Bridget Phillipson says she doesn’t know why our children are unhappy. Tell her.
On Sunday, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told the Observer that “we don’t know why British children are some of the unhappiest”. She blamed screen time. She talked about children not playing outside enough. It was an admission from the minister responsible for children’s wellbeing. And it was wrong, because we do know. The evidence has been piling up for years. The Government simply will not say the word.
UNICEF’s 2025 Report Card ranked the UK 27th out of 36 rich countries on children’s mental health. The Children’s Society found that UK 15-year-olds have the lowest life satisfaction in Europe – 25.2% reporting low life satisfaction, compared with the European average of 16.6%.
What sits underneath those numbers? Family breakdown. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, using Millennium Cohort Study data, found that cohabiting parents were three times more likely than married parents to have separated by their child’s fifth birthday – 27% versus 9% – even after controlling for the mother’s education, ethnicity and background. Researchers at the University of St Andrews, tracking children’s family pathways using UK Household Longitudinal Study data, found that children whose trajectories included parental separation or the entrance of a non-biological father had the worst mental health outcomes of any group studied.
Children do best when their parents are married. And the reason is not hard to find: married parents are more stable, and they are happier. Yet the same week Phillipson claimed ignorance, The Times ran a headline designed to obscure precisely this. A new study of over 26,000 Europeans, it reported, shows that “parenthood doesn’t make you happy”. That headline is a statistical trick. It averages together married parents – who are the happiest group in society – with single and cohabiting parents, who are considerably less happy. When you separate married parents out, the picture is transformed: 40% of married mothers report being “very happy,” compared with just 17% of unmarried mothers. Happier parents, more stable families, happier children. The pattern is consistent. And across one million European observations, Blanchflower and Clark confirmed it: when financial difficulties are controlled, children make married couples happier.
The Government knows all of this. But the political climate punishes anyone who promotes marriage. This very week, journalist Zoë Grünewald branded pro-family policy “sinister”, and Labour minister Olivia Bailey dismissed it as ‘an exclusionary sham’. So the evidence piles up, yet the silence continues.
That is not good enough. Britain’s children deserve better. They deserve the truth.
Please write to Bridget Phillipson and tell her the answer she already knows. The answer is marriage. Ask her to say it!
You can email her at: bridget.phillipson.mp@parliament.uk
You can forward this email or you can tell her in your own words that the evidence is clear. Tell her that children do best when their parents are married. Tell her the Government’s refusal to say the word ‘marriage’ is a political choice, not an evidence gap, and that Britain’s children are paying the price.