Peer-reviewed article
Beyond a Living Apart Together Relationship: A Children’s Rights Perspective on Child Well-being
Wouter Vandenhole ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This peer-reviewed paper examines the relationship between child well-being and international children's rights law, particularly the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The author explores how child well-being is constructed within children's rights frameworks and proposes dialogue between the two fields. The paper is primarily a conceptual and theoretical analysis rather than an empirical study of child outcomes or interventions.
Key points
- The term 'well-being' is rarely used in children's rights work despite both fields focusing on child flourishing
- The author challenges the view that children's rights offer only a minimalistic checklist for child well-being
- The paper proposes frameworks for dialogue between children's rights law and child well-being research
Limitations
This is a theoretical and conceptual analysis without empirical data on actual child well-being outcomes or evaluation of specific interventions. It cannot tell us what works to improve children's lives in practice or provide evidence about the effectiveness of any particular approach.
Abstract
At first sight, child well-being and international children’s rights law have much in common. Specifically, they both focus on a category of human beings defined by age (children), and both are concerned about ‘child flourishing’. Surprisingly perhaps, the word well-being is rarely used in children’s rights work, and it is not very prominent in the leading human rights instrument on children’s rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In this paper, I pursue two objectives. First, I want to find out how the notion of child well-being has been constructed in international children’s rights and which proxies in the latter can help to imbue the concept with meaning. Second, I explore whether and how the fields of children’s rights law and child well-being may engage in a fruitful dialogue. I challenge the view that children’s rights are unable to offer more than a minimalistic checklist for child well-being, identify learning points for children’s rights, and propose speaking points for a sustained dialogue between the two fields.