Former US president Bill Clinton evoked both scorn and praise with his comment, "I feel your pain."
Former Taiwanese minister of justice Liao Cheng-hao (
Now director of the Tosun Public Interest Foundation, a non-government organization (NGO) devoted to children's issues, Liao yesterday announced the results of a questionnare survey on "growing pains" -- and a lot of kids are not happy.
Calling it "the index of pain," foundation representatives claimed the survey quantified the anguish of middle and high school students nationwide.
"If [a child's] score exceeds 60 points, that indicates that the participant is in pain," said foundation representative Bill Hsu (許福生).
Each survey response in five categories -- including home, school, society, future prospects and politics -- was assigned a number score, with scores exceeding 60 points per questionnare indicating an individual's discontent with regard to most, if not all, of the categories, a foundation press release said.
Although similar to "romantic compatibility tests" in magazines for teenage girls, the foundation's index of adolescent angst was painstakingly boiled down from 2,845 questionnares, and was an accurate indicator of the overall emotional health of children, foundation representatives said.
The press conference to announce the index yesterday at the Youth Activity Center in Taipei was an uneasy mix of former and current politicians, prosecutors, judges and Buddhist monks. Among them were High Court Judge Gau Fehng-shian (高鳳仙) and People First Party (PFP) Secretary-General Chin Chin-sheng (秦金生).
They mingled and ate cookies while a polka jazz band played "umpa-umpa" jazz in between periodic, ear-splitting squeals of microphone feeback.
According to Hsu, students are generally depressed about their academic and vocational prospects, as well as society in general and "government actions," or performance, Hsu told the audience.
The average scores for these three categories among survey participants were 62.2, 60.4 and 71, respectively, he said.
Although the overall scores for the remaining two categories, home and school, were also high at 50.4 and 52.2, respectively, they didn't indicate severe emotional pain as they were both below 60, Hsu's pain threshold.
"The good news is that levels of discontent for all five categories are at their lowest ever," Hsu said, referring to how this year's "index of pain" stacked up against pain indices created by the NGO in 2004 and last year.
Liao called on the government and NGOs to pay more attention to issues involving the health and prosperity of children, saying that they were "the future of Taiwan."
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