There are penalties when one spurs in ways that constitute animal abuse. Not so when children and teenagers are metaphorically spurred on relentlessly at school by well-meaning parents. In the European league table of young people's well-being we have placed last according to a study conducted by the Child Poverty Action Group focusing on children and teenagers coming from 29 European countries. Wherefore art thou health, happiness and prosperity? Now that we are "blessed£ with all the chocolate, colour television sets and computers my generation yearned for, and much, much more - albeit at the other end, one fifth of our children are living in poverty - what do we get? A sad generation.

I don't remember being unhappy as a kid or as a teenager. I do remember though, that, generally speaking, parents didn't pressure us to succeed academically at all costs, as many do today. Students wanting to learn - especially if theirs was a sound environment at school and at home - got the necessary results with no drama and extra tension; so maybe that's one lesson we should have learnt from our mothers and fathers. But it seems that the stressful educational process of today, with some parents driving their children to the point of needing tranquillisers, is one of the tragic problems of our times. More so because it is a problem caused by us with the "help" of our system, also designed by ourselves. In the afore-mentioned study our children and youths place 28th in the domain of subjective well-being. So no surprises here since this domain includes well-being at school and one of the indicators is "children who feel pressured by schoolwork".

From what I observe, the problem with some parents today is that school results are no longer looked at as the key that opens the door to the next level of education. This was the general idea in my time as a student, and which I still embrace today as a parent. If one has the aptitude of an A student, that's very good, but we know that many children are unnecessarily pressed to persist to achieve the highest grades which, in the long run, will not make any positive difference to what they will be and will become as adults. They are chastised if they don't reach the target. It follows then that even in the personal well-being domain where one indicator is "children who report high life satisfaction", the score is very low. Our ranking here does not come as a surprise either because child abuse is widespread in Malta. And I am not talking about sexual or physical abuse but, for instance, giving children hell because they fail or don't do as well as expected in their 11+ exam is abuse that leaves emotional and psychological scars compounded by self-perceptions of inadequacy for many years.

We are then on the 28th rung of the health domain ladder. The indicators in the "child health from birth" area include the mortality rate where we fare excellently since our death-at-birth rate is thankfully negligible. But then the score is a disaster in the field of "children's health behaviour" where the indicators include: children's physical activity and children who are overweight. With the obesity rate of youngsters between 13 and 15 years, which exceeds even that of North America, we do have a big problem that will be even greater when these youngsters reach adulthood. Definitely, an area where preventive and remedial action needs to be stepped up.

You may be asking why I commented on this study by domain instead of taking it as whole. It would have been incorrect to simply consider that we got the worst over-all placing because Malta only provided information on four domains out of seven. No information was forthcoming on three areas: material resources; education; and housing and environment. This I find abstruse. So in this survey, our scores for indicators such as educational achievement, child poverty, housing problems and pollution are missing. Maybe the person responsible may explain why this information was not made available to the researchers.

The countries that did not submit all the information required were us, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria. This skews the result if one just looks at the final placings, instead of by domain, since a country may, for instance, provide data in areas where it is doing well and leave out information on domains where it is not. For example, it is interesting to note that Cyprus, placed 12th providing data in just three domains, whereby in two areas it placed in the top third and in one it placed in the middle third of the table.

In any case, I hope that we will not just have a couple of rounds of hand-wringing and that's it. The undue academic pressure put on children in the 11-year-old age cohort is being tackled and this gives us some hope. But there are other very important areas such as child poverty and child and teen obesity, where policy-makers and all stakeholders need to seriously step-up action. Here, some spurring is of the essence.

The author is a sociologist and a Labour member of Parliament.