Developing an Indicator System to Measure Child Well-Being: Lessons Learned over Time

Tracking the well-being of children is as important to a country as monitoring the economy. In fact, some day, today’s children will be in charge, and it is critical to know how children in varied groups and communities are developing. Fortunately, enormous progress in measuring and monitoring children's well-being has been made in recent decades in the United States (U.S) at the national level and, to a lesser extent, at the state level. However, efforts to describe children’s well-being at the community level have been uneven and varied. Also, research is needed to assess the appropriateness of available measures in diverse population subgroups. Robust yet brief measures of children’s social and emotional outcomes are needed; and brief measures of the contextual factors that influence children’s outcomes continue to be in short supply. The purpose of this paper is to describe the experience of one country over four decades, as the lessons learned may be informative to others.