GIRLS’ unhappiness with their appearance has deepened over the past three decades, the Children’s Society reports. Its long-term analysis, released during Children’s Mental Health Week, has found that they experience much greater pressure to meet unrealistic beauty standards than boys.
The analysis of data from its Good Childhood Report and other surveys over 30 years suggests that girls’ unhappiness cannot be attributed solely to pressure from social media. The Society said that the pressure for girls to conform to beauty standards has been blighting the happiness of generations of girls.
In the most recent data from 2022-23, 15.1 per cent of children aged ten to 15 reported being unhappy with their appearance. More than double the proportion of girls than of boys were unhappy with this aspect of their life. Girls have reported significantly lower satisfaction with their appearance than boys in every national survey by the Children’s Society since 2009-10.
In follow-up conversations, young people told researchers that girls were particularly affected, and social media were just one cause.
Girls also reported feeling less happy with life as a whole: with family, friends, school, and schoolwork, as well as their appearance. And 15-year-old girls growing up in the UK were also far more likely to have low scores for well-being than girls of the same age elsewhere in Europe.
The researchers said that, while the gender gap narrowed briefly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it had since widened again, returning to levels similar to those of the mid-1990s. The researchers assert that the long-term evidence indicates “social media and the digital world are unlikely to be the main explanation for female unhappiness with their appearance. . . multiple factors are likely to have a bearing.”
Unhappiness at school was found to be another driver of a low sense of well-being for young people: one in eight children said that they were unhappy with how little they were listened to at school. Their top concern for the future was now achieving good grades at school, the first time that this has been the most commonly expressed worry. Young people reported that they felt overwhelmed in school, and that too much pressure was placed on academic achievement.
The report says: “Overall, young people were keen for the school environment to shift towards a place where their exam results do not define them or how successful or valued they are. They also wanted the curriculum to be rebalanced towards more opportunities to prepare for adulthood and learn relevant life skills.”
Trend data show that children’s happiness with school and schoolwork has consistently declined over the past decade.
The Children’s Society is calling for a national well-being measurement to be published alongside data about attainment and school attendance.
The chief executive, Mark Russell, said: “No child should grow up feeling that they don’t measure up. Yet for many, feeling unhappy with their appearance has been part of childhood for generations.
“When a problem lasts this long, it’s a clear sign that we need to take children’s well-being more seriously, understand what’s driving these issues, and act before these pressures become part of growing up.”