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Supporting children and young people's wellbeing
Supporting children and young people's wellbeing

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2 What do children and young people think?

While the term ‘wellbeing’ is in common use, it is not necessarily one that children or young people use when talking about their own lives. What do they say? This issue is explored in the next activity.

Activity 2 A good childhood?

Timing: Allow about 1 hour

Task 1

The Good Childhood Report [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]  (Children’s Society, 2019) is an extensive survey of the wellbeing of children and young people in the UK. The survey has been developed and repeated, so has built up a detailed picture over time. The whole of the report is relevant to this course, and it is a useful resource to draw on. Here, though, you just need to read from pages 8–27. You’ll be asked to answer a series of questions in the next task, so you might want to bear them in mind as you read.

Please note that a new version of this report is published annually. The 2019 version is being used for the tasks in this activity for consistency, but the report is a useful resource to draw on for your work on this course. The most recent version can be found on the Children’s Society website and the subsequent versions give more insights into the short- and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 health pandemic, children’s anxieties about the cost of living, and concerns about the future (Children’s Society 2023).

Task 2

Now write your responses to the following questions. Try to answer each question as fully as possible before reading the discussion.

  1. Why did the Children’s Society develop the good childhood index?
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  1. How did the research team ascertain the initial ideas from children and young people? And how were their ideas used to help create the wellbeing survey?
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Discussion

  1. The Children’s Society argue that in the past parents or teachers were asked to assess wellbeing on behalf of children but that ‘research has shown that children’s and parents’ responses to the same sets of questions about emotional and behavioural difficulties are not the same’. Therefore, they believed it was important to work with young people to develop their own index of measures of wellbeing.
  2. Rather than use the term ‘wellbeing’, the researchers asked open-ended questions about what makes a ‘good life’ for young people and what the barriers to a good life are. The ideas were initially generated (see p. 14) with eight thousand 14- and 15-year-olds, and then piloted and expanded so the survey now covers the 8–17 age range.

The kinds of measures used in this report are usually described as ‘subjective’ (data drawn from our own perspective). Another way of trying to gauge the wellbeing of children and young people is to use those commonly described as ‘objective’, such as levels of poverty and measures of health or education, housing conditions or the quality of the environment. Both ways of ‘measuring’ are valid but it is important to think about the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Wellbeing is a broad concept which spans a wide range of physical and mental health as well as emotional and social factors.