International Comparison on the Children’s Quality of Life and the impacts of Play and Leisure Activities on It
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Kim Meesook , Kim HyoJin , Kim Anna 
Published: April 2019

Due to Korea’s un-precedent economic growth, most of households escaped from poverty and the issue is no longer dealing with absolute poverty but tackling relative poverty. The physical environment for children has improved, but the quality of children’s life is uncertain. Most of Korean children are deprived of play and leisure activities, because of their parents’ high zeal for education. Hence, they chidlren very unsatisfied with their lives. Children can grow healthily while playing and relaxing, and can achieve social skills and communality while playing. Nowadays, the international society is emphasizing on children’s rights to play. For instance, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child deals with the rights of children’s leisure activities, play and culture. Opposite to the international trend, Korean children are lack of playing times due to serious emphasis on education. As Korea is about to enter into the advanced country, it is required to have a high quality of life (QOL) for children. The quality of life in most of the advanced countries is rather high with proper political intervention to children. That of the Nordic countries is the highest. Under these circumstances, we need to examine the quality of Korean children’s life and the factors affect them. We need to investigate how play and leisure activities influence children’s QOL. In addition, we need to compare our children’s QOL with that of other countries to find out the status of our children’s QOL and set the target. Korea is left out in most of research on children’s QOL comparison. If we compare QOL among OECD countries, we can find out our status with the international standard. Up until now, there were lack of data which can compare internationally and Korea did not participate in the international survey on children’s QOL, that international comparison were only partially feasible. Thankfully, the Korean National Survey on Children in 2013 adopted the QOL index and thus, we can compare the QOL of Korea with other OECD countries.
This study compared Korean children’s quality of life with OECD countries and examined the impacts of play and leisure activities on their quality of life. As for data, both ‘WHO’s Health Behavior in School-Aged Children’ data and a survey on the Korea Children aged 9 through 17 (2,279 children) were utilized. The QOL level of the Korean children were as follows: life satisfaction marked 30th out of 30 countries, family relations, 20th, educational well-being, 29th, and health well-being, 1st. This shows that Korean children’s QOL was very unbalanced. Summing up the four components together to measure subjective well-being, Korean children ranked 28th out of 30 countries. These results confirm the fact that the quality of Korean children is very low. Four analytical models (socio-demographic model, relationship model, education model and play and leisure activities model) were built to examine the impacts of play and leisure activities on QOL, where play and leisure activity factors include 8 elements. Five out of 8 play and leisure activity components had significant impacts on QOL. The more friends they had, the longer their sleeping hours were, the shorter their time to watch TV and video was, the longer their reading time was, and the short their time to spend for culture and art activities was, the higher their quality of life was. Watching TV and video and using the internet affected their quality of life negatively, and so did obligatory cultural and art activities. This implies that to boost the QOL of children, we need to design play and leisure activities properly to have relaxation without much stress, including securing sleeping time. Finally, strategies to maximize relationships and minimize the study stress are needed.