Children’s Worries.
A small scale investigation of the views of
twelve and thirteen year old children
By Alex Mann and Joe Liley
INTRODUCTION
As two year 7 students at a Middle School in Bedfordshire who had been trained in
research techniques, we were very interested to research what children worry about.
We chose this topic because we wanted to help adults better understand the issues
that worry children of our age. We felt that as young researchers we might get
different results than if adults were to undertake this research.
We had read some interesting work about children’s worries which had been
researched by children and had looked at the issue on line.
We also wanted to learn how worried children could best be helped with their
problems and then pass the information on to adults.
The issues we wanted to cover were:




What do children in year 7 and year 8 worry about?
How does it affect them?
What are the issues year 7 and year 8 children most worry about?
What helps them with their issues, who helps and how effective is it?
We also wanted to find out whether worries changed across the age groups we were
looking at and whether boys and girls worried about different things.
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1. METHODOLOGY
We decided to collect our data by using questionnaires so that we could get as much
information as we could.
We used a list of possible worries from which respondents could select which
applied to them as this would make it easier to analyse. We used a 5 point scale to
measure how much each issue affects them as this provides a good range of
responses. We also had more open questions to find out who helped the children
and how effective it was and included a section on ‘what else could be done’. All
were put on a single table to make it easier to record responses. We also needed to
know their year and gender so we gave them boxes to tick [see copy of
questionnaire in Appendix 2].
We chose to do the research with our year group [Year 7] and the one above [Year
8] as we could easily access them. We had to get permission from our headteacher
and our form teacher to undertake this research.
We also interviewed our school counsellor because she would know a lot about
children’s worries [See appendix 1]. This guided us in our selection of possible
worries to put in our questionnaire.
We choose two classes in our school and we gave out 33 questionnaires. We were
in the room and so was the teacher. The children handed their questionnaire into us
as soon as they had finished, so we got every questionnaire that we gave out back
in.
ETHICS
We made the questionnaires anonymous so people would tell the truth and to make
it more accurate and did not need to ask for parental permission after consulting our
headteacher about this. We told the two classes that their responses would be dealt
with confidentially.
2. RESULTS
The 33 questionnaires were split between boys and girls and year as shown in the
table below.
Year 7
Year 8
Gender Total
Girls
10
8
18
Boys
7
8
15
Year Total
17
16
33
We used Excel to put all the results of the survey together and make it easier to put
together charts and tables to analyse them.
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To make the analysis of the open questions easier, we grouped similar answers
together to make categories.
For questions where children had to choose a number on a 5 point scale we mainly
looked at the average.
The answers to the question “How often do you get worried?” are shown in the figure
below.

A majority of the children are either worried ‘rarely’ or ‘sometimes’.

Of the people that worry more than ‘sometimes’ 3 out of 4 were girls.

Year 7 are spread out over the whole range whereas year 8 are only between
“rarely” and “quite often”.

There doesn’t seem to be much difference between boys and girls
3
When a comparison is made by gender we found the following:

What affects children most is a loved one dying, with a score of 3.2 for the girls
and 3 for the boys.

Homework also worries both boys and girls (2.8 and 2.7 respectively).

Worrying about appearance, busy parents and illness are all prominent worries
for mainly girls.

Family finance, world problems and feeling different are not worried about as
much as other issues by neither boys nor girls.
4
When we looked at differences between the two age groups we found the following:

Year 7 are more affected by family relationships (2.7), world problems (2.2) and
family finance (2.2) than year 8 (2.0/1.7/1.8).

Year 8 tend to worry more about death and illness (3.3/2.5 compared to 2.9/2.1
for year 7) and appearance (2.5 compared to 2.1 for year 7).
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When we looked at how much children worry by age groups and gender together we
found the following:

This graph confirms that illness, appearance and busy parents are mainly a worry
for girls regardless of their year.

For homework and death year 7 girls and year 8 boys are the most worried.
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We also looked at who was helping children with their worries and found the
following:

This graph shows that parents help a lot especially with school work, homework,
illness and siblings.

For feeling different and physical appearance, children tend to help themselves.

Parents, friends, family and siblings help with every worry.

For bullying it is the school/teachers who are helping the most.
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We also asked how effective the help was for the children and found the following:

In general the help is effective or really effective.

Very few people said the help was not effective or not good.
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We also tried to find out what else could help children with their worries.
Very few children answered this question and when they did, a lot answered
‘nothing’, ‘don’t know/not sure’.
Below are the summary tables of what else could help for 3 sources of worries
(Homework, Illness and Bullying) as examples.
Homework
less homework
no homework
Concentration
they learn the new methods
do it earlier because it gets me stressed when I do it late
get rid of it
Help
I try more to understand
Nothing
not sure
No answer
Answers
4
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
6
1
14
Illness
better medicine
Calpol
people leave me alone when I feel worse
rest more
that I notice its easy
don't know
not sure
Nothing
No answer
Answers
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
5
20
Bullying
stopped quicker
I tell someone
not have bullies
don't know
not sure
No/nothing
No answer
Answers
1
1
1
1
1
5
23
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3. DISCUSSION
From the results of our survey, it looks like nearly all children worry sometimes and
only a few worry a lot. Their main worries are about school (Homework and School
work) as well as death of a loved one. There are no big gender differences, although
it looks like girls worry more about appearance, busy parents and illness than boys.
The big differences between the year groups were that Year 7 seem to be more
affected by family relationships, world problems (2.2) and family finance while Year 8
worry more about death, illness and appearance (2.5 compared to 2.1 for year 7).
Most of the children are getting the help they need to deal with the issues and this
comes mainly from family and friends.
We think it would be useful to share these research findings with teachers and
parents so that they might be better able to understand and support us with our
worries. It is possible that if we had involved older or younger children we might have
had different results.
Quite a lot of children did not answer all the questions (especially the open
questions), which limits the interpretation of the results.
Some of the answers were difficult to understand (e.g. people written names of
friends/family or pet rather than their status).
We should have encouraged the children to fill in all the questions (maybe by
offering them a sweet if they completed all the questions) and also to explain that
they should write status/relationship with people/pets they mentioned in their
answers.
For each category of children (Year 8 boys, Year 8 girls, Year 7 boys, Year 7 girls)
we only had between 7 and 10 questionnaires. This makes it difficult to know if what
each group have said is representative of that age group and gender. It would have
been good to do the survey with more classes of year 7 and year 8 in the school to
get more questionnaires for each category and be more sure of our findings.
CONCLUSION
We feel that our main finding is that children do have some worries and that they
vary from child to child. There are some differences related to gender and age. It
also shows that children are helped in dealing with these worries and that such help
can always be improved. We have also learnt a lot about the issues associated with
collecting data and if we had the same opportunity we could improve our research
and take it further.
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APPENDICES
APPENDIX 1: Interview with school counsellor
1:
Question:
Could you list some of the causes of stress for children?
Answer:
Parents arguing – home issues, low self- esteem, lack of
confidence, feeling different, physical appearance, financial
problems – maybe envy of those with lots of money, busy
parents, being ignored, parents remarrying – new(older)
siblings, unable to do schoolwork and bullying – may refuse to
attend school.
2:
Question: Which affects them the most?
Answer: Feeling different or being the odd one out.
3:
Question: What are some of the affects on children?
Answer: Lack of sleep, not eating, being distracted in lessons,
aggression, crying, self harming and bad behaviour.
4:
Question: Could you give some tips on how to deal or cope
with stress?
Answer: Punch balls, stress toys, trampolines, calming pets
(stroking them), hobbies, talking to peer counsellors, talking to
parents, and positive thinking all help.
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APPENDIX 2: Questionnaire given out to the children
Questionnaire Page 1
Please read
We are two year 7 boys called Alex Mann and Joe
Liley who are very interested in what worries
children and young people. If you could take a bit
of time to fill in the questionnaire it could change
the views of adults on the subject of children’s
worries. Its TOTALLY confidential so don’t put
your name on it. Could you please tell the truth as
it could really help us with our research (and as
it’s confidential you have nothing to hide)? Thank
you!
Please tick the appropriate boxes:
Are you:
Male
Female
Year 7
Year 8
How often do you get worried?
Never
Quite Often
Rarely
Often
Questionnaire Page 2
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Sometimes
Always