Research on marital quality and child well-being is currently limited by its common use of geographically constrained, homogenous, and often cross-sectional (or at least temporally limited) samples. We build upon previous work showing multiple trajectories of marital quality and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 (NLSY79) regarding mothers and their children (inclusive of ages 5-14). We examine how indicators of child well-being are linked to parental trajectories of marital quality (happiness, communication, and conflict). Results showed children whose parents had consistently poor marital quality over the life course exhibited more internalizing and externalizing problems, poorer health, lower quality home environments, and lower math and vocabulary scores than children of parents in consistently higher-quality marriages. Group differences remained stable over time for child health, home environment, and vocabulary scores. Group differences for internalizing problems declined over time, whereas group differences increased for externalizing problems and math scores. Initial advantages for females across nearly all indicators of child well-being tended to shrink over time, with boys often moving slightly ahead by mid adolescence. We discuss the implications of these findings in regard to children's development and well-being and suggest treating marriage as a monolithic construct betrays important variation within marriage itself.
Spencer L. James, David A. Nelson, McKell A Jorgensen-Wells et al.
The findings of this empirical research provide new information about the importance of caregiver interactions during care routines, specifically diaper changing, in supporting infant and toddler involvement and well-being. This correlational study involved observations of 144 separate diapering cycles by 31 caregivers with 74 infants and toddlers in 30 infant and toddler classrooms in a U.S. Midwest city. Based on these observations, caregiver responsiveness was found to be significantly related to both child involvement and child well-being. Another feature of caregivers' behavior, caregiver encouragement, was significantly associated with child well-being, but not child involvement. The study results suggest that caregivers' behaviors, specifically responsiveness and encouragement, during diapering are vital proximal processes in the moment-to-moment interactions between a caregiver and child. Thus, responsiveness and encouragement in care routines should be emphasized in infant care settings and be a focus for caregiver professional development, including pre- and in-service training. Although training related to diapering is often restricted to health concerns, the findings suggest that specific caregiver-child interactions during this care routine may support or hinder children's well-being and involvement in the moment. Caregiver responsiveness to children's cues in this context may enhance children's opportunities to practice involvement in bidirectional relationships and support children's well-being.
Deborah E. Laurin, Shannon Stark Guss, Diane M. Horm
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.
The French Archbishop of Cambrai and pedagogue François Fénelon (1651-1715), was the tutor of the grandson of Louis XIV. Based on his classical education, he wrote the pedagogical books Education of Girls and The Adventures of Telemachus, The Son of Ulysses. This paper seeks to examine, according to the historical method of analysis, how the moral value and didactic spirit of these literary pieces influenced the European philosophical and pedagogical thinking, they contributed to the cultivation of moral values among young people and they are classical references for the achievement of children’s well-being. Being both priest and pedagogue, Fénelon considered that education is key to welfare and he encouraged the cultivation of moral virtue. His contribution to the philosophy of education is worthwhile, since, in his book Education of Girls, he suggested the need to educate all children, irrespective of gender or social status, in order to obtain the best possible social behavior and to cultivate good characters. Moreover, he put forward his arguments for educating girls and he achieved to make their education a social need. In The Adventures of Telemachus, The Son of Ulysses Fénelon prepared an action plan to help the Duke of Burgundy and throne successor get the moral training that a prince ought to take according to his beliefs. He codified instructions that would affect the personality and behavior of the prince, teaching him the devaluation of human weaknesses in order to lead him to higher spiritual level. Although Fénelon wrote this book for his student, it was welcomed throughout Europe. He promoted humanitarian education as means of prosperity, when education was not institutionalized and children did not have recognized rights yet. The aim of this presentation is to show that Fénelon’s ideas on education and moral cultivation of children contribute to their welfare; ideas which are still valid.
Child marriage has adverse reproductive health outcomes of women and mothers’ poor health status which affects the well-being of their children. Despite this, much less is known regarding this interrelationship among Bangladeshi women. Objectives: In this study we examined the effect of age at marriage on reproductive health status of women and the impact of the mother’s reproductive health status on child well-being. Data and methods: To meet the objectives we used the most recent 2011 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey data. Both bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses were employed to analyze the data. Results: Overall, 78% of the women were married-off before they reach their eighteenth birth day, of which, 36% were married before the age of 15. The mean age at first marriage and first birth were 15.8 and 17.9 years respectively. The findings of this study reveal that early age at marriage had adverse effect on the reproductive health status of women and child well-being. The women married at age 18 or later and those married-off at age 15-17 were 4.74 times (95% CI=4.25-5.29) and 1.72 times (95% CI=1.58-1.87) as likely as to have better reproductive health than those who were married-off before age 15. The children belonging to mother with high RHI were significantly (p<0.01) less likely than children of women with poor RHI to suffer from stunting (OR=0.70, 95% CI=0.39-0.83), underweight (OR=0.59, 95% OR=0.40-0.86) and wasting (OR=0.64, 95% CI=0.38-1.06) and any failure of anthropometric measure (OR=0.56, 95% CI=0.38-0.82). The under-five children with poor reproductive health of mothers were significantly at increased risk of any anthropometric failure including stunting, wasting and underweight and had lower risk of survivorship. Early marriage and early childbirth are common in Bangladesh that adversely affects both mother and child health. Program should aim to retain girls in schooling for a longer period by the government as well as guardians, not only to raise their education level but also for their sound health and overall societal development.
Poverty remains a pervasive challenge in Nigeria, with far-reaching implications for family life and child development. Despite numerous policy interventions, a significant proportion of households in urban centers such as Kano Metropolis continue to live below the poverty line, which affects how parents raise their children and how children thrive. This study investigates the effects of poverty on parenting practices and child well-being in Kano Metropolis, Nigeria. A cross-sectional survey design was employed, and data were collected from 200 households across five local government areas. Structured questionnaires captured quantitative data on income levels, parenting practices, and child well-being indicators, while semi-structured interviews provided qualitative insights into parental experiences under conditions of deprivation. Findings reveal that poverty significantly shapes parenting behaviors, often resulting in heightened parental stress, reliance on punitive discipline, and reduced involvement in children’s education and health. Children from poor households were more likely to experience irregular school attendance, malnutrition, and psychosocial difficulties compared to their peers from relatively stable households. Regression analysis confirmed that household income was a strong predictor of child well-being, with parenting stress emerging as a partial mediator in this relationship. The qualitative findings further highlighted parental frustration, feelings of helplessness, and the struggle to balance livelihood with child-rearing responsibilities. The study highlights the urgent need for multi-sectoral interventions that address both the economic and psychosocial dimensions of poverty. Recommendations include poverty alleviation programs, parental support services, and child-focused policies that can break intergenerational cycles of deprivation and promote healthier child development outcomes in urban Nigeria.
• A high rate of immigration positively impacts household welfare, thereby enhancing children's wellbeing. • Utilizing the comprehensive wellbeing index to measure the overall happiness of children, aiming for long-term significance while ensuring relevance when researching in developing countries. • Using the asset index to measure household welfare aims to represent long-term living standards in a volatile economic context. • Using the MICs 6 dataset for the study, which was conducted by UNICEF and the General Statistics Office (GSO). This research assesses the effects of migration on child well-being in Vietnam through the mediating role of household welfare at the cluster level. To give an overall picture of these above relationships, the authors use the Ordinary Least Squares regression model (OLS) and the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique to examine the mediating relationships, based on the secondary data collected from Vietnam Sustainable Development Goal Indicators for Children and Women survey in the period 2020-2021 by the General Statistics Office (GSO) and United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF). The results show that migration increases household welfare, which in turn has a positive effect on child well-being. This research proposes several recommendations with the expectation of supporting the Government in managing and improving child well-being in high-migration areas.
Based on a unique repeated cross-sectional data set of school-aged children in Europe, the Middle East and North America, we analyze how children’s subjective well-being is related to parents’ employment status, depending on the institutional context. We find that parental unemployment is strongly negatively related to children’s life satisfaction across countries and years. The effect is thereby moderated by the generosity of unemployment benefits. Exploiting across- and within-country variation, our results suggest that a higher benefit replacement rate, on average, alleviates the negative effects of fathers’, but not mothers’, unemployment. We further test the robustness of our results considering unemployment benefits jointly with social work norms. While the buffering effect of unemployment insurance remains, the spillover effects of paternal unemployment seem to be more pronounced in environments with stricter social work norms.
Elementary education is a type of education that focuses on the maturation and development of young learners. The purpose of this study is to ascertain how the make-a-match learning model can be applied to the learning objectives of primary school children. This study is a review of the literature using a qualitative methodology, and it will be explained in a descriptive manner. Understanding and evaluating data sources from scientific publications, theses, proceedings, and books that are relevant to the research topic is how data gathering approaches are carried out. The use of cards in learning activities to create meaningful learning and reinforce students' conceptual understanding is one of the research's findings. in order for students to be joyful and enthusiastic about the subject and to be able to comprehend it well, as shown by an increase in their learning outcomes.
Influential reports about the “learning crisis” in the global South generally pay insufficient attention to social inequalities in learning. In this study, we explore the association between family socioeconomic status and learning outcomes in 10 francophone African countries using data from the Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems, a standardized assessment of pupils’ mathematics and reading competence at the end of primary school. We start by showing that learning outcomes among grade 6 pupils are both poor and highly stratified. We then develop and test a conceptual framework that highlights three mechanisms through which family socioeconomic status might contribute to learning: (1) educational resources at home, (2) health and well-being, and (3) differences in school quality. We find that most of the effect of family background on learning outcomes operates through school quality, which results from a combination of the unequal distribution of resources (such as teachers and textbooks) across schools and high socioeconomic segregation between schools. On the basis of these results, we suggest that most countries in the region could improve equity as well as overall performance by “raising the floor” in school quality.
