Variations in Children’s Affective Subjective Well-Being at Seven Years Old: an Analysis of Current and Historical Factors

Abstract

There is a growing amount of evidence on children's subjective wellbeing in general, but research on this topic with younger children is still scarce. In the UK, Wave 4 of the Millennium Cohort Study asked questions about positive and negative affect to a nationally representative sample of over 13,000 children aged around seven years old. The study also contains other information reported by children about their friendships, family relationships, experiences of school and of being bullied; and extensive data gathered from parents across four survey waves starting when the child was nine months old. This paper analyses the extent to which variations in children's positive and negative affect (happiness and sadness) at the age of seven years old are associated with contemporaneous factors reported by children (e.g. bullying) and parents (e.g. household income, parent-child relationships). It also analyses the extent to which socio-economic and family factors earlier in childhood can predict children's affective subjective well-being at seven years old. A comparison is made between findings for affective subjective wellbeing and for emotional and behavioural difficulties. The analysis identifies important differences in factors associated with variations in positive affect, negative affect and emotional and behavioural difficulties. The paper considers the implications of these findings for future research and also in terms of the potential to improve children's experience of childhood.

The Structure of Children’s Subjective Well-being

“…These items specify a concrete timeperiod (2 weeks) wherein participants are asked to endorse the extent to which they experienced three positive (happy, calm, and full of energy) and three negative (sad, stressed, and bored) affective states. For both PA and NA, these items reflect a pleasant-unpleasant, activated-deactivated and neutral affect (see Rees, 2019). Given the specified time-period, the scale is purported to measure state level affective well-being.…”

“I wish someone would explain why I am in care”: The impact of children and young people's lack of understanding of why they are in out‐of‐home care on their well‐being and felt security

“…Rees et al 2010;Bradshaw 2016;the Children's Society, 2018) to understand the SWB of the general child population, there has been far less research on the SWB of children in out-of-home care. Furthermore, there have been few studies on the SWB of younger children, with most research conducted with those aged above 10 years (Andresen et al 2019;Rees 2019). Work that has been completed with very young children (aged 4-6) has demonstrated that their perceptions of their quality of life may not correlate with their caregivers' perceptions, emphasising the need to ask young children themselves (Vieira et al 2018).…”

Children’s Well-Being

“…Life satisfaction measures are the most commonly used indicators of well-being among children and Veenhoven (2002) emphasizes that life satisfaction aspect of well-being is the best indicator of overall quality of life. Whereas affective experiences are inherently dynamic and fluctuating, life satisfaction indicators tend to be more stable and indicative of one's general attitudes towards life (Antaramian & Huebner, 2009;Rees, 2019). In other words, life satisfaction reports typically do not fluctuate often and tend to change only when people experience major changes in life's circumstances, while currently experienced affective states tend to have trivial effects on life satisfaction assessments (Jayawickreme et al, 2017).…”