and have little leisure time. Clearly, animals pick up emotional clues from their masters. But the problem is even more acute for America’s children.
Data from UNICEF and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) paint a dismal picture of the quality of life for America’s children. I attended OECD’s 2015 How’s Life Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, last month, and returned with the organization’s annual report on measuring wellbeing in the world’s 30-plus richest countries, which are all OECD members. The report contains data comparing the wellbeing of children in an amazing array of areas ranging from child poverty rates to the percentage of teenagers who smoke or drink to incidents of bullying in schools and time parents spend with their kids.
OECD data shows that Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in almost all other OECD nations and their children fare far below the average in most wellbeing categories. The “bird’s eye view of child wellbeing” ranks U.S. children a shocking close-to-last place, with only Poland and Turkey faring worse. I suspected that long working hours might mean American parents spend less time with their kids, accounting for many of the negatives. But I was wrong: the data shows we spend more time with our kids than all but four other countries.
Overworked Americans don’t sacrifice time for their kids. They give up time with friends, with spouses or partners, or alone, in leisure activities. These sacrifices leave them highly-stressed and rub off on their children. And much of the time
Americans spend with kids is about preparing them for competition and includes chauffeuring them to an endless string of activities, to give them a leg up in college admissions and so forth. Both children and parents are stressed by such activities.
American children rank second-to-last among OECD countries in “finding it easy to talk with parents” and rank very poorly in many other similar categories such as “feeling stress from schoolwork” or “finding classmates kind and helpful.” They rank worst among OECD countries in obesity (itself as much a response to stress as to diet or exercise) rates and in “reporting poor health.”
By contrast, in the Netherlands, the top-performing country for children and the nation with the world’s shortest working hours for adults, children are engaged in only about a third as many extra-curricular activities as American children, feel little stress in school (while performing better), are the least obese and report the highest life satisfaction. Yet their parents actually spend less time with them than American parents do, giving more of their ample free time to socializing with friends or other leisurely pursuits.
Inequality in the United States and the fierce competition it engenders produce stress for both people (rich and poor) and their pets. It’s something to think about.