Assessment Task 1 – Promoting child & adolescent health outcomes in Australia.

Select one priority direction from the list:
Improving the social and emotion wellbeing of young Australians.

Written By Danielle Jones
Student ID: 210609
Unit Code: 530
Unit Name: Bachelor of Health
Unit Coordinator: Lindsay Smith
Due Date: 16th April 2014

Improving the social and emotional wellbeing of young Australians.
Children and young people’s wellbeing has become a somewhat ubiquitous, complex and politically imbued field (Ereaut & Whiting, 2008; Fattore, Mason & Watson, 2007; Noble, 2008; Rose & Rowland, 2010), with social and emotional wellbeing variously described in terms of mental health, resilience, psychosocial competence and the like. While the discourse of wellbeing is now widely appropriated as a way of capturing our aspirations for children and young people, the term itself is poorly defined and under-theorised (Griffiths & Cooper, 2005; Hamilton & Redmond, 2010; McAuley & Rose, 2010; Noble, 2008).
There is a significant instability and ambiguity around the term ‘wellbeing’ both in public policy and popular discourse. Ereaut and Whiting (2008) contend that signals a shifting set of meanings, that is, it represents what is collectively agreed by a group or number of groups constituting the Aristotelian notion of ‘the good life’. In similar vein, Ryan and Deci (2001, p.141) propose that wellbeing is a complex construct that concerns optimal experience and functioning, which will of course be somewhat relative to context. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to canvass literature the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of wellbeing it is worth pointing out that the current research on wellbeing has been derived from two broad perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines wellbeing in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudemonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realisation and defines wellbeing in terms of degree to which a person is fully functioning (Ryan & Deci, 2001). These two views have given rise to different research and knowledge interests that are in some ways divergent, and in others complementary. Nevertheless, both views broadly incorporate notions of a person’s good, benefit, advantage, interest, prudential value, welfare, happiness, flourishing, utility, quality of life and thriving (Camfield, Streuli & Woodhead, 2009). Despite this, however, philosophers, psychologists, economists and others who try to think systematically about wellbeing tend to use these terms to denote one simple notion rather than a multiplicity of related ones (Angner, 2007, p.3) which makes wellbeing less useful as an analytical concept. Camfield, Streuli and Woodhead (2009) cite the work of White (2008) in providing a useful framework for encompassing the diversity of wellbeing concepts. This framework distinguishes between notions of having a good life (material welfare and standards of living), living a good life (values and ideals), and locating one’s life (experience and subjectively).
Bradshaw, Hoelscher and Richardson (2007, p.135) put it this way; wellbeing can be defined as the realisation of children’s rights and the fulfilness of the opportunity for every child to be all she or he can be in the light of a child’s abilities, potential and skills. The degree to which this is achieved can be measured in terms of positive child outcomes, whereas negative outcomes and deprivation point to the neglect of children’s rights.
The surge in interest in notions of child wellbeing, what this encompasses, and how it is most effectively addressed, has generated some critically important debate about how wellbeing should be measured and monitored (Ben-Arieh, 2006). One of the most widely recognised assessment frameworks for child wellbeing is included in the ARACY report card which provides a ‘comprehensive assessment of the lives and wellbeing of children and young people’. Whilst the ARACY and similar report cards are widely recognised and highly regarded they have also been seen as fuelling social concern about childhood because they exemplify a deficit model approach to studying children’s lives (Marrow & Mayall, 2009). It is important, then to reinforce the need for larger scope of children’s rights, childhood as a phase in itself, the need for children to report on their own experience, as well the broader consequences of the changing field of wellbeing definition and measurement (Ben-Ariah, 2005).
Ben-Ariah has elsewhere (2005, p.577) suggested a number of important questions we should consider in our efforts to study the wellbeing needs of children and young people: 1. What are children doing? 2. What do children need? 3. What do children have? 4. What do children think and feel? 5. To whom or what are children connected and related? 6. What do children contribute?
Answering such questions Ben-Ariah (2005) suggests ‘will enable a more complete picture of children as human beings in their present life’, the positive aspects of their lives and in a way that values those legitimate members of their community and broader society (p.577). In Australia, at least, we remain some way off implementing such as vision, since we’ve not yet identified for ourselves what we mean by ‘a good life’, much less initiated the kind of processes for finding out what this might look like for young people, and how it might be measured. As Hamilton and Redmond (2010, p.x) observe, ‘in the meantime, policy concern with the development of statistics for the kind of society we wish to live in, and prioritising the principles of positivity, universality and attention to the views of the child or young person’, suggest that children should be asked simple, universal (or as close as possible to this ideal), quality of life questions about overall satisfaction with their lives, or with important aspects of their lives.
Common to much of the research in the 1990’s was a framing of children’s experiences in terms of discourses of harm, hence largely positioning them as passive victims, vulnerable and at risk(Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980). Yet what was clear at the time, and remains evident still, is that children’s experiences of change in their families- including well documented emotional responses such as sadness, anxiety, anger, resentment, confusion, guilt and loyalty tensions (Graham, 2004) – needed to be heard, acknowledged, respected and acted upon. Children have a quite extraordinary capacity for coping, problem solving, decision-making and goal setting (Graham, 2004) although clearly they do best in developing competence with these in a supportive social environment (Smith, 2002). Given timely and appropriate support, children are capable of reconstructing their experience in ways that enhance agency (a sense of being enabled and so acting upon what they can influence) as distinct from dependency (being constrained by acting upon decisions, processes or family dynamics they can’t or don’t wish to influence). Children are important and we need to ensure the processes we employ in programs aimed at promoting their social and emotional wellbeing are guided throughout by the key principles of recognition, since these are critical for their developing identity as persons of worth in their own right. International interest in child and youth wellbeing is clearly growing, with the ARACY report card just one of many indications of the extent to which is now routinely monitored and measured (Ben-Arieh, 2008). Children’s social and emotional wellbeing, in particular, is now firmly located within the public policy sphere and a large range of interventions linked to the promotion of mental health, resilience, psycho-social competence and the like are now commonplace in education, health, welfare and other human service settings. Yet the concept of wellbeing remains ambiguous and its implementation fragmented and ad hoc. As such, to a large extent, wellbeing remains an aspiration and hence it is critically important we continue, in our various professional contexts, to both question and develop the programs, interventions, methods and tools we use to improve and measure it. There have been some important shifts in recent years that will need our continued attention as we move forward. These include a more critical engagement with what a good life means for children and young people in different social and cultural contexts, and about how this changes over time; a deeper acknowledgement of children as agents and not simply as objects of concern, with a consequential distinction between notions of their wellbeing and well becoming; expanding the current broadly accepted domains of wellbeing to include those that reflect more closely the lived and reported experience of children and young people; a more interdisciplinary focus to help ensure the ways we understand and approach wellbeing reflects the whole child and not just the particular aspect that is the focus of concern; and a continuing persistence with strengths based approaches that recognise the assets and possibilities of children and young people – not just the limitations and deficits that make their lives a problem.
We also need to continue to give very close attention to ensuring the interventions we deploy in addressing concerns about social and emotional wellbeing are informed by sound evidence. Similarly, further work needs to be done in ensuring some of the more promising and empirically tested interventions and protocols are effectively implemented in a range of community settings, particularly since there is increasing evidence that the values and beliefs of professional play a key role in whether and how these are initiated in different contexts ( Aarons, Sommerfeld & Wairath-Greene, 2009). We also still have much work to do in finding out and attending to the ways in which such programs and interventions might facilitate better interaction between children and young people and their families, schools and communities. As Jordon (2006, p.42) argues the preoccupation with outcomes of particular interventions in the lives of individual children has ‘neglected the big picture of how all the elements in children’s experiences link together in a coherent framework’. The broad field of wellbeing, including children and young people’s social and emotional wellbeing, has changed quite considerably over the past 30 years. I am conscious that I’ve barley managed to scratch the surface of what is an incredibly important, complex and changing landscape within which children and young people yearn to be noticed, challenged, supported and celebrated. As signalled above, we each potentially play a critically important role, within our different research, policy and practice contexts, in ensuring children and young people’s own views are heard in relation to the issues that influence their experience of a well live life.

References
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