Centre on Well-being, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity (WISE)
Measuring What Matters for Child Well-being and Policies
To design, implement and monitor effective child well-being policies, policy-makers
need data that better capture children’s lives, measure what is important to them
and detect emerging problems and vulnerabilities early on. Despite improvements in
recent decades, there are still important gaps in both national and cross-national
child data. Countries can achieve progress if the right actions are taken.
Measuring What Matters for Child Well-being and Policies lays the groundwork for improved
child well-being measurement and better data to inform better child well-being policies.
It outlines an “aspirational” framework for child well-being measurement, setting
out which aspects of children’s lives should be measured, and how, to better monitor
child well-being. It also outlines priorities for child data development and identifies
key data gaps, all with the aim of motivating improvements in child data infrastructures.
Our new aspirational child well-being measurement framework pinpoints the aspects of children’s lives that should be measured to best monitor their well-being. At the core of the framework’s multi-layered structure are four main dimensions for well-being monitoring: children’s material living standards, their physical health, their social and emotional outcomes, and their learning and educational achievements. Subsequent layers reflect the essential role of children’s families, schools, neighbourhoods and larger communities in shaping their well-being by providing support, security, resources and opportunities.