Children’s Worlds together with the OECD, UNICEF office of research, Innocenti and the European Commission have joined forces to bring together experts from around the world to present and discuss the state of the art of child well-being.
For the agenda and list of speakers.
The event was opened by Gabriela Ramos, OECD Chief of Staff, Sherpa to the G20 and Special Counsellor to the Secretary-General who encouraged the participants to help the OECD put child well-being higher on the political agenda by combining forces and working together on this important issue.
The first day was then introduced new studies and findings from each of the organizations. Asher Ben-Arieh began the Children’s Worlds presentation by emphasizing that we cannot improve the well-being of children without children’s perspectives, and that part of believing and arguing for children’s rights include collecting data from children. He then moved to present the Children’s Worlds project and announced that we have reached 90,000 children around the world who participate in the first and second data collection. Ferran Casas introduced the survey methodology detailed the challenges faced by the project, especially as it relates to a variety of languages, diversity of cultures and participating countries and the range of ages. Gwyther Rees presented main findings from the second wave of data collection. He illustrated how each country can use the data to better understand which issues need to be improved, compared with other countries and in relation to other areas within each country. Jonathan Bradshaw stressed that children are different than adults in what influence their well-being. While for adults economic indicators, such as GDP, are important, our findings show that other indicators like friendships and choice are more important to children’s well-being.
The presentation was concluded by a discussion in which three key factors were mentioned in order to create good living environment for children that will support their well-being: (a). stimulating good friendships for children, (b). enabling children to take bigger part in decisions affecting their lives, and (c). increasing the sense of safety of children.
The full presentation can be found here.
The second day of the event was focused on research and policy challenges raised by the evolution of family types over recent decades. Sabine Andresen and Tamar Dinisman, presented a comparison of three types of children’s living environments, based on data from the second wave of the project: Children living with two parents, children living in single-parent families and children living in separated families. The full presentation can be found here.
More information on the event can be found here
