FEELING OF LONELINESS IN CHILDREN: DATA FROM THE SURVEY OF CHILDREN AND PARENTS IN THE PROJECT “CHILDREN WELLBEING INDEX”

Abstract

The feeling of loneliness is a multiple phenomenon, that affects many sides of children’s wellbeing. In order to realize “Russian Child Wellbeing Index” project since  Elena and Gennady Timchenko Charitable Foundation has been collecting “children’s voices” – the survey data of children at the age - and their parents. This information allows us to talk about wellbeing from six points of view in the domains of education, health, material wellbeing, self-realization, security and social relations. Apart from main questions to indicate domain values, there are some supplementary questions, needed for better and wider understanding of wellbeing. One of them is “How often do you feel lonely?” in children’s questionnaire, and the same one in parents’ questionnaire. So, the report is based on the analysis of   children and their parents’ responses regarding the feeling of loneliness. The main outcome is that there is a stable connection between the regularity of the feeling of loneliness and general children wellbeing. Students, who often feel lonely also think that their classmates threaten them worse, they more frequently encountered with bulling, at home their parents scream at them more often, than in typical families and the number of scandals in their families is also bigger. The main risk factors for loneliness are identifi ed. They are the inability to be heard by parents and adults (to a lesser extent this applies to peers), as well as psychological or even physical violence against a child. Moreover, children’s loneliness relates with such parameters as overall life satisfaction, the presence of their own items and a room, the presence of bulling at school and some others. In comparison with children responses parents’ assessment often belittle the role of positive factors and exaggerate the role of negative features. Especially it is true for the question about relations between the child and family.