A youth worker said “it’s disappointing, it’s just another kicking” after the town where they work was labelled the hardest place in England to be a child. A teacher, who described her pupils as joyful, said: “It suggests our children are living unhappy lives.” A clearly riled Chris Cooke, the mayor of Middlesbrough, said: “We get told a lot by people outside this place what we are. We know what we are. There is another side.” This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

They were all reacting to a report published this week by the children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, titled The Childhood Lottery, in which she declared childhood to be in “a state of emergency”. The report drew on a “landmark dataset” that “brings together 162 measures of children’s lives to build a comprehensive picture of the areas in England where it is the hardest to grow up”. The metrics included everything from child poverty to exclusion rates to poor air quality. And at the bottom was Middlesbrough.

The Guardian visited the town this week and spoke to children and professionals about growing up there. No one denied there were many challenges, but equally no one thought the label was helpful.

At a busy, buzzy youth club in the residential suburb of Coulby Newham, children aged 10 and up were making papier-mache Halloween decorations, cooking, playing table tennis and, outside on a strikingly mild October evening, getting ready to play dodge ball. “You’d think they were playing professionally,” said one volunteer.

Hannah*, 15, said her life was good but she knew it was not the same for others. “I love living in Middlesbrough. I love Albert Park and the Dorman Museum. I love going to the football. I love coming to youth club and making friends,” she said.

A boy looked confused when asked if it was hard being a child in Middlesbrough. “I’m going to be here the rest of my life,” he said. “Why would I leave?”

His friend let the side down by declaring: “I’m going to a hot country when I’m older … Hawaii. Or Zanzibar. Middlesbrough is too cold and scruffy.”

Wayne Mason, a former soldier who is chief executive of Linx Youth Project, which runs the club, said of the report: “We are disappointed. What it’s doing is attaching yet another label to Middlesbrough and its young people, and we already have many, many labels. It’s disappointing … all this negativity attached to the town.”

He and the project’s deputy, Eilís Sexton, were at the club but could not stay long as the local Rotary club was about to give them a much-needed and much-appreciated cheque.

Sexton was worried about the message the report sent out. “I’ve been thinking about young people who want to start their own families and how it’s going to make them feel, knowing that their child is going to have the ‘most difficult upbringing’ in the country? It is quite demoralising for them,” she said.

She was born and raised in the area and studied at Teesside University. “I did move out of Middlesbrough for six months and I hated it,” she said.

Neither of them disputed the statistics but they said there was another side. “Pride is the overriding thing that we see with the young people,” Mason said. “We know youngsters living in some of the most deprived areas of Middlesbrough, of which there are many, who don’t want to leave. They don’t want to leave because this is their home.

“We always talk about deprivation and poverty and crime, but we don’t talk about community.”

The report comes weeks after a collision on the A66 in which a car with five young people inside crashed into a police car carrying two police constables, killing the occupants of both vehicles.

Some subsequent media portrayals painted a picture of an urban dystopia where gangs were in charge, but residents said the reality was different.

It would have been hard for children to avoid media coverage about the deaths. Hannah said she had been past where it happened and burst into tears.

In Middlesbrough town centre there is a huge open square and the contemporary art gallery Mima, currently hosting the Turner prize. Next door is the town’s oppressive 1970s-built magistrates court building. Opposite is the grand Victorian town hall where Cooke, the elected Labour mayor, has his office.

When it comes to the subject of it being hard to grow up in Middlesbrough, Cooke is better equipped than most to talk about it. He grew up in a violent family. His father took his own life when he was a teenager, and his mother’s mental health spiralled. He said that as a young boy he felt he had to be in charge of everything because he was terrified of being separated from his sister.

Cooke had periods of not going to school and ended up in care. “I bounced around the system. People struggled to take me because I was quite difficult. I think that’s the polite version. What wouldn’t have h