Children’s Society Director Encourages Aid for Youth

After the Children’s Society’s Good Childhood Report in 2013 discovered that more than half a million children with the U.K. are unhappy with their lives and UNICEF reported the U.K. now ranks as the 16th in child well-being, the Society called for a greater understanding of children and adolescents’ welfare.

The mission of the Children’s Society is to create a world where the youth are able to live a “valued, respected and happy” life. As of late, the Society has over 36 children centres in England with over 34 programmes throughout the country, assisting troubled children and teenagers. They aid those who are disadvantaged, refugees, runaways and any who are in a vulnerable state with the intention of helping them on a better path.

The Director of Communications and Policy at The Children’s Society, Lily Caprani spoke on the subject and exemplified the importance of providing aid despite the success they already reached in previous years.

“The first decade of this century saw things get better for children in the U.K.,” Caprani said. “But this new report backs up our own research and shows we still have a very long way to go. At any point in time, there are hundreds of thousand of children in the U.K. who are unhappy with their lives.”

Caprani expressed the importance of not only focusing on children, but also adolescents who are often overlooked due to the stigma of being troublesome.

“We are particularly concerned about low wellbeing among teenagers identified in the report,” Caprani said. “It is far too easy to assume that teenagers aren’t as vulnerable as younger children or don’t need as much support. By just dismissing teenagers with low well-being as ‘difficult,’ we don’t recognize the huge pressures they are under or that we can do something about it.”

Caprani ended with a motivation tangent, motivating those involved within the Society to continue progressing forward in hopes of decreasing the number of unhappy youth.

“Only by putting the well-being of children at the centre of decision-making will the U.K. be able to make the dramatic-and critical-improvements in child well-being that we need and children deserve.”