Child Well-Being: What Does It Mean?

The notion of child well-being appears in a large number of publications nowadays. Our review of the literature underlines both the oddly pathogenic approach to child well-being and the scarcity of papers discussing a still poorly defined notion. Through this review, we identified the recourse to a binary language; from there, we derived five theoretical axes that heed the multidimensional and multilevel nature of well-being, although for each one, a pole is here predominantly developed. We argue in favour of an override of a one-dimensional, single-level, unipolar approach to child well-being and an exploration of its otherwise underdeveloped positive, hedonic, subjective, spiritual and collective dimensions. (C) 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and National Children's Bureau