home, money and possessions, school, appearance, and the amount of choice in life. It has some interesting key findings. One in 11 children has low subjective well-being. Family relations and choice are the two most important factors. Family relations has the best score and is always a positive, but how a schoolchild or young person manages the choices that affect his own or her own life has one of the lowest scores. External factors, life events and relationships with others can have a dramatic and sudden effect on the subjective well-being of children. Household income is important, but it should be enough rather than a lot. If a child has too much, they can mark themselves out and become a figure of fun as the posh kid in the class.

The report highlights six priority areas, one of which is the opportunity to learn and develop not just cognitive but emotional intelligence. I was a little disturbed last week when one of the education Ministers said that he held emotional learning in complete disregard. That does not chime with the opinions of the Prime Minister, and the Minister needs to think carefully about it.

The home environment is as important as the school environment. If a child goes home to a house in multiple occupation and is living six storeys up where it is wet, windy and draughty and he or she cannot concentrate, that is not a good environment in which to create opportunities for learning and developing.

Children and young people should have their opinions respected. They should be listened to not only in school, through schools councils, but by their parents around the breakfast table or the dinner table. They need to have a positive image of themselves. Advertisers tell us that beautiful people are thin, attractive, intelligent and dynamic. That is not always the case, but it is the image that is thrust at us through the media.

We must ensure that all families have enough to live on as they face the sudden shock of redundancy, benefit caps, the freeze in child benefit and the abolition of education maintenance allowance. The full consequences of those measures as regards how they will impact on childhood well-being must be thought through before they are introduced.

Positive relationships with family and friends are a key priority area. Family bonds are 10 times more important than the structure of the family. A lot is made of the nuclear family, which is held up as a paragon. I am from a nuclear family and I have my own nuclear family, but we should not be promoting that model by saying “You are not quite right” to all the other families, because that additional pressure will not help a child’s well-being.

Children must be in a safe and suitable home environment. Privacy is important for a child’s well-being: they need to have their own bedroom. If a child is in a transient family that moves between one town and another, they are twice as likely to have poor well-being. I come from a seaside town, Rhyl, where one primary school has a 49% transiency rate. In other words, for every 100 children who are there in September, 49 are gone by July. That is not good for the 49 and it is not good for the 51 who remain. Those children will often move two or three times in a year, leading to massive pressures on themselves and their families.

Children need an opportunity to take part in positive activities, because otherwise they will turn to negative activities such as drink, drugs, teenage sex and teenage pregnancy. We need to create positive opportunities for volunteering and creative and expressive activities.

The report is a mixed blessing. I hope that the Minister has a copy. The final page has a grid on which the green areas represent initiatives that have been put in place—I congratulate the Government on that—and the purple areas represent ideas that have not been acted on. I hope that in the course of this Parliament they will all become green areas. Just to remind the Minister, I have put down 36 questions tonight—one for each box—so he will be able to answer them tomorrow.

The important thing that the report says is that all these things need to be monitored. I know that the Minister, his party and the Government do not believe in red tape, but if they are not monitored, we will not know whether they are successful.