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Toward a Theory of Child Well-Being

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Abstract

Assuring the well-being of children has emerged over the past several decades as an important goal for health and social policymakers. Although the concept of child well-being has been operationalized and measured in different ways by different child-serving entities, there are few unifying theories that could undergird and inform these various conceptual and measurement efforts. In this paper, we attempt to construct a theory of child well-being. We first review the social and policy history of the concept of child well-being, and briefly review its measurement based on these conceptualizations. We then examine three types of theories of well-being extant in philosophy—mental states theories, desire-based theories and needs-based theories—and investigate their suitability to serve as prototypes of a theory of child well-being. We develop a constraint that child well-being is important in and of itself and not merely as a way station to future adult well-being (we call this a non-reduction constraint). Using this constraint, we identify the limitations of each of the three sets of theories to serve as a basis for a theory of child well-being. Based on a developmentalist approach, we then articulate a theory of child well-being that contains two conditions. First, a child’s stage-appropriate capacities that equip her for successful adulthood, given her environment; and, second, an engagement with the world in child-appropriate ways. We conclude by reviewing seven implications of this theoretical approach for the measurement of child well-being.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brown School, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1196, St. Louis, MO, 63130, USA

    Ramesh Raghavan

  2. Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, 63130, USA

    Ramesh Raghavan

  3. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge University, Cambridge, CB2 3RH, UK

    Anna Alexandrova

  4. King’s College, Cambridge, UK

    Anna Alexandrova

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  1. Ramesh Raghavan
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Raghavan, R., Alexandrova, A. Toward a Theory of Child Well-Being. Soc Indic Res 121, 887–902 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0665-z

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