Taiwanese children’s self-reported life satisfaction fell for the third straight year this year to the lowest level on record, an annual survey released yesterday by the Child Welfare League Foundation (CWLF) showed.
In its 2024 Health Behaviors in School-Aged Children Survey, the foundation found that the subjective life satisfaction score for Taiwanese children in grades 5 to 9 (ages 11 to 15) was 68 out of 100, down 5.5 points from last year and 11.2 points from 2017.
The score was also seven points below the international average, it said.
Photo: CNA
The foundation blamed the low scores on a combination of factors, including increased feelings of psychological alienation, stress from school, insufficient sleep and addiction to digital devices, which it said were borne out by the survey’s targeted questions.
In terms of psychological alienation and loneliness, 37.4 percent of children said they agreed with the statement “if I was not in the world, it would not make a difference.”
Another 13.7 percent of respondents described themselves as “unhappy” with their lives.
Other factors measured children’s satisfaction with their daily routines.
For example, three-quarters (75.9 percent) of the children said they felt stressed by their schoolwork, up more than 30 percentage points from the 44.5 percent reported last year, the survey showed.
The CWLF did not state whether it viewed the increase as a statistical anomaly or as related to specific trends or changes in Taiwan’s education system.
Respondents also reported sleeping an average of 8.01 hours on weekdays and 9.59 hours on weekends, falling in the lower end of the daily eight to 10 hours of sleep recommend by experts for children aged 13 to 18, the foundation said.
Regarding their engagement with digital devices, 20.8 percent of those surveyed said they played screen-based games at least six hours a day, while 9.4 percent said they played more than eight hours daily.
Nearly one-quarter of the children (24.5 percent) said they were so fixated on a game they could not think about other things, while a similar number said they had trouble reducing screen time even after being asked.
The survey also showed some positive developments in the area of family relations, with 70.8 percent of children saying they believed they could talk to their mother about their feelings, while 55.4 percent said they could talk to their father, the CWLF said.
Sixty-three percent of respondents said they shared at least one meal per day with their family, the foundation said, adding that each of the three metrics had risen “substantially” over the past year.
The CWLF has yet to release the details of the survey’s methodology. In previous years, it used a sample size of at least 1,500 students, as recommended by the WHO, which collaborates with more than 50 countries to administer the survey every four years.
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