Kindliches Wohlbefinden – Child Well-Being

This article re-examines the findings of two earlier studies that asked four to six year old children about the quality of their kindergarten. It places those findings in the framework of subjective well-being and mental health. The authors describe this as an alternative interpretation of existing results, not a reinterpretation. From this they propose a new model of children's subjective well-being in kindergarten with four dimensions.

Key points

• The article draws on two child-perspective studies of kindergarten quality (Nentwig-Gesemann, Walther & Thedinga, 2017; Nentwig-Gesemann et al., 2021).
• The studies focused on the views of children aged four to six.
• The findings are reframed within subjective well-being and mental health.
• The reframing is described as an alternative interpretation, not a re-interpretation, of existing findings.
• The model has four dimensions of well-being: personal; social; space-, time- and thing-related; organisational.

Limitations

Only the abstract is available, so the methods, sample sizes and detailed findings of the underlying studies are not described. The model is derived from existing data and the abstract does not say whether it has been tested.