The National Youth Agency: Comment - Healthy friendships

Many of us will relate to that, but now there would appear to be research evidence that the famously long-lived comic was on to something.

A decade-long study by Australian researchers has shown that having good friends in old age can do more for your life expectancy than contact with family members. Those assessed as being in the top third for friendship groups were 22 per cent less like to die over a decade than those with the bottom third. Contact with children and relatives had little effect.

With the rhetoric about families often so strong, and the associations of gangs and peer group pressure often so negative, this kind of finding is an important corrective. It is almost a truism to say that family bonds are weaker than in the days when mother stayed at home and the family ate together round the table every evening. If young people are to now enjoy Kelly hours after school while their parents enjoy the longest-working hours in Europe, I can only see that process continuing.