Jump to page content

The Importance of Wellbeing

Four out of five children and young people are happy with their lives

Here at BeeZee Bodies we really value the wellbeing of everyone we work with. We realise that the best and most realistic changes to healthier lifestyles happen when people feel happy, able and free to make change. 

On 10th October 2019, also World Mental Health Day, the Government published ‘State of the nation 2019: children and young people’s wellbeing’.

We were pleased to see that one of the main findings was that the majority of (four out of five) children and young people are happy with their lives. The report assessed satisfaction with their life overall, feelings of meaning and purpose and recent emotions (happiness and anxiety). Therefore, it is great news that most people aged between 10 and 24 feel so positive about those aspects of life. 

This plays into the ‘wider determinants of health’. This means that there are other, broader factors that influence health, for example, the support network from friends and family, wealth and income, and how easy it is to access services and or other resources. We spend time in our programmes talking about these wider factors in life that influence people’s health decisions, and how they can be tackled. As a result of this, last year in Brighton, we found that of the people who we worked with to make positive changes, (200 or so), wellbeing score* improved on average by 24%.  

How can we improve?

We do not want to forget the other 20% of children and young people who say that they are less, or not, happy with their lives. There is always more that can be done to help young people and we are pleased to see that, as the report summary outlines, a new RSHE curriculum has been created to help children to make informed decisions about their wellbeing and support them as they move into adult life. In addition, specialists Mental Health Support Teams have been proposed to support local schools’ access to services such as counsellors, nurses and educational psychologists.

As for our industry in particular, we are very aware that self-esteem and body image issues can be common in this field. If you haven’t already, please check out the blog from Dietician, Lauren, on a Parent’s Guide to mental health and body image

*Measured with the short version of the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS) used to measure mental wellbeing among people aged 13 to 74 in the UK.

 

Enjoy the Read? Let us notify you about our next post

Never miss a post