The Area and Community Components of Children's Well‐being

Until recently, mainstream services for children in the UK have largely relied upon individual and reactive approaches to safeguarding children's welfare. However, recent legislative and policy reforms require the development of a more preventive orientation, capable of promoting the well‐being of all children. This will require that agencies responsible for the integrated delivery of children's services develop strategies that, for the first time, take full account of the area and community components of children's well‐being. The challenges presented by these reforms, to existing organisational and professional cultures and ways of working, are examined in the light of recent research evidence. Copyright © 2006 The Author(s).     

Children's work and children's well‐being: Implications for policy

This article argues for holistic consideration of children's work. Dominant discourse on “child labour” attends only to dangers of children's work, leading to policies that damage some children's chances for development. Far from being universally negative in children's lives, appropriate work contributes to their well‐being and development, and to transitions to adulthood. Children's work can convey benefits for sustenance and quality of life, provide learning to complement and support school, offer psycho‐social benefits, particularly in building self‐esteem, and help develop social relations and responsibility. These benefits are especially critical for marginalized children. Common policies of abolishing child labour based on age of employment rather than potential harm deny such benefits to younger children.     

Re‐framing the Analysis: A 3‐dimensional Perspective of Prisoners’ Children's Well‐being

This article highlights three dimensions to understanding children's well‐being during and after parental imprisonment which have not been fully explored in current research. A consideration of ‘time’ reveals the importance of children's past experiences and their anticipated futures. A focus on ‘space’ highlights the impact of new or altered environmental dynamics. A study of ‘agency’ illuminates how children cope within structural, material and social confines which intensify vulnerability and dependency. This integrated perspective reveals important differences in individual children's experiences and commonalities in broader systemic and social constraints on prisoners’ children. The paper analyses data from a prospective longitudinal study of 35 prisoners’ children during and after their (step) father's imprisonment to illustrate the arguments.     

‘You Can't Have Well‐being If You're Dead…or Can You?’ Children's Realistic and Logical Approach to Discussing Life,Death and Wellbeing

Well‐being is a popularised and regularly considered aspect of an individual's life. Whilst frequently theorised across disciplines interested in childhood, children's perspectives on well‐being are often missing. This article presents children's views on well‐being, focussing on the extent they consider well‐being to exist after death or near‐death experiences. Through focus‐group discussion, children's conversations reflect their ability for deep philosophical, abstract thinking and contributing to clearer understandings of well‐being across different contexts. Children's pragmatic responses about death when considering well‐being provide a valuable contribution to understanding fear of death whilst arguing for collaborative approaches between adults and children when considering complex issues.     

Fathering With Multiple Partners: Links to Children's Well‐Being in Early Childhood

The claim that multiple partner fertility may pose a risk of adverse outcomes for children has not been tested. We test this argument using a sample of 4,027 resident fathers and children from the Fragile Families and Child Well‐being Survey by examining the pathways through which fathers' multipartnered fertility is associated with children's externalizing behaviors and physical health status at 36 months. Path analyses indicate that multiple partner fertility exerted both a significant direct and indirect effect through paternal depression to influence children's externalizing behaviors. Fathers' multiple partner fertility also exerted a significant indirect effect through one mediator—father involvement—to influence children's physical health. This evidence suggests that the disruptions brought about by multipartnered fertility are important for understanding child well‐being.     

Psychosocial Well‐Being and the Relationship Between Divorce and Children's Academic Achievement

As an unprecedented number of children live in families experiencing divorce, researchers have developed increasingly complex explanations for the consequences associated with marital dissolution. Current accounts focus on changes to family finances, destabilized parenting practices, elevated parental conflict, and deterioration of the parent–child relationship, to explain the impact of divorce. A less studied explanation draws attention to children's diminished psychosocial well‐being following divorce. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten cohort (ECLS‐K) (N = 10,061), I examined the role of psychosocial well‐being in the relationship between divorce and children's outcomes. The results suggest that divorce is associated with diminished psychosocial well‐being in children, and that this decrease helps explain the connection between divorce and lower academic achievement.     

Autonomy,Fairness and Active Relationships: Children's Experiences of Well‐being in Childcare

Researchers and policy‐makers are increasingly concerned with children's well‐being in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) settings. Recent research identifies the value of using qualitative methods to understand children's experiences of well‐being in ECEC/OSHC, but there remain few such studies. This article presents findings from a child‐centric qualitative study with Australian children of nurses and police, which sought to understand their experiences of well‐being in ECEC/OSHC. Children's experiences of well‐being were shaped by parental relationships, how informed they were about the rationale for their care arrangements and the degree of age‐appropriate autonomy they experienced.     

Parental After‐School Stress and Psychological Well‐Being

The mismatch between employed parents’ work schedules and their children's school schedules creates the structural underpinning for an as‐yet‐unstudied stressor, namely, parental after‐school stress, or the degree of parents’ concern about their children's welfare after school. We estimate the relationship between parental after‐school stress and psychological well‐being in a sample of 243 employed parents of children in grades K–12. Parental after‐school stress is related to psychological well‐being. This relationship did not differ by parent gender or child age but was significantly stronger for parents of girls versus boys. Our results suggest that parental after‐school stress is an important stressor that affects the well‐being of a large segment of the work force and warrants further research.     

Measuring Children's Experience of Their Right to Participate in School and Community: A Rights‐Based Approach

This paper discusses the development of a children's rights‐based measure of participation and the findings from its use in a survey of 10‐ to 11‐year‐old children (n = 3773). The measure, which was developed in collaboration with a group of children, had a high reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.89). Findings suggest that children's positive experience of their participation rights is higher in school than in community, and higher for girls compared to boys. It is argued that involving children in the ‘measurement’ of their own lives has the potential to generate more authentic data on children's lived experiences.     

Children's Well‐Being during Parents' Marital Disruption Process: A Pooled Time‐Series Analysis

On the basis of a large, nationally representative multiwave panel, this research examines the extent to which parents' marital disruption process affects children's academic performance and psychological well‐being at 2time points prior to and 2 time points after parental divorce. The results of a pooled time‐series analysis show that compared with peers in intact families, children of divorce fare less well in most well‐being measures at all 4 time points, from approximately 3 years before divorce to 3 years after divorce. Interestingly, whereas the effects of the disruption process on students' test scores demonstrate a linear decline over time, the effects on their social‐psychological measures exhibit a U‐shaped time pattern. Families in the process of marital disruption are also characterized by a deficit in economic and social resources at various time points of this process. These differences in family resources either partially or completely mediate the detrimental effects of the disruption process over time. Furthermore, the process of marital disruption appears to affect girls to the same extent that it does boys. Finally, the causal role of divorce in affecting children is also discussed.     

Policy on Children's Work and Labour

Current international child labour policies emphasise removing children from work rather than improving their well‐being. Prohibited ‘child labour’ extends beyond work shown to be harmful, and work in poorer, majority‐world societies is particularly targeted. These policies ignore benefits that children can gain from work, and have been developed largely without the involvement of the children, families and communities most concerned, limiting chances of successful outcomes. This paper argues for alternative approaches, developed in collaboration with children and their communities, focussing on children's well‐being and development, and protecting children from harm and exploitation while allowing them to benefit from appropriate work.     

Parents' Relationship Quality and Children's Behavior in Stable Married and Cohabiting Families

Although an extensive literature has shown that family structure is linked with child well‐being, less well understood is how the dynamics within families affect children, in particular the extent to which positive mother–father relationship quality is linked with children's outcomes. In this study the authors used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 773) to examine how couple supportiveness in stable coresident families is related to children's externalizing and internalizing behavioral problems over ages 3 through 9. Using latent growth curve and fixed effects models, they found that parents' greater supportiveness has a slight association with lower levels of children's behavioral problems. Using cross‐lagged structural equation models to examine the direction of the association, they also found some evidence that parents' relationship quality and children's behavioral problems are reciprocally related. Overall, this study suggests that more positive couple interactions are beneficial for children residing with both of their biological parents.     

Dynamic Noun Generalization: Moment‐to‐Moment Interactions Shape Children's Naming Biases

Recent research on early word learning suggests that children's behavior when‐generalizing novel nouns integrates their prior vocabulary knowledge with the specifics of the task. This study examines how these factors interact on the moment‐to‐moment time scale of the training children receive and the sequence of stimuli they are shown. In ***1 condition, we used a combination of training and stimulus factors predicted to produce a bias to generalize nouns by shape similarity. We then reduced this shape bias and amplified a bias to generalize nouns by material similarity via manipulations of training and stimuli across 3 other conditions. Additional analyses suggest that children's generalizations on individual trials are influenced by what they have seen and done on previous trials. These results highlight the importance of the task and stimuli in bringing children's prior knowledge to bear in early word learning.     

Moving “Up and Out” Together: Exploring the Mother–Child Bond in Low‐Income,Single‐Mother‐Headed Families

Bearing children is often viewed as negatively impacting the social mobility of low‐income single mothers. This analysis draws on 66 in‐depth interviews with low‐income, single‐mother participants in an antipoverty program in Boston. The author argues that the mother–child relationship is at the center of efforts by these single mothers to move out of poverty. Interviewees repeatedly expressed the primacy of their children's needs being met in order for them to move forward. Mothers tried to include their children in efforts to move out of poverty, thus fulfilling the role of a “good mother” while exhibiting proper behavior for a poor person trying to achieve economic independence. The data here highlight the limitations of policy initiatives that fail to acknowledge the centrality of children's well‐being to the lives of single mothers and suggest that the mother–child bond may be an untapped resource for policies and programs serving this community.     

Children's participation: control and self‐realisation in British late modernity

Children's participation in public life in contemporary Britain is examined in relation to the tension between control and self‐realisation found in late modernity. It is argued that, despite the recognition of children as persons in their own right, public policy and practice is marked by an intensification of control, regulation and surveillance around children. This tension is considered in relation to the constitution of children in the public sphere as human capital and therefore as a means of controlling the future. This is contrasted to the private sphere where children's potential for self‐realisation is increasingly sequestered in the family. It is suggested that these trends raise issues of social inequality, intergenerational justice and institutional disengagement in relation to children. This requires more serious attention to enabling children's participation in the society. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Family Structure and Child Well‐being: Integrating Family Complexity

Although children's family lives are diverse, the measurement of children's living arrangements has lagged, focusing on the relationships of children to parents while largely ignoring sibling composition. Using data from the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation (N = 23,985) the authors documented patterns of family complexity among a nationally representative sample of children ages 0–17 living in a range of family structures. They also examined the independent and joint associations of family structure and family complexity on child economic well‐being. Family complexity was independently related to economic disadvantage, namely, a lower income‐to‐needs ratio and a higher likelihood of public assistance receipt. The role of family complexity was partially contingent on family structure, with the positive association between family complexity and receipt of public assistance more pronounced for children in families with 2 married biological parents. This study demonstrates the utility of integrating family structure and family complexity in studies of children's well‐being.     

Domestic Violence,Children's Agency and Mother–Child Relationships: Towards a More Advanced Model

Although domestic violence research increasingly recognises children's agency, this awareness has not extended to our understanding of children's relationships with their abused mothers. Findings suggesting that some children actively support their mother, and encourage her to leave the perpetrator, have been consistently under‐discussed. This article argues that the model of parent–child relationships used by most domestic violence research sees children as passive and contributes to mother‐blaming discourses. Analysing key quantitative and qualitative research, I suggest that a more sophisticated model of parent–child relationships is needed to understand how children's agency affects them, their mothers and the domestic violence situation.     

Economic hardship in the family of origin and children's psychological well‐Being in adulthood

Past research consistently indicates that poverty and economic hardship have negative consequences for children. Few studies, however, have examined whether these consequences persist into adulthood. This study addresses this gap by assessing whether economic resources in the family of origin have long‐term effects on psychological well‐being in adulthood. Specifically, we test two processes—one involving interpersonal processes in the family of origin, and the other involving children's socioeconomic attainment—that may help to explain the link between early economic factors and later well‐being. Using 17‐year longitudinal data from two generations (N= 589), we find evidence that economic hardship in the family of origin predicts later adult well‐being through the parents’ marital relationship, the parent‐teen relationship, children's educational attainment, and children's earned income. Supplementary analyses suggest that economic hardship is particularly problematic when it is of long duration or when it occurs during adolescence.