This report from OECD indicates the importance of childhood in child development, well-being, the effect of Covid, new measurement methods and frameworks. As childhood is a crucial period while individuals get skills, abilities that are very important for safeguarding the prosperity and sustainability of future generations. Considering these, for designing effective child well-being policies, policy-makers need comprehensive and timely data that capture what is going on in children’s lives.
The publication aims to move the child data agenda forward by laying the groundwork for better statistical infrastructures that will ultimately inform policy development.
Thus, here are the findings which are based on important sources like the OECD’s previous work on child well-being including 2009 Doing Better for Children; the How’s Life for Children chapter in the 2015 edition of our How’s Life? Report; our OECD Child Well-being Data Portal; and the wider OECD Well-being Framework.
Main findings:
- Although the availability of cross-national child data has improved considerably in recent years, comparable data is still lacking and limited in scope.
- Existing data often fail to represent certain age groups: there is limited information on the well-being of children under school age, especially in comparison to adolescents.
- Unequal data representation can be observed across different population groups.
- Children’s views and perspectives are not always well heard.
- Existing cross-national child data fail to link the different dimensions of children’s lives and therefore do not account for how outcomes in a given area, such as physical health, may affect others like socio-emotional well-being.
Thus, for making the situation better, the report suggested the following solutions:
- “Siloed” approach to producing child data and a new measurement framework that highlights multiple interactions, between the different areas of children’s lives and within the larger environment they grow up in.
- Paying attention to the importance of developing age-sensitive indicators and the importance of incorporating children’s views and perspectives in measurement.
- Coordinated action and long-term commitment from governments, international organizations, and the wider international community.
- Increase the regularity and timeliness of data collection, as well as the reach of techniques for combining data from multiple sources to build robust datasets.
- Strengthen the capacity to collect data on the well-being of children in vulnerable positions
Source: oecd-ilibrary.org, childhub.org
Read the full report HERE
Picture: pixabay.com
