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Handbook of Child Well-Being pp 2439–2462Cite as

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Child Well-Being

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Abstract

Child well-being is mentioned rarely in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in spite of the fact the pairing of ‘children’s rights and well-being’ appears with increasing frequency in the discourse of policy makers, childhood advocates and researchers. This chapter considers the concept of child well-being through the disciplinary lens of human rights, with a particular focus on children’s rights as set out in the CRC. It explores the differences in the concepts of child rights and child well-being both in terms of their rationale and their scope and suggests that children’s rights standards, as politically negotiated agreements by states, are in many ways more limited in scope and aim than the normal aspirations of child well-being. This is followed by a discussion of the system for monitoring and measuring the implementation of children’s rights, with particular attention being paid to the specific characteristics of child rights indicators. These are distinguished from well-being indicators both in their substance (including, in particular, the need to focus on the activity of state actors and not just outcomes for children) and in the processes required to develop them (since a core element of child rights indicators will be the meaningful involvement of children at all stages). The chapter concludes by suggesting that the movements which have developed around these separate entities could be better aligned in order to advance the interests of children.

Keywords

  • State Parti
  • State Party
  • Duty Bearer
  • Vocational Training Center
  • Disciplinary Lens

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Fig. 84.1

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Children’s Rights, Queen’s University School of Education, Belfast, Northern Ireland

    Prof. Laura Lundy

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  1. Prof. Laura Lundy
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Correspondence to Laura Lundy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Asher Ben-Arieh

  2. Research Institute of Quality of Life, University of Girona, Girona, Spain

    Ferran Casas

  3. Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Ivar Frønes

  4. Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

    Jill E. Korbin

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Lundy, L. (2014). United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Child Well-Being. In: Ben-Arieh, A., Casas, F., Frønes, I., Korbin, J. (eds) Handbook of Child Well-Being. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9063-8_94

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