An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries

Innocenti Report Card 7: Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries was released on 14 February 2007 by UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre. It brought together the best of currently available data, providing an overview of the state of childhood in the majority of economically advanced nations of the world.

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The six dimensions covered

The report for the first time measured and compared overall child well-being across six dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s subjective sense of their own well-being.

In total, 40 separate indicators of child well-being – from relative poverty and child safety, to educational achievement and drug abuse – are brought together in this overview to present a picture of the lives of children.

The report’s findings

North-European countries dominated the top half of the table, with child well-being at its highest in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. The United Kingdom and the United States were in the bottom half of the table.

The UK ranked in the bottom third of the country rankings for five of the six dimensions reviewed. While the country ranked higher in the educational well-being dimension, the UK lags behind in terms of relative poverty and deprivation, quality of children’s relationships with their parents and peers, child health and safety, behaviour and risk-taking and subjective well-being.