Japanese kids suffer near worst mental health among richest nations: report

Get rid of all the anime and other things that corrupt young minds. Western influences can also be bad.

Western influences can also be bad.

So Eastern influences are good? Ridiculous, It just depends, what I think is bad though is how the kids have to deal with these post COVID-19 rules. The fact that kids have to catch up and make up for the lost time over the months of the lockdown and the pressure of extra homework Shorter classes everything being rushed and some of them go to Juku doesn’t help at all and I see it with my kids.

Not really surprising when considering some of the things that teens have to contend with in Japan, and for some it's much worse than for others. The less fortunate ones have to go to school, study like crazy, worry about entrance exams so they can escape, avoid trashy teens and then go home at the end of the day to endure a screaming and hysterical single mother putting you down who can barely hold things together and make ends meet. It's all true because I had a student just like this who hanged himself. He was a good kid too.

Japanese kids suffer near worst mental health among richest nations: report

Japan, an average of 7.5 in 100,000 adolescents aged 15 to 19 committed suicide between 2013 and 2015,

In academic proficiency and social skills, Japan placed 27th.

After they becoming adult those issue issue just go away? No, it's still exist, just no one measure it comprehensively.

Let the kids actually enjoy their childhood instead of cramming their life with extra studies, thinking you can make them smarter by throwing school at them year-round. When I was child, during July and August, I was outside playing ball, fighting, going to the ballpark, and the beach and meeting girls, not cooped up in a classroom. No one the boys here are so inept at damn near everything outside of school.

Same as what Reckless said, Japanese kids have jump through more hoops at school, at home, among their peers and with society compared to other countries. There's a steep price to pay for keeping up high standards and I'm afraid that there will be a day where kids won't be able to afford it.

Get rid of all the anime and other things that corrupt young minds

Agreed, anime and manga should be banned throughout the world on punishment of jail. These media promote atheism, immorality, whaling and environmental destruction, and child abuse. Only in Japan does such filth exist and they are now exporting it to the rest of the world to brainwash our children. Censorship won't cut it, only an outright and permanent ban. It's no surprise that the results of this study show that Japanese kids are the most mentally unhealthy in the world.

Western influences can also be bad

Yeah right, if anything Japan needs a full embrace of liberal Western influences to sort out their problems, particularly on race and social justice.

It starts at the top. The old establishment want kids here to suffer the old systems. Need to change government first. Also need to change the kaisha. They want braindead graduates with good results. None of this is going to happen anytime soon.

And we can't accused UNICEF to be biased, Japan is the main donator :)

when figures for Covid lockdown are released, it will be Aussie kids.

LOL, read the stats:

Japan's children came first in physical health,which was measured by the percentage of overweight children and child mortality,

In Japan, an average of 7.5 in 100,000 adolescents aged 15 to 19 committed suicide between 2013 and 2015, while the suicide rate for New Zealand was the second-highest at 14.9. Greece saw the lowest suicide rate at 1.4, while Lithuania saw the highest at 18.2.

It's a bit rough to measure mental health levels with only one indicator or suicide rate.

Especially considering the 2011 earthquake and the potential metropolitan earthquake, it is not strange that young Japanese feel blue and become negative.

I think it's better to judge governments on happiness created than GDP. These studies mean well, but there is massive scope for measurement differences once you are comparing different countries. "Do you get on with your parents?" etc. will have different standards in different cultures. The winner is probably the society with the lowest expectations.

My daughter got caught once with a manga at school. Actually it wasn't her, it was just her comic that was being handed round, but oh was there was hell to pay!

Pressure to excell with pressure to be subordinate, not hard to see why being under a train or at the end of a rope might seem easier.

Anyone that works with Japanese kids already knows this.

The number of times I have met a demanding parent telling me what university their preschool aged kid is going to have to enter is staggering.

These kids are STUDY, STUDY, STUDY from waking until sleeping.

I say all the time, I am certain the average Japanese kid can run circles around the average American kids when it comes to studies, but put two of them in an unexpected situation and you will see which has a better handle on real life situations.

I feel so sorry for these kids that work harder than most people do in a full-time job and then people act shocked when they burnout, or worse, snap.

-Extreme jealousy between the students.

-Teachers and parents who play three wise monkeys.

-Unrealistic idealism.

-Rote learning.

-Discrimination towards the differences.

These are enough reasons to be a depressed kid.

I smell bias:

Japan was 20th, thus about middling overall.

Japan's kids are 9% more life satisfied than the last contender.

Japan's kids have half the suicide rate of the "2nd highest" and maybe 40% of the highest suicide rate.

Nearly 70% of them think they can make friends easily. Please remember, not everyone is necessarily interested in making friends regardless of the difficulty level.

Japan has the lowest unemployment rate and below average poverty rate.

Somehow, all this is summed up with the following title:

Japanese kids suffer near worst mental health among richest nations: report

Really?

Japanese children had the second-worst rated mental well-being among 38 developed and emerging countries due to poor life satisfaction and the high frequency of suicide, a UNICEF report said Thursday.

Living in normal Japanese neighbourhood surrounded by people with kids (although not enough to keep the population from shrinking, alas) I´d take that study with a grain of salt. There are so many problems in other countries that Japanese kids do not have to deal with. I often feel I am living in a Norman Rockwell painting here.

Let’s also remember that divorce is skyrocketing and 70% of kids don’t see their parents after divorce.

So, my kids haven’t seen me, their father for five years, have no contact with any relative on my side (yes, no phone calls, no nothing), and are told that their father is evil. So, maybe they wouldn’t answer that they are happy in a confidential survey.

As for juku, while I am not told which school they attend, I am told that they attend juku - something they wouldn’t be doing if I were there.

So perhaps the kids who don’t see one parent at all, and know they can’t admit they want to, might skew these figures.

While the number of these kids may not be high, it’s thought to be 150,000 a year so that adds up

The Australian Women’s Safety New South Wales survey found 40% of frontline workers reporting increased requests for help by survivors–70% of the increase was during the pandemic.

Of course for you downvoters, domestic violence has no effect on the mental health of children.

@Ipanema Beach well done satire is on point.

This has been know for years already nothing new.

Lets blame the cell phones turning children into zombies too

The article had some very odd sentences, some disconnected by paragraphs from references in the next paragraph. Too hard to follow as they author tried to say specific things where a table would have been better.

People that cannot show, their children emotion support , should think twice about bringing children into the world

Kids that allegedly bounce between countries aren’t going to be doing well in school given they would also be bouncing between schools.

What research do you have to back that up? And what is the percentage if you can show us the stats.

No surprise that J kids mental health score ranks so low. We should be cautious though about what we read into that. Life satisfaction is not necessarily commensurate between societies. Japan’s preference is for a tractable flock, conditioned to be that way through inculcated, ingrained helplessness. Paradoxically, the stress inducing emphasis on passivity, mutual dependence and being attuned to ‘reading the air’ about what is or isn’t socially sanctioned in an intrinsically 危ない world, has a flip side; subliminal contentment.

How did New Zealand rank lowest? We keep hearing about what a utopia that place is.

Perhaps visiting other countries (e.g. USA), as foreign visiting students (for a year or more), may help give Japanese youth a better appreciation of themselves.

Those citing allegedly peculiar features of Japanese society should be able to explain why New Zealand comes out with an even lower ranking despite being a very different society having little in common with Japan.

I would also note that the US ranking is not that much better than that of Japan.

I'm glad I grew up in the 80s and early 90s. I had a great time!

As a preschool teacher in an international school I can tell that children feel stressed to perform and pass entrance exams. It's too early to feel this amount of stress and has negative effects on them.

Ipanema Beach's post was so good I felt the need to quote it!

Get rid of all the anime and other things that corrupt young minds

Agreed, anime and manga should be banned throughout the world on punishment of jail. These media promote atheism, immorality, whaling and environmental destruction, and child abuse. Only in Japan does such filth exist and they are now exporting it to the rest of the world to brainwash our children. Censorship won't cut it, only an outright and permanent ban. It's no surprise that the results of this study show that Japanese kids are the most mentally unhealthy in the world.

Western influences can also be bad

Yeah right, if anything Japan needs a full embrace of liberal Western influences to sort out their problems, particularly on race and social justice.

Nothing else to say except that I agree 100%

@aly Rustom

I agree too, except the atheism part. Im an atheist, and perfectly mentally well. As to these findings: Nothing new. I've been in Japan since 2001 and observed it since then. Wrote about it extensively in my 2009 book. This problem will not improve anytime soon. One thing I do know is: not my kid. I will not allow japan to hammer my daughter. She will understand that she's always encouraged to be the nail that sticks out.