PILLOW TALK
The Understanding Society study has indicated severe problems with our sleeping habits
but also the quality of the parents’ partnership. Children who ate at least three evening meals a week with their parents were more likely to report being ‘completely happy’ with family life. Hours spent watching TV were unrelated to a young person’s happiness with his or her family situation. “Watching TV has been linked to several adverse outcomes among children,” said Dr Maria Iacovou, a Research Fellow at ISER specialising in family structures and education. “But it looks as though children’s perception of their own well- being isn’t one of them.”
night. Germany was next, with 27 per cent; then the UK, 24 per cent; and Japan, 20 per cent. The Dutch, at 12 per cent, were the least affected. Understanding Society found that it was not just length of sleep and quality of sleep that was the problem, it was getting to sleep in the first place. A quarter of women said they had trouble dropping off within 30 minutes on three or more nights a week. One in five men said the same. By the time men and women reached the age of 65, half had trouble sleeping on three or more nights a week. Many of these people were still working. Around 28 per cent of people over the current retirement age, and without long-term illness or
“ Sleep deprivation has an effect on
well-being because of its impact on temper and mood
limitation, are still in employment. Dr Bryan said: “The EU Working Time Directive (introduced in 1993 to regulate the amount of time spent at work in order to protect the health and safety of the European workforce) restricts long hours, but in this country you can opt out of that, which accounts for people working 48 hours or more a week.” In the UK an estimated 3.2 million people are working these long hours. While lack of sleep affects health and productivity, it may also skew David Cameron’s project to measure societal happiness. The Prime Minister says he inherited a ‘Broken Britain’. He wants to create a greater focus on well-being rather than wealth, and from 2012 has pledged to introduce a happiness or GWB – general well-being – index which will measure people’s quality of life. But sleep deprivation has an effect on well- being because of its impact on temper and mood. Tired parents bicker and are less optimistic. Children suffer when mum and dad snap at them, argue with each other, are too exhausted to listen to their problems or too busy to eat with them. For Understanding Society, 1,268 children between the ages of 10 and 15 were interviewed about family life and how happy they were at home. The research showed that the biggest influence on children’s well-being was the quality of relationships within their family – not just relationships between parents and children,
” 12 SOCIETY NOW SPRING 2011 CHILDLESS COUPLES
The research found that childless couples were happiest with their relationships, while those with a pre-school child – and often the least sleep – were least happy, although happiness increased with the age of the youngest child. Dr Iacovou said: “When you have a baby, it is terribly hard and a very difficult time in the life of couples. When you have a pre-school child, that’s the time when there is the most strain on a relationship and it is possible that some people never recover the happiness they had originally (as childless couples).” More research is planned on whether these differences vary according to whether couples are childless by choice or expecting to have a family in the future. Other research showed that while being jobless was associated with lower levels of happiness in a man’s relationship with his partner, income had no additional effect on relationship happiness among men, and was ‘only mildly important’ for women. But better educated people were happier with their relationships, and for women the association between relationship satisfaction and education was stronger than for men. Dr Iacovou said: “It might be that better educated people find it easier to conduct their relationships – they may have more space and more money, and relationships are not such a strain. But it may also be because people who have more education are more likely to match up with someone better suited to them. People who are more educated also tend to settle down later in life and when you are more mature, you tend to make a better choice of partner.” With work-life balance, marriage, mental health, and job satisfaction increasingly regarded as the solvent of societal happiness, the issue of sleep and how it affects all these things is becoming an important area of study. If the Government is keen on our collective happiness, perhaps it should consider ways to improve people’s sleep – a recipe for increased happiness for us all. n
i Sarah Womack is former social affairs correspondent of the Daily Telegraph
The ESRC commissioned and is the major funder of the Understanding Society study. The research team is led by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex and the study includes research findings on our working lives, relationships, health, finances and neighbourhoods.
Web
www.understandingsociety.org.uk
▲
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32