Children's Subjective Well-Being

Mark Tami Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

Our children are under threat like never before. In the past, threats to children were mainly physical. Many died in infancy, when working or of diseases. The modern threat to our children and young people is more to their mental and psychological well-being.

There are many reasons why, and one is child poverty. After the war, whichever party was in government, child poverty hovered between 12% and 15%, but it went from 13% in 1979 to 29% in 1992. With the huge investment that Labour made over 14 years, we managed to get it down only to 20%—a big reduction, but not enough.

There are other factors. We face an obesity epidemic, with costs to the individual child’s health and self-image. The most recent figures, for 2010-11, show that obesity among children in reception class, at five years old, is at 9.4%, and that by the time they reach year 6, at 10 years old, it doubles to 19%.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we are storing up problems for the future, both in terms of cost and from a psychological point of view, as many such children unfortunately become very disturbed adults?

[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.