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Learning for Well-being: 2
A Policy Priority for Children and Young People in Europe
Chapter 2- Change how we think about children
CONSULTATION QUESTIONS
Does this chapter include the themes and arguments needed?
Are there other aspects of the EU agenda that should be included?
What other examples would you include for the overall approach and for measuring child well-being?
Are there any major aspects that are missing?
Chapter 2: CHANGE HOW WE THINK ABOUT CHILDREN
Children’s well-being is central to a future oriented agenda: it must be a European policy priority to generate and improve child well-being
The goal: supporting children and young people to develop their UNIQUE potential
a) Child well-being in an age of globalization and individualization
The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born. UNICEF
The multi dimensional concept of well-being recognises both the fundamental needs and aspirations of people that exist at individual and community levels as well as the needs and aspirations linked to diverse social and cultural contexts. Child well-being is a global agenda: the health of children in Europe is linked to the challenge of children’s well-being at a global level.
In a review conducted for UNICEF in 2001 on “Harnessing globalization for children” the uneven development of child well-being around the world is highlighted. In most regions of the world, the last 20 years have witnessed a continuation of the improvements in key child-welfare indicators initiated in 1960-1980, a period that in itself recorded the fastest rate of improvement of the last several centuries. But there has been a slowdown in the rate of improvement in key indicators of child well-being and a rise in the levels of relative and absolute child poverty despite the commitment of countries to the Millennium Development Goals.
We are not the sources of problems; we are the resources that are needed to solve them.
We are not expenses; we are investments.
We are not just young people; we are people and citizens of this world.
A WORLD FIT FOR US 2002
Most disconcerting is the increasing relative distance of child well-being indexes between countries and regions as well as within countries. The UNICEF report concludes that “If globalisation is to be child-friendly there is little doubt that its main objective should be to ensure the gradual realization of the rights of children regardless of their country, gender, social class or income level.” (Cornea 2001) From a child rights perspective well-being is defined as the realisation of children’s rights and the fulfilment of the opportunity for every child to be all she or he can be. The degree to which this is achieved can be measured in terms of positive child outcomes, whereas negative outcomes and deprivation point to the denial of children’s rights. Deprivation clearly is more than material aspects. Most important comparative studies on children’s well-being – even though their indicators are usually less holistic than suggested here– show clearly that there is no automatic relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita.
The Innocenti league table of child well-being in European countries covers 29 countries (EU 27 countries plus Norway and Iceland). It was produced by researchers from the University of York. It includes 43 separate indicators, summarised in seven domains of child well-being. Countries with similar levels of GDP do not necessarily have a similar ranking; for example The Netherlands comes top of the table of overall child well-being, followed by Norway and Sweden, whereas the UK came 24th, well below countries of similar affluence.
Important global agreements
1989: the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It says that children ‘should be fully prepared to live an individual life in society, and brought up in the spirit of the ideals proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations’.
1990: at the World Summit for Children 159 Heads of State and Government and other high-level representatives proclaimed that ‘there can be no task nobler than giving every child a better future’.
2000: the Millennium Development Goals set goals for children’s health and education.
2002: the UN General Assembly devoted its 27th Special Session exclusively to children, and adopted a Declaration committing themselves to seizing ‘this historic opportunity to change the world for and with children’. The resulting plan of action aimed to create a World fit for children, one in which all children get the best possible start in life. The UN Special Session on Children itself benefited from the presence of child representatives from all over the world who prepared the children’s declaration ‘A World Fit for Us’.
Children and the MDGs
The most important MDG of all: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education Because: decades of research directly tie the education of girls to the goals of reducing poverty, hunger, under-five mortality, maternal mortality and fighting major diseases; Because: even were the other goals for 2015 to somehow be met without ensuring girls and young women their right to a quality primary education, the achievements could not be sustained with undereducated girls and women; Because: it takes seven years to complete a course of primary schooling, a gradualist approach of small increases every year will not do; Therefore: if the Millennium Development Goals are to be met and sustained, we must rapidly move towards the goal of universal primary education by ensuring every girl her right to education – now.
UNICEF 2003
What matters:
The Learning for well-being approach suggests that engaging the unique potential of each child as he/she navigates the diverse processes and trajectories described above, allow him/her to develop well-being.
Modern society requires much of the individual: it puts a strong emphasis on individualization and self-referred values - this assumes that every person is able to be self-reliant, yet many structural difficulties hamper the individual’s ability to reach well-being (Grob & Kirchhoff, 2008). "Globalisation and modernisation are creating an increasingly diverse and interconnected world. To make sense of and function well in this world, individuals need for example to master changing technologies and to make sense of large amounts of available information. They also face collective challenges as societies – such as balancing economic growth with environmental sustainability, and prosperity with social equity. In these contexts, the competencies that individuals need to meet their goals have become more complex, requiring more than the mastery of certain narrowly defined skills” (OECD 2005).
Factors important for individual resilience - agency, self-efficacy, the mastery system, social support (in particular “hidden” social support) and community acceptance - mirror those that characterise effective child-focused community-based practice…. Resilience therefore emerges from the efforts of the individual child or youth to mobilise people and resources for his or her needs and from the capacity of the environment to provide those resources in such as way that there is a “goodness of fit” between the support needed and the support offered. Veale 2010
This includes supporting children and young people in developing the capabilities and competences they need in this process. The DeSeCo project, carried out by OECD between 1997 and 2002, was launched with the aim of providing a sound conceptual framework to identify key competences required by young people. It considered “that individuals should be able to achieve their potential and that they should respect others and contribute to producing an equitable society” (OECD 2005). They asked questions as to the demands that today’s society places on its young citizens: what do they need to function well in society, keep employment, cope with technology and shape their world. It classified the key competencies into three broad categories:
Ability to use a wide range of tools for interacting effectively with the environment and to understand them well enough to adapt them for their own purposes;
In an increasingly interdependent world, individuals need to be able to engage with others and to interact in heterogeneous groups; and
Individuals need to be able to take responsibility for managing their own lives, situate their lives in the broader social context and act autonomously.
Individuals have to set their own goals, which implies challenging requirements about self-reliance and for psychosocial resources (Havighurst, 1948). While there is no straightforward cause-effect relationship between the individual and the contextual factors research indicates that the interface can play out at various levels: at the personal level (loss of meaning of life, lack of perspectives); at the social level (disintegration of families, temporary relationships) or at the societal level (anonymisation and functionalisation of members). Increasingly therefore concepts of well-being include the notion of individual and community resilience in order to underline the capacities needed at individual and societal levels to adapt to change and to cope with uncertainties and crisis.
OECD DeSeCo: Definition and Selection of Competencies: The project carried out under the coordination of Switzerland was linked to the development of the PISA programme. It was launched in 1997 and brought together experts from 18 countries, 12 of which contributed country reports that constitute the data for the summary report. The European countries were Austria, Belgium (Fl), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland. New Zealand and the USA were also included. The experts came from a wide range of disciplines to work with the stakeholders and policy analysts to produce a framework.
b) CHILD WELL-BEING: A central dimension of the European well-being agenda
“The Europe 2020 Strategy sets out a vision for the 21st century of a Europe where the children of today will have a better education, access to the services and to the resources they need to grow up and, one day, lead Europe into the 22nd century.”
Every society has the option to invest today in happy, safe and flourishing childhoods - but what can governments and policy makers learn from the new concern with well-being and happiness in relation to children’s well-being? Though the main focus of well-being research and consequently the public policy recommendations has been on adults, the key issue that emerges is that economic growth can no longer retain such a dominant place on the domestic and the European policy agenda. Particularly if one follows the lead of an understanding of well-being proposed by the Council of Europe then societies need to invest in human flourishing – meaning those fundamental aspects of what constitutes well-being for all. The goal is a society in which all people have the capability to realize their unique potential through physical, emotional, mental and spiritual development ... in relation to self, others and the environment.” (UEF)
The imperative for a sustainable future calls for policies with due regard for present and future generations. Child well-being thus constitutes a common social goal of governments. The United Nations have taken a clear position on the rights of the child: Article 27 of the UNCRC states that participating nations “recognize the right of every child to adequate standard of living for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development.” In February 2011 the European Commission has reinforced that the promotion and protection of the rights of the child is one of the objectives of the EU included in Article 3(3) of the Treaty of Lisbon by forwarding An EU Agenda for the Rights of the Child to the European parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the regions. Article 3(3) requires the EU to promote the protection of the rights of the child as does the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in Article 24, which recognises that children are independent and autonomous holders of rights. It also makes the child's best interests a primary consideration for public authorities and private institutions.
“Governments should … get better value from their investment in children. And spending early, when the foundations for a child’s future are laid, is key, especially for disadvantaged children and can help them break out of a family cycle of poverty and social exclusion.”
The OECD report “Doing Better for Children” compares public spending and policies for children with key indicators of child-well-being in OECD countries. These include education, health, housing, family incomes and quality of school life. It indicates the directions that such investment should take
Doing Better for Children
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The EU agenda for child well-being
The overall policy context for the European Union is provided by the Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union of 2008 which states in Article 3 that “The Union's aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples”. The three key drivers identified are: creating value by basing growth on knowledge, empowering people in inclusive societies, and creating a competitive, connected and greener economy.
The social agenda
The social agenda agreed in 2007, Opportunities, access and solidarity: towards a new social vision for 21st century Europe, poses as a central question how the well-being, quality of life and common values of Europe's citizens can be best advanced in today's world? The Commission notes that it requires a new approach centred on providing citizens with adequate opportunities for self-fulfilment, access to education, employment, healthcare and social protection in a context of solidarity, social cohesion and sustainability. The challenge defined for education is to strengthen the reform of school systems so that every young person can develop his or her full potential through improved access and opportunities, to ensure that every citizen can become an active participant in the emerging knowledge economy, and to reinforce social solidarity.
"Towards an EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child".
In its aim to fulfil the challenge of child well-being, the European Commission in 2006 established a basis for promoting and protecting the rights of the child in its internal and external policies with its Communication "Towards an EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child". This strategy allowed the Commission to set up structures to strengthen the capacity of EU institutions to address child rights issues. This includes the work of the European Forum on the Rights of the Child.
A renewed commitment of all actors is necessary to bring to life the vision of a world where children can be children and can safely live, play, learn, develop their full potential, and make the most of all existing opportunities.
Towards an EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child
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EU Task-Force on Child Poverty and Child Well-Being
Social inclusion is a priority theme across all the major policy areas affecting children and young people. The Directorate General for Social Affairs is developing a set of indicators for monitoring the state of child poverty and well-being in the 27 Member States as part of the European Strategy for Social Inclusion. The focus is on developing a set of indicators that reflect the multi-dimensional nature of child well-being suitable for monitoring policies, including non material aspects such as education and health. This initiative was complemented by the establishment in 2007 of the EU Task-Force on Child Poverty and Child Well-Being. In January 2008 the report and recommendations of the EU Task-Force were formally adopted by all Member States and the Commission, and the incorporated into the EU acquis in this area. The EU Task-Force recommendations cover six broad areas: 1) Setting quantified objectives; 2) Assessing the impact of policies on child poverty and social exclusion; 3) Monitoring child poverty and well-being; 4) Developing a common framework for analysing child poverty and social inclusion; 5) Reinforcing statistical capacity and improving governance and monitoring arrangements at all relevant policy levels; 6) Improving governance and monitoring arrangements at all relevant policy levels.
The EU Task-Force report identifies seven dimensions of well-being: (i) economic security and material situation, (ii) housing, (iii) education, (iv) health, (v) exposure to risk and risk behaviour, (vi) social participation and relationships, family environment, and (vii) local environment.
2010 Belgian EU Council Presidency
In 2010 the Belgian EU Council Presidency in cooperation with the King Baudouin Foundation (KBF), Eurochild and UNICEF Belgium presented a “Roadmap for a recommendation to fight child poverty” as part of the 2010 European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion. Three main policy areas are identified for action: (a) adequate resources for all children; (b) access to quality services; and (c) active participation for all children and youth. The conference adopted a Recommendation to Fight Child Poverty and Promote Child Well-Being that includes a recommendation to the Commission that child well-being should be mainstreamed across all policy areas at national and EU level in an integrated and coherent manner with a view to addressing the multi-dimensional nature of child well-being. It was recommended that reporting on child poverty and child well-being should also include an analysis of other dimensions of child well-being in particular a set of indicators of the non-material aspects of child well-being. It also calls for the involvement of children and young people in all decisions that affect their lives.
EU Strategy for Youth
The EU Strategy for Youth – Investing and Empowering, A renewed open method of coordination to address youth challenges and opportunities seeks to create favourable conditions for youth to develop their skills and fulfil their potential. It is based on a dual approach. Firstly Investing in Youth, which is about putting in place greater resources to develop policy areas that affect young people in their daily life and improve their well-being. Secondly, Empowering Youth, which is about promoting the potential of young people for the renewal of society and to contribute to EU values and goals. It calls for greater collaboration between youth policies and other policy areas and for providing young people with an opportunity to have a say and make their voices heard.
OECD How to invest to enhance child well-being
The OECD in its path breaking report “Doing better for Children” proposes that governments should develop a coherent “Child Investment Portfolio”. It would consist of the following components:
Concentrate spending early in the child life cycle in order to break patterns of intergenerational inequality
Risk-load spending disproportionately on vulnerable children at all parts of the child life cycle for reasons of both fairness and effectiveness
Structure interventions for children to reinforce positive development across the child’s life cycle and across a range of well-being outcomes
Establish targets for child well-being outcomes in order to create positive incentives
Regularly collect high quality information on children’s well-being and ensure international comparability
Continually experiment with policies and programmes for children and reallocate funding to those that work
c) Measuring child well-being
A significant number of instruments have been developed to measure child well-being and inform policies. They have been succinctly summarised in the recent literature “It seems that there is broad agreement among citizens, researchers, and policy makers that indicators of child well-being can provide common goals for society and that social progress can be assessed, in part, on the progress of nations in reaching these goals. In addition, there is widespread agreement that these goals need to be positive as well as negative. In other words, it is important to monitor and reduce negative outcomes such as school failure and substance abuse; but it is also important to identify and increase positive outcomes such as positive peer relationships and school engagement.” (Lippman et al 2009)
… although advances have been made in terms of the methods used to operationalise child well-being across countries, there remains the need for a clear consensus on which indicators economically advanced countries should use to monitor the well-being of their children. OECD 2009
To measure child well-being in rich countries the Innocenti Report Card 7 identified six dimensions relevant to children’s life and rights: “In keeping with UNICEF's mandate to advocate for children in every country, the Centre's Report Card series focuses on the well-being of children in industrialized countries.” (http://www.unicef-irc.org/) The Innocenti report emphasised that the concept of well-being is guided by the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Though it contains a definition of child well-being which corresponds to the view and the experience of a wide public, areas such as children’s mental health and emotional well-being were considered to be probably underrepresented (UNICEF, 2007). The graph below helps to understand the scope of policy action that is required to ensure and improve child well-being.
Table 1: Dimensions and Components of Child well-being by UNICEF
Adapted from the Innocenti Report Card 7
The dimensions (material well-being, housing and environment, educational well-being, health and safety, risk behaviours, and quality of school life) were selected referring to child research literature, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children and in consideration of the dimensions identified by UNICEF. Even though the methods used to produce this ranking are sufficiently robust, they contain some problems, such as being a primary data-driven selection of indicators. There is a survey focus on specific well-being dimensions rather than on monitoring child well-being overall and the weighting of indicators and dimensions on statistic or ad hoc grounds are adolescent-focused which do not make it possible to examine child well-being at different points in the child’s lifecycle. A general problem of aggregation of such information is that it infers common priorities by all countries across all dimensions by placing the same country valuation on outcomes. For these reasons OECD presents no single aggregated score.
Four of their six dimensions are the same as those chosen by UNICEF. “Housing and the environment” and “quality of school life” were defined, because they were seen to be more influenceable by policy than “peer and family relationships” and “subjective well-being”. All dimensions have their roots in the international standards of the United Nation Convention on the Rights of Children, which presupposes the need for adequate policy. Principles for selecting indicators were that all dimensions could be relevant to different age groups, they took account of efficiency and equity considerations (e.g. indicators should reflect the range of differences as well as average outcomes), child well-being for today and the future (sometimes referred to as well-being and well-becoming), as well as a coverage of outcomes within a dimension (e.g. mental and physical health within the health dimension). (OECD 2009)
Because much research on children’s well-being defines it in terms of what is negative in children’s lives, the consequence is we know more about “what we don’t want for our children than what we do want” (Fattore et al 2009). “The other limitation in the well-being literature is the little that is known about what children and young people identify as well-being, what it looks like and the factors which affect their sense of it (Fattore et al 2009). One of the changes in recent years has been an increasing agreement that statistical data only or proxy data (e.g. collected from parents or teachers) are not sufficient to understand child well-being holistically and from their point of view, echoing the UNCRC which includes the right for children to be listened to and their opinions attended to by adults. Hence, there is an increasing number of surveys, in European countries and elsewhere, of children and young people that are undertaken with the objective of understanding their views and being able to develop indicators that reflect their own perspectives of their needs and requirements in the diverse environments in which they live (schools, neighbourhoods, etc;) to grow and flourish. Focusing on how children and young people feel that their learning is supported across these diverse environments is the core of monitoring learning for well-being.
The challenge to define child well-being positively and holistically
We are the children of the world, and despite our different backgrounds, we share a common reality. We are united by our struggle to make the world a better place for all. You call us the future, but we are also the present.
A World Fit for Us 2002
What policy makers need to consider:
Too easily when formulating policies we focus on negative factors: Many of the child and youth indicators still track negative outcomes and negative environments – government programmes tend to focus on prevention and remediation of problems rather than on promoting strengths. Reasons are the high costs (monetary and non-monetary) that deficits generate and concerns of equity for less well-off children. But focusing only on deficits neglects children’s strength on with society must build to enhance well-being (OECD, 2009). More recent research includes research and measurement of positive traits such as caring, confidence, compassion and resilience. Many of the existing measures are also not culturally sensitive and this has significant influence on their validity (Brown 2008).:
We do not sufficiently consider the holistic dimensions: No single dimension of well-being stands as a reliable proxy for child well-being as a whole. An optimal package of dimensions has to be considered. The development and expression of all these multiple dimensions is influenced by the environmental context. Even biologically-based aspects of well-being require a social context to induce their full and appropriate expression (Bornstein, 2003) Well-being is a state of successful performance throughout the life course integrating physical, cognitive and social-emotional functions that results in productive activities deemed significant by one’s cultural community, fulfilling social relationships, and the ability to transcendent moderate psychosocial and environmental problems. Well-being also has a subjective dimension in the sense of satisfaction associated with fulfilling one’s potential (Bornstein et al., 2003).1
We do not focus enough on subjective dimensions: Children play an active role in creating their own well-being. Thus children’s personal resources –their ‘health’ and ‘subjective well-being’ – are simultaneously the most basic outcomes and the very basis of achieving well-being. This is emphasised by research developments which call for increased investments in measuring children’s own perspectives, especially also giving voice to vulnerable groups of children. EUROCHILD has drawn attention to the fact that child-specific data is still limited. It advocates to involve and engage with children and young people in the development of indicators and in ensuring that indicators can include information on children’s views and perception.
In this perspective the individual processes are crucial and overall life satisfaction permeates the positive valence of the judgement of every dimension within the whole well-being (Bornstein, 2003). Thus it is critical to ask children directly about their well-being. This self-reported subjective well-being of a child is rarely taken into account because of limited theory, data and the adult scepticism about younger children’s ability to respond to such questions. (WHO Europe 2007 )
CONSULTATION QUESTIONS
Does this chapter include the themes and arguments needed?
Are there other aspects of the EU agenda that should be included?
What other examples would you include for the overall approach and for measuring child well-being?
Are there any major aspects that are missing?
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