Well-Being from a Child's Perspective

Children's well-being is a fundamental prerequisite for successful developmental and educational processes. Nevertheless, in research and practice it has often been defined and evaluated from an adult perspective. While many existing studies rely on objective living conditions or parental assessments, the perspective of the children themselves often remains unconsidered. The Convention on the Rights of the Child strengthened children's right to participation and the recognition of their own viewpoints – including in early childhood education. This project embraces this paradigm shift by giving children themselves a voice and thus enabling new insights into their subjective well-being. The project makes an important contribution to understanding well-being as a central dimension of educational quality and promoting corresponding conditions in daycare centers.

The goal of the project is to gain scientifically grounded insights into children's well-being from the children's own perspective. It aims to make visible in which situations, under what conditions and structures children experience well-being in daycare. Furthermore, professional staff and administrators should be sensitized to this issue and enabled to deliberately create supportive conditions. The research findings should demonstrate how educational situations must be designed to strengthen children, promote self-efficacy, and support their mental health. In the long term, the project should contribute to anchoring well-being as a guiding principle in early childhood educational practice and incorporating it into professional development processes.

In ten childcare centers, children will be interviewed using various qualitative methods. Creative, visual, and language-based approaches will be employed, adapted to the individual forms of expression of the children. In a pilot phase, suitable data collection instruments will be selected, tested, and subsequently refined. The goal is to combine three to four data collection methods to make the diversity of children's perspectives visible. The collected data will be analyzed using the documentary method to reconstruct typical patterns and key situations of well-being. Based on these results, practice implications will be derived that show how educational professionals can specifically promote well-being in everyday situations. In a subsequent transfer phase, the development of materials and training concepts is planned, which will be tested in practice.