You can't realy argue with bottom place. If UNICEF says that Britain is the worst out of 21 rich Western countries in which to live your childhood, then somthing must be done.

What you think should be done is up to you. The Telegraph notices that "(t)he nation's high number of single parents and step-families has contributed to the ranking", reverting to one of their favourite themes.

The Guardian found someone to argue that this was the result of long term under investment in children.

Both might be right. But this sort of composite league table doesn´t really test the relative weight of these factors.

Some of the saddest findigs relate to what children feel about their contempories. The UNICEF press release points out that

"The percentage of children who report that their peers are ‘kind and helpful’ varies from a high of 80 percent or more in Switzerland and Portugal to less than 50 percent in the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom."

But the high scores for Portugal and Switzerland contrasts strikingly with the findings on bullying:

"The prevalence of bullying varies more widely, with about 15 percent of children reporting being bullied in Sweden and the Czech Republic and more than 40 percent in Switzerland, Austria, and Portugal."

Frankly I am unconvinced by cross-cultural attitudes of this kind. It is very hard to ensure that you translate workds like "kind" and "helpful" in a way that means they have the same force in different languages. So we should focus on the experience of childhood in Britain, rather than wondering if we are really better or worse than the Swiss.

We also know that the British are pretty poor at eating together - we're also not that great at cooking proper home meals (except for Tabman). So if you compare us iwth the Italians, you know what is going to happen.

But there are plenty of objective factors to focus on. Teenage mothers are three times as common in the UK as in France. British teenagers are much more likely to escape from education and training (and to settle for a low wage employment) at a young age than most of our European neighbours.

The image that emerges from - slowly - from the UNICEF report is of a society that is still class-ridden, in which the most pernicious form of poverty is poverty of aspiration.