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What is child well-being?

The development of well-being in a child requires more than having good health care or child care, or even the presence of loving, caring parents. To have well-being means that children—adults, too—have the capabilities or the strengths to undertake and perform activities or enter into successful relationships that are appropriate for their age and level of development. These abilities and strengths include physical health and development, appropriate social and emotional functioning, and cognitive growth.

The Center for Child Well-being undertook a project to define what the elements are in each of the three areas above. The results of this project will be published later this year. (For more information about this publication, see Well-being: Positive Development Across the Life Course.

Some of these elements in the cognitive domain are curiosity and exploration, persistance in achieving goals, thinking and intelligence, information-processing and memory, problem-solving, creativity, and language and literacy.

Elements in the social and emotional domain include regulating emotion; coping; autonomy; trust and attachment; relationships with parents, siblings, and peers; and empathy and sympathy.

Elements of physical well-being are nutrition, preventive health care, physical activity, and physical safety and security. They also include the development of characteristics that lead to healthy decisions regarding sexuality and the use of illicit drugs, and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco, particularly during childhood and adolescence.

How can health care foster well-being in children?

The elements in the three domains listed above do not develop individually, or in isolation from the others. For example, strong parent-child relationships contribute to the cognitive growth of a child as well as to the child’s physical security. Good nutrition has an impact on a child’s ability to learn. A child’s ability to learn language contributes to his or her ability to form relationships with others.

Health care professionals are the custodians of the physical health of children. Physicians are often the first people parents turn to when they are concerned about any aspect of their child’s development, including the development of mental functioning and social skills. As physicians and other health care providers become more aware of the interaction of physical health with mental growth and social and emotional functioning, they become even more important to children and their parents and caregivers. Therefore, we encourage you to explore sections in this web site that are focused on disciplines and organizations that may help you understand how the integration of physical health, cognitive growth, and social and emotional development.