Child well-being in the European Union

What do we know at the moment?

Although there is not readily available robust data to assess the child wellbeing situation in Europe in comparison to rest of the world, existing child indicators data indicate that European nations vary widely. Bradshaw et al. 2007 found that eight out of twenty five EU nations have “high” levels of child wellbeing (e.g. the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Slovenia), another eleven have “medium” levels (e.g. Germany, France, Italy, Poland), and the further six have “low” levels (e.g. the UK, Malta, Latvia, Estonia). The updated analysis of data by Bradshaw and Richardson (2009) covering EU27 nations again suggest that certain areas of child wellbeing are worse in the UK and the countries of the former Eastern Bloc (with the exception of Slovenia).

Where is the gap?

The main challenge for the EU is to develop the best policies and approaches to effectively improve the wellbeing of children and young people. There is, however, a gap in the evaluation of child and young people’s wellbeing as policy decisions across Europe are currently being made based on data that are not fit for purpose (Goswami et al. 2016). A recent FP7 project (MYWeB – Measuring Youth Well-Being) identified that although studies on children’s / young people’s wellbeing exist in every EU country (with the exceptions of Cyprus and Luxembourg), surveys are limited in East European (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Poland) and smaller (Denmark, Ireland, Malta) countries, which are not surveyed as often as other European countries. Existing datasets are also limited in their coverage of topics relating to child wellbeing. In both research studies and administrative data sets, topics like the environment, risky behaviour, safety, culture and participation tend not to be covered in depth. Existing European surveys have also not always explored psychological or mental and emotional aspects of wellbeing (Busse and Backeberg 2018).

The GUIDE/EuroCohort survey aims to fill in all these gaps and, above all, to conduct a large longitudinal European survey that is comparable between countries.