Teenagers are happier than 10 years ago

Young teenagers are happier and healthier now than teenagers were a decade ago, a new study said, Daily Mail reports.

It found that the ‘Facebook generation’ of youngsters are less likely than their predecessors to drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or cannabis, or get bullied. A growing proportion of 11 to 15-year-olds, the study said, engage in behaviour that would make their parents proud. They eat fruit and vegetables, take exercise, clean their teeth and talk to their mothers and fathers.

However the study, assembled by academics at St Andrews University, complained that despite the increasing levels of health and well-being, adolescents now are just as likely to be fat as the generation of the 2000s. Obesity rates, it said, did not decline between 2002 and 2010. The findings, based on a series of papers put together with the help of the World Health Organisation, are the latest to underline the increasing trend for teenagers to avoid risky behaviour in favour of a healthier lifestyle.

In England and Wales teen pregnancies have fallen to levels last seen in the 1960s and official surveys have shown a major drop in drinking among young people. More than a quarter of under-24s are teetotal and fewer than a fifth ever go binge drinking, according to 2013 estimates.

In 2013, tobacco smoking among young women aged 18 to 24 dropped by 10 percent and among young men by almost as much. State surveys also showed a major drop in 2013 in numbers of people in the same age group who took any illegal drug, down from 19.3 percent to 16.3 percent. Some researchers have pointed to a ‘Facebook effect’, which has led teenagers who would once have spent their spare time on the streets instead to devote it to playing with gadgets in their bedrooms. Widespread public disapproval of smoking, drunkenness, drug abuse and teen mothers is also likely to have influenced teen behaviour.

Professor Candace Currie of St Andrews, who assembled evidence drawn up from surveys and official statistics carried out in Europe and North America, said, “There is much to celebrate about the health and well-being of many young people today.”

She added however that “others continue to experience real and worrying problems”.

Some countries, including Scotland, showed evidence that fewer youngsters took daily exercise in 2010 than in 2002.

The report said that while the overall optimistic picture seems surprising, considering that many countries faced a severe economic crisis in the last decade, policies and actions to improve public health were implemented in many countries in the same period. Many of those policies were, however, deeply controversial.

Critics of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, launched in England by Tony Blair, have said that it had nothing to do with the fall in teenage pregnancy, which did not become evident until after David Cameron’s Coalition scrapped the programme of contraceptive distribution in 2010.

The report added that “the general feeling that young people are better off today could also be attributed to changes in fashions, behavioural norms and societal values”. Professor Currie said, “Adolescence is a crucial stage in life when you lay the foundation for adulthood, whether that is healthy or otherwise.”