Mick Hartley

I think Barabara Ellen’s got it about right on that Unicef report:

Neglected? Deprived? Those living below the poverty line are one thing, but the majority of UK adolescents are, if anything, spoiled brats. I would challenge anyone to fill a small car park with British 15-year-olds (from any social class) who don’t own a mobile phone. It is also debatable whether our children are as ‘disenfranchised’ as depicted in the report. At one point, we’re breathlessly informed that ‘only 81 per cent of them really like school’ (only?). But never mind that. When listening to British children talking about the spiritual wasteland that is their existence, those nice Unicef people with their clipboards failed to include the most crucial factor of all – the contrary bolshie nature of the people they were talking to; the fact that British teenagers have always loved nothing more than to pose, bitch, rebel, slag everything and everyone off, and blow endless anti-establishment raspberries.

Indeed, British teenagers are, have always been, by nature, rebellious, stroppy, and a lot less interested in being fair than they are in being interesting. Which to my mind is much less creepy and disturbing than the thought of all those sucky-up kids from Holland and Sweden (henceforth known as the apple-polishing nations) chirruping away about how much they respect their elders. Bearing this in mind, this was the only possible result for this study.

Unlike their Dutch or Swedish counterparts, British children were never going to answer such questions as ‘Are your contemporaries kind and helpful?’ with po-faced sincerity; to piously and publicly abhor the idea of sex, drugs, and other ‘bad behaviour’; and pour anything other than molten scorn upon the status quo. Indeed, the vast majority of British adolescents are as they always were, as most of us were – vile, stroppy, preternaturally sarcastic ingrates, who would doubtless be labelled dangerous, disaffected sociopaths in any other European country. And this is supposed to be a bad thing?

The UK, in fact, does especially badly at “risk behaviours”, where we languish at the foot of the rankings by “a considerable distance”. Risk is bad, apparently.

Risk behaviours considered in the study include smoking, being drunk, using cannabis, fighting and bullying, and sexual behaviour.

Only about a third of young people eat fruit daily.

Shocking.