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The authors investigate how employee social support impacts children’s perceptions of service quality of a child helpline chat service and the chatters’ immediate well-being. Specifically, the purpose of this study is to examine how action-facilitating support, nurturant support and emotional reflections influence the children and to test whether this impact varies depending upon the controllability of the issues discussed.

The authors develop hypotheses about the influence of social support and controllability on children’s perceived service quality and well-being. Chat conversations are coded on the social support given by the employee and the controllability of the issue. Questionnaires are collected to measure children’s service quality and well-being. Using structural equation modeling, hypotheses are tested with a sample of 662 children and chat conversations of a child helpline.

The study reveals that for children chatting about controllable issues, nurturant support and negative emotional reflections negatively influence the immediate well-being of these children. Positive emotional reflections positively influence immediate well-being. For children chatting about uncontrollable issues, nurturant support and negative emotional responses positively influence the perceived service quality.

This study contributes to the services marketing literature by broadening the current understanding of the impact of social support on children’s service quality perceptions and well-being, and by showing how this impact is moderated by the level of controllability of the issue discussed.

The concept of ‘well‐being’ is entering into the policy debate on the back of recent research on ‘happiness’ ‐ self‐assessed evaluations of quality of life. It stands for a reassertion of relationships and feelings as central to positive evaluations and against the competitive and consumerist ethos of market individualism. Although the findings of research on well‐being among adults need to be adapted to suit children's situations and perceptions, work on this is in progress. This article presents some of the issues for measuring children's well‐being and for comparing measurements between countries. It also considers the implications for children's services of an approach that re‐values the relational elements in human service work, and argues that coherence between services is as important as the outcomes of interventions with individuals and families.

European Union (EU) indicators on poverty and social exclusion employ only two child breakdowns: the proportion of children living in households with incomes below 60% of the national median using the modified OECD equivalence scale and the proportion of children living in workless households. The UK also uses these indicators in the Opportunities for All series. This article first develops a new indicator of child poverty based on income, subjective and deprivation indicators which may be more reliable than income alone. It then explores the extent to which income poverty and worklessness represent international variation in child well‐being using an index that we have developed. The conclusions are that: (1) relative income poverty and worklessness are poor indicators of child well‐being, especially for some of the new EU countries; (2) deprivation has a stronger association with overall well‐being than relative income poverty or worklessness; (3) there are a number of other single indicators of child well‐being that could be used as proxies for overall child well‐being; and (4) The EU (and the UK) could easily develop its own index of child well‐being.

This chapter is on positive education in primary schools (including pre-schools), and how programmes that use interventions from positive psychology (PPIs) can have positive effects (academic and for well-being), on children in this age group (up to 11 years). It explores some of the key challenges of implementing PPIs at younger ages and why, compared to secondary schools, limited studies of PPIs in pre- and primary schools exist. Based on the author’s personal experience of successfully delivering a multiple PPI (mPPI) in a primary school in the United Kingdom, the chapter also presents a case study. In particular, a mPPI known as Hummingbird Primary, adapted from the Hummingbird Project which has successfully been delivered in high schools; see Chapter 3. The case study presents an overview of the mPPI, the impact it had and some of the lessons learned. The chapter concludes with recommendations for educators wishing to implement PPIs in a whole primary school setting.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of what well-being means to children in the food context and to formulate recommendations about the way food retailers may take actions to promote children’s food well-being (FWB).

A qualitative study based on a child-centric perspective is conducted with 25 French children aged 6–11 years. The data collection and analysis use both verbal and graphic data methods including focus groups and drawings in order to help children express their feelings and thoughts.

The findings put forward that according to children, the concept of FWB relies on five dimensions: sensory taste, health, commensality, empowerment and altruistic behaviours. Their discourses suggest that food practices contributes to objective, hedonic, eudaemonic and social well-being on the short and long term.

Based on children’s intrinsic needs for pleasure and empowerment, our recommendations highlight how food retailers might rethink their own-label offering, retail environment and communication to take into account young consumers’ FWB.

Drawing upon the concept of FWB and positive psychology, the authors do not only examine children’s food representations through a nutritional lens, but enlarge the scope to show how physical, emotional, psychological and social factors, involved in food context, contribute to different aspects of well-being.

This article exploits British Household Panel Survey data to explore trends in subjective well‐being of young people aged 11‐15 over the period 1994‐2008. Two dimensions of subjective well‐being are measured using multi‐dimensional scales representing ‘happiness’ and ‘selfesteem’. This 14‐year period has seen many changes in the environment of young people that may have had an impact on their well‐being, including economic growth, increases in parental employment and major efforts to improve social policy for children. Has all this activity had an impact on what young people say about their lives? The evidence from this analysis suggests that there has been an improvement in the average level of happiness of 11‐15 year‐olds over time, especially for girls. It is impossible to draw clear conclusions about the causes of this improvement in happiness but there is some evidence that it focused on relationships with friends and happiness with school.

The focus of scientific research on the parental well-being has been mainly placed on parents of pre-school children. However, recent findings indicated that parents of pre-school children show lower levels of depression and higher levels of self-efficacy and self-esteem, compared to parents of older children. The purpose of this paper is to establish to what extent the parent-adolescent relationship, coping strategies and co-parent relationship, influences the parental well-being.

This study was conducted to establish to what extent the parent-adolescent relationship, coping strategies and co-parent relationship, influences the parental well-being of parents in a sample of 310 Dutch parents with children aged 12-18. Participants filled out questionnaires on the parental well-being and coping. Path analysis using a structural equation model (SEM) was performed.

The SEM revealed that active problem-focused coping strategies were predictive of higher levels of parenting-related well-being. The satisfaction of the relationship with the co-parent predicted both higher levels of parenting- and individual-related well-being. Lower levels of parenting-related well-being were significantly related to more problems in the parent-adolescent relationship, which, in turn, were related to decreased individual-related well-being.

Future studies on the influence of coping strategies and the co-parent relationship satisfaction are recommended to create greater understanding of the underlying mechanisms and their positive effect on the parental well-being.

This study could lead to improvements in the support system for parents raising adolescents.

The present study shows that the parent-child relationship is an important predictive factor in parental well-being. This study also shows that the more highly parents scored on co-parent relationship satisfaction, the less they saw parenting as a burden and the more they felt they had the parenting skills to control the behavior of their child.

In specifically examining uses of freemium applications for children, this study aims to investigate the effects on user well-being after the experiential value by examining the influence of experiential value in terms of domain-specific innovativeness; the impact of domain-specific innovativeness in terms of child well-being; the moderating role of child socialization; and the relevance of contextual variables associated with media exposure during freemium game use.

The study is based on a survey of children who had downloaded freemium games on their smartphones. A total of 410 completed questionnaires were collected from children of 9 to 12 years of age. Confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation models were applied to examine and test the study hypotheses.

The results indicate that experiential value influences domain-specific innovativeness; domain-specific innovativeness is a significant predictor of well-being; parental materialism and communication with friends significantly moderates domain-specific innovativeness and well-being; and contextual variables do not influence the model.

Public policy managers should be cognizant of these results and should make every effort to prevent the identified relationships from becoming too strong, given the strong effect of domain-specific innovativeness on child well-being.

This paper contributes to the extant literature by incorporating experiential value and domain-specific innovativeness variables within a comprehensive model and by accounting for the effects of relevant contextual variables and the moderating role of child socialization.

This paper aims to present findings from 440 responses regarding the experiences of supervision, coping and well-being of 83 service providers and policymakers from eight countries working to support children’s well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A smartphone survey hosted on a custom-built app was used. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The data were gathered in the last quarter of 2020.

While most respondents described the supervision they received as “useful” – both personally and professionally – and reported several characteristics of effective supervision practices, concerns about not receiving optimal support were also voiced. Respondents shared a range of stress management and other self-care practices they used but also revealed their difficulties optimally managing the stresses and anxieties during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, some respondents shared they were feeling helpless, unmotivated and unproductive. Yet, overall, responses were imbued with messages about hope, perseverance and self-compassion.

Using a bespoke smartphone app, rich and intimate insights were generated in real time from a wide range of professionals across high- and low- and middle-income countries – indicating the need to better support their well-being and service delivery.

This study aims to bridge the gaps in the existing literature by studying the links between children's development and the subjective well-being of the caregivers using first-hand data collected in rural China.

Although the broad array of literature has examined the effects of child development on the subjective well-being of caregivers, the relationship between early childhood development and caregiver subjective well-being has not been well-studied using sample families with potential developmental delay in rural China. Also, existing research has relied on maternal reports to evaluate the developmental status of children. The study used data collected from 32 townships in seven nationally designated poverty counties in the Qinling mountainous area in 2016. The authors measure child development using the social-emotional module of the Ages & Stages Questionnaire and Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development–Third Edition.

The authors find that child development indicators are correlated with caregiver subjective well-being. In particular, social-emotional skills are positively associated with life evaluations and positive emotion. However, we do not find any significant correlation between child development and negative emotion or depression, anxiety and stress scores.

The value of this study is to report the indicators of child development in rural China and examines the correlation between child development and caregivers' subjective well-being.