The measuring and monitoring children's well-being is of growing
importance to policymakers and those who strive to improve the lives of
children everywhere. In the last decade, public attention has centered
on children, a development driven by decreasing fertility in the most
developed countries of the world and the postindustrial emphasis on
human capital development. These developments position children at the
center of the future capacity of a nation or region. Children have
increasingly been identified as subjects with rights and entitlements of
their own, as illustrated by the U. N. Convention on the Rights of the
Child (CRC), which emphasizes a child's right to develop his or her
capacities. The CRC represents a milestone both in the understanding of
children and in offering principles and guidelines for policies. The
rights underscored by the convention require evidence on children's
well-being and theories or models for understanding their evolving
capacities and development. The right to develop one's capacities
illustrates a complexity of analyzing children's well-being: the
analysis must encapsulate both the current standard of living and the
potential for growth and future fulfillment arising from present
conditions. Of course, systematic statistics on children have existed
for a long time. However, new development in data and analytic resources
and growing interest in childhood among social scientists have combined
to advance child well-being to the forefront of research.
