Family and child well-being

Abstract

Child well-being involves the family. The family, in turn, is very much a part of culture and society; therefore, child well-being has to be studied within a sociocultural context. Most work addressing child well-being has been conducted through problem-oriented research informed by ecological perspectives and has been conducted in the West. Such an orientation, though highly valuable, has been a challenge for defining goals of research involving possibly universal standards of healthy child development. Foremost among such goals would be proposing optimal development models which would be both contextually relevant and also hopefully have more extensive (universal?) applicability. Toward such an end, research emerging from the “Majority World” would be very useful. In particular, “integrative syntheses” of insights deriving from mainstream psychology on the one hand and those deriving from Majority World experience on the other are promising. Two such integrative syntheses are proposed, namely, “autonomous-related self” and “cognitive + social intelligence” which have both contextual and universal relevance. They appear to be promising as goals to pursue for child well-being globally. The Turkish Early Enrichment Project is discussed as a case in point.