Life satisfaction of Taiwanese children drops to all-time low: Survey

Taipei, Nov. 18 (CNA) Taiwanese children's self-reported life satisfaction fell for the third straight year in 2024 to the lowest level on record, according to an annual survey conducted by the Child Welfare League Foundation (CWLF) released Monday.

In its "2024 Health Behaviors in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Survey," the CWLF found that the subjective life satisfaction score for Taiwanese children in grades 5-9 (ages 11 to 15) was only 68 out of 100, down 5.5 points from last year and 11.2 points from 2017.

The score was also 7 points below the international average, the CWLF said.

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 wasn't in the world, it wouldn't make a difference."

Another 13.7 percent described themselves as "unhappy" with their current lives, the survey found.

Other factors had to do with children's daily routines.

For instance, three-quarters (75.9 percent) of children said they felt stressed by their schoolwork, up more than 30 percentage points from the 44.5 percent reported last year, according to the survey.

The CWLF did not indicate, however, whether it viewed the increase as a statistical anomaly or as related to specific trends or changes in Taiwan's education system.

Kids 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 8-10 hours of sleep recommend by experts for children aged 13-18, the foundation said.

In terms of kids' 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 played more than eight hours.

Additionally, nearly a quarter of children (24.5 percent) had become so fixated on a game they couldn't think about other things, while a similar number had had trouble cutting down on screen time even after being asked, the survey found.

Meanwhile, the survey also contained some positive developments in the area of familial relations, the CWLF said.

While 70.8 percent of children said they felt they could talk to their mother about their feelings, 55.4 percent felt they could talk to their father.

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, however, it has used a sample size of at least 1,500 students as recommended by the WHO, which collaborates with over 50 countries to administer the HBSC survey every four years.