Child Wellbeing - What Matters?

What does research say about child wellbeing and what are the key factors?

1. Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and also at the criticism of it. It's a useful starting point for thinking about child wellbeing, but it's not the whole answer. For example, lacking some very basic needs does not necessarily mean lack of child wellbeing or that the child will not become a great person. Think Oprah Winfrey or Narendra Modi (India's Prime Minister).

2. Deficits in child wellbeing can be compensated for by protective factors. A drug addicted mother and a strong supportive grandmother; lack of schooling or food, but aspirational parents; constant danger from war but a warm and supportive community. Child wellbeing is not just about the nuclear family.

3. Parenting is important - warm, supportive, unconditional love - but child wellbeing depends on more than the microsystem of the home. Urie Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory demonstrated the wider influences and interactions affecting child wellbeing.

4. Emphasis on 'safeguarding' and 'child protection' tends to deflect attention away from the wider support and policy needs of families and may reduce child wellbeing by focussing on risk rather than on how to protect and support.

5. Placing children in care cannot be shown to improve child wellbeing in the long term and is not a solution. For research on this and other issues surrounding child wellbeing, please click here, or to read more about a public health approach to child protection and child wellbeing, please click here.