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The Wellbeing of Children and Youth

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The Psychology of Quality of Life

Part of the book series: Social Indicators Research Series ((SINS,volume 83))

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the research on wellbeing related to children and youth. Several definitions of these subjective aspects of quality of life are discussed in relation to children of pre-school age, elementary school age, middle-school age, adolescents, and college students. There are at least three major theories employed by wellbeing researchers to explain how these different population groups experience a sense of wellbeing. These include social development theory, attachment theory, and ecological theory. The chapter also highlights factors affecting the sense of wellbeing of these population groups—situational factors, personality factors, demographic and psychographic factors, and socio-economic and socio-cultural factors. The chapter concludes with a discussion of indicators of children wellbeing and public policy implications.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

—Nelson Mandela, Former President of South Africa(https://www.compassion.com/poverty/famous-quotes-about-children.htm)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Casas (2016) for an excellent literature review of the research on children wellbeing and adolescents. Further, see a recent major conceptual contribution in the literature of children wellbeing is the Handbook of Child Well-Being, edited by Ben-Arieh, Casas, Frønes, and Korbin (2014). The handbook includes 114 chapters (more than 238 authors from 32 different countries) on the state-of-the-science of children wellbeing and presents a wide range of different theoretical perspectives. The reader should also be informed that data sources for subjective indicators of children’s well-being include the HBSC (www.hbsc.org) and the PISA (www.oecd.org/pisa).

  2. 2.

    See Losada-Puente, Araujo, and Munoz-Cantero (2020) for a systematic review of the assessment of quality of life in adolescents.

  3. 3.

    An important data source that many children well-being scholars use to identify predictors of children wellbeing is the International Survey of Children’s Wellbeing (ISCWeB; http://www.isciweb.org/). See a description of this database in Casas (2016).

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  1. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    M. Joseph Sirgy

  2. North West University, Potchefstroom Campus, Potchefstroom, South Africa

    M. Joseph Sirgy

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Sirgy, M.J. (2021). The Wellbeing of Children and Youth. In: The Psychology of Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 83. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71888-6_24

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