Girls in Britain are becoming more miserable, according to the Children’s Society’s annual report.
Among 10 to 15-year-old girls, the charity’s report says 14% are unhappy with their lives as a whole, and 34% with their appearance.
Researchers were told of girls feeling ugly or worthless.
The figures for England, Wales and Scotland for 2013-14 represent a sharp rise in unhappiness on five years before.
By contrast the study found that boys’ sense of happiness remained stable.
The charity’s annual Good Childhood Report, now in its 11th year, draws its findings on teenagers’ happiness from the Understanding Society Survey which gathers data on 40,000 households across the UK.
Children’s Society and University of York researchers examined responses on the wellbeing of 10 to 15-year-olds.
They found that between 2009-10 and 2013-14 on average 11% of both boys and girls said they were unhappy.
But the latest available figures, for 2013-14, showed the proportion of girls saying they were unhappy had risen to 14%.
Lucy Capron from the Children’s Society told BBC Radio 5 Live: “This isn’t something which can be explained away by hormones or just the natural course of growing up, actually this is something that we need to take seriously and we need to address”.
The proportion of girls reporting being worried about their looks rose from 30% for the period as a whole, to 34% in the year 2013-14 - while the proportion of boys unhappy with their appearance remained unchanged at 20%.
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