by Tony Rucinski, TCW
ON Sunday, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told the Observer that ‘we don’t know why British children are some of the unhappiest’. She blamed screen time and a lack of outdoor play. She described a ‘funny kind of paradox’ in which parents can track their children’s every move but are increasingly reluctant to let them go outside.
It was a striking admission from the minister responsible for children’s wellbeing – and it was almost entirely wrong. Not wrong about the screens, which are plainly a problem. Wrong about the ‘we don’t know’. We do know. The evidence has been piling up for years. The Government simply will not say the word. The word is marriage.
Two days before Phillipson’s interview, the Times ran a story based on a new study by Denson and Denson, published in the Journal of Family Issues. The headline read ‘Does parenthood make you happy?’ The answer, according to the study of more than 26,000 people across 24 European countries, is ‘no’. Parents and non-parents showed no significant difference in overall happiness.
The Times treated this as news. But the finding is a statistical artefact, and a well-documented one at that. The Denson study pools together every kind of parent – married, cohabiting, single, divorced – and compares them with every kind of non-parent. When you do that, the answer comes back flat. It is like asking whether exercise makes people healthier by averaging marathon runners and people who have just fallen off a treadmill.