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The community as extended family

What is child well-being?

The development of well-being in a child requires more than simply 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 appropriate social and emotional functioning, cognitive growth, and physical health and development.

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 do communities 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.

Many community organizations work primarily in a particular area of child development. As such, they contribute greatly to children’s well-being. However, if people in these organizations are aware of the child’s needs in other areas and become knowledgeable about where to refer to other community resources or—better yet—to collaborate with others, the community will be much more prepared to meet all the child’s needs. Therefore, we encourage you to explore sections in this web site that are focused on disciplines and organizations that are not like yours.