Children’s Day has come and gone with another flurry of news conferences drawing attention to the needs of young Taiwanese. As it does every year, the Child Welfare League Foundation released the results of its child well-being survey, finding only a “medium level” of happiness among Taiwanese children.
It comes as no surprise that academic stress, loneliness and lack of sleep and exercise were ranked as the primary culprits. About 79 percent of respondents gave their life satisfaction score a passing grade, 8.9 percentage points lower than the average score in a similar WHO study. A paltry 14.4 percent said that they like school — nearly 14 percentage points lower than the WHO study average — while more than one-quarter said they do not like school at all. Another 28 percent felt the world could “go on without them,” and only 27.9 percent said that they like the life they have now.
Another study by the foundation offered a more troubling peek into the mental health of teenagers. In the February survey, 23 percent of high-school students reported experiencing severe depression. Seventeen percent said they would not talk with anyone about troubling emotions, while only 40.6 percent said they would talk with their parents. In an indictment of the accessibility of mental health services, only 5.6 percent said they would seek professional counseling from their school.
Add to this climbing suicide rates since 2014 — the second-most common cause of death for those under the age of 44 — and the information begins to paint an image of startlingly lonely children and young adults.
The mental health challenges posed by social media, the COVID-19 pandemic and existential crises such as climate change are worth the weight of the ink that has been spilled on their behalf. Still, sloughing blame off onto an amorphous boogeyman does nothing to provide immediate relief for the very real mental anguish many are experiencing. At its worst, it compounds the weight of hopelessness people feel when facing threats so unfathomably large.
As with adults, the stigma of seeking help can feel insurmountable. Creating more community counseling centers would hopefully make access easier, as the new director of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Department of Mental Health, Chen Liang-yu (陳亮妤), plans to do, along with an array of other small and meaningful efforts to reduce stigma and expand access to professional mental health resources. Yet when wondering how to help on a personal level, the most useful rule of thumb is to foster meaningful connections.
In a bright spot from the February survey, the foundation found that despite the isolation brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, it facilitated communication between parents and children in some families. When no one knows how to handle unprecedented times, it can create an opportunity to face it together.
Instead of sheltering children from the challenges of the world, they need to be part of the solutions. In the same survey, researchers found that the more socially competent a teenager feels, the less likely they are to experience stress and depression. Teens who feel like they are a valued part of their community are more likely to find meaning and reach out to others, helping to stave off the most insipid aspects of modern isolation. That so many children reported disliking school is an indication that their voices are not being heard, and an invitation to initiate change.
The world might be changing fast, but it is not the first time people have struggled to keep up with the shifting tides. Children and teenagers are moving through this milieu along with everyone else — their voices not only matter, but it is crucial to their well-being that they are heard.
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