The Importance of Feeling Adequately Heard by Adults and Enjoying Time with Family in Relation to Children’s Subjective Well-Being

Abstract

It is essential to take children’s subjective well-being (SWB) into account to give attention to children’s lives. The aim of this article is to analyse children’s SWB according to domain-based indicators of the cognitive component of SWB and indicators of the affective component of SWB, as well as indicators of interpersonal relationships in different contexts and activities outside school, besides sociodemographic and educational characteristics. This is developed though the answers of a probabilistic sample of children from Barcelona city in 2017 (mean age = 10.74) to an adapted preliminary version of the third International Survey of Children’s Well-Being, promoted by the Children’s Worlds project, which includes the Children’s Worlds Subjective Well-Being Scale (CW-SWBS), based on the Student Life Satisfaction Scale by Huebner (School Psychology International, 12, 231–243, 1991). It is found that, although children typically do high evaluations of their lives, children’s SWB is even higher when children display better scores in domain-based cognitive SWB and affective SWB (55.07% and 42.75% of the CW-SWBS-5′ variability is explained, respectively), as well as of interpersonal relationships (39.42%). Activities outside school (11.52%) and sociodemographic and educational characteristics (4.76%) seem to have low but critical contributions to children’s SWB. Therefore, promoting better evaluations of cognitive domains (especially feeling adequately heard by adults) and enjoying relationships (especially with family members) both could improve all children’s lives. Furthermore, activities outside school, and in particular sociodemographic and educational characteristics, both could be used to identify children in vulnerable situations.