Thinking Paper #99 – Are our children are unhappy for the same reason everyone else is unhappy?

By Tim Massingberd James

Abstract

A new study by UNICEF has found that children in Britain are amongst the unhappiest in the world. Could this possibly be caused by the same factors that make everyone else unhappy?



Are our children unhappy for the same reason everyone else is unhappy?

A new UNICEF report has found that British children are as unhappy as Nick Clegg on polling night 2015. Almost all of the children said that, rather than ipods, junk food and big tellies, what they actually craved was spending time with family and friends and having fun outdoors.

There are very few people in the world who do not crave spending time with family and friends and having fun outdoors, but UNICEF uncovered that rather than being able to deliver this, Simon Cowbell - the King of Broken Britain - is making parents work longer and longer hours, in an attempt to make them feel tired enough all the time that they submit to another series of X Factor.

As a result, in what little free time they have, parents feel guilty and shower their children with gifts rather than going outside to fly a kite, or taking a cycle ride to the local arboretum. An independent study by the IIPBA, which supports the findings, also discovered that whichever parent spends most time with the children actually spends most of that time brimming over with resentment that their spouse is not pulling their weight, rather than cherishing the treasured moments with their young children.

A spokesperson for the UN said they were considering deploying a UN Child Rearing brigade of crack Bhutanese troops to Britain, the unhappiest country in the industrialised world, to tackle the blight of "brand bullying" and force families to interact at gunpoint on countryside walks.

Conclusion

As the staff at the IIPBA began to question whether one of the world's richest countries rearing the world's unhappiest children shows that the systems of our society are not working correctly, Editor in Chief Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou reminded us we were all freelance contractors and he could terminate our employment immediately.

At that point, all IIPBA staff returned to our desks to work, and some one struck up a conversation about the next generation iPad.