Irish teenagers are among the least satisfied with their lives despite leading on academic performance, according to a report on childhood in economically developed countries.
The report – Report Card 19: Child Wellbeing at Risk in an Unpredictable world – compares the wellbeing of children across 43 countries in the EU and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Ireland is in the bottom half globally, ranking in 24th place for adolescent wellbeing.
Nearly one in three 15-year-olds in Ireland reported low life satisfaction, with analysis from 2018 to 2022 indicating declining life satisfaction in adolescents across 22 of 26 countries where data is available.
The study also highlights Ireland’s youth suicide rate as sitting above the international average, standing at 6.4 per 100,000. The report notes that suicide rates in this age group are substantially higher among males than females, although this gap appears to be narrowing.
Social media, relationships and family, being bullied, and the effects of Covid-19 lockdowns are all given as reasons for a decline in mental wellbeing.
Ireland had the highest share of adolescents whose parents spend time talking with them at least once or twice a week (91 per cent) which was strongly linked to positive life satisfaction. This compared to Japan, which was lowest on the scale, where just 53 per cent of parents spent time talking with their children.
“When it comes to mental health, what children experience on social media may be more pertinent than the amount of time they spend on it,” the report noted.
While the report examined the impact of social media on mental health, authors pointed to drawbacks, including that self-reported estimates of time spent on social media are not that reliable, whilst the links between self-reported time use and various aspects of mental health are not consistently that strong.
The Unicef study said that moderate social media users tended to have “somewhat higher” life satisfaction than either intensive users or children who do not use social media at all. It said: “The differences are not that large in comparison with other factors that are linked with variations in life satisfaction as already seen in Figure 6. Children who spent more than seven hours a day on social media had significantly lower than average life satisfaction, but this is a small group making up only around 6 per cent of 15-year-olds.
“Moreover, it is possible either that spending a lot of time on social media causes lower life satisfaction, and/or that children with low life satisfaction tend to turn to intensive social media use. Children who never used social media also had lower life satisfaction than average. This group of children tend to have poor quality relationships with family and peers.”
The report noted that social media use has been linked to negative body image for both girls and boys.
“Self-comparisons with models and celebrities are one aspect. Daily exposure to idealized and often manipulated content can lead to feelings of inadequacy as adolescents measure their worth against unrealistic portrayals. Appearance-related social media content was identified as a particular risk.
“It should be noted, however, that academic researchers had highlighted the negative effects of unrealistic beauty standards on young people’s body image, even before the rise of social media. On the other hand, digital technology use (including social media use) has been linked to positive aspects of well-being, such as greater satisfaction with Friendships.”
In the large majority of countries, the proportion of children with high life satisfaction fell between 2018 and 2022. Japan was the only country where children’s life satisfaction increased substantially between 2018 and 2022.
While both girls and boys experienced a drop in their life satisfaction, the magnitude of this decrease was, in nearly all countries, larger among girls.
Peter Power, executive director of Unicef Ireland, described the findings as stark, stating:
“Ireland’s teens are succeeding in school, but struggling in life. We must match our investment in academic achievement with the same urgency for mental and emotional wellbeing.”
Noting the impact of Covid lockdowns on young people, the report detailed: “Children were the age group that was least seriously physically affected by the virus; they made up 0.4 per cent of the global deaths for all ages. However, COVID-19 related restrictions had a profound impact on children’s lives. In addition to lockdowns, schools were closed for long periods in most countries, included in this report, causing major disruption to children’s learning experiences and social lives.
“In 2025, the memory of the COVID-19 pandemic is fading and policy and media attention has shifted to current pressing concerns. Yet, as this report highlights, the pandemic had major impacts on children’s well-being that continue to reverberate. History suggests that societal recovery from such shocks is slow.”