Chapter 3: Child Welfare and Well-Being

This chapter focuses on the welfare of the world’s 2.3 billion children below the age of 18. Focusing especially on low-and-lower-middle-income countries, it will discuss efforts to deal with major challenges such as poverty, malnutrition, high child mortality rates, various forms of child labor, child trafficking, the destructive impact of armed conflicts on children’s lives, early marriages and pregnancies for girls, female genital mutilation, limited or no formed education, and failure to have one’s birth and name registered. It will include a table relating selected SDG targets to issues of child welfare as well as a glossary of terms.

During the last 220 years, the world’s overall population has been increasing dramatically. After approaching 1 billion in 1800, it passed 2.5 billion in 1950 and 7.7 billion in 2018. The projected population for 2050 is 9.8 billion (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2018). In 2019, 59.4% of the world’s population lived in Asia, 17.1% in Africa, 9.6% in Europe, 8.5% in Latin America, 4.8% in Northern America, and 0.5% in Oceania. Among them were 2.3 billon children below the age of 18 years, with nine-tenths of them living in low- and middle-income countries. As can be seen in Lancy’s (2016) overview of anthropological studies of children in traditional and preindustrial societies and taking into account Gielen and Kim’s (2019) comparisons between the childrearing practices of four quite different societies, it becomes clear that most children used to grow up in large families struggling for survival. They were expected to work from early on for their families, were mostly illiterate, married early, and had limited or no contact with persons outside their communities. In contrast, the children of today’s post-industrial societies in East and West tend to belong to small families, spend numerous years in school (Seth, 2002), experience a long period of adolescence and a subsequent stage of emerging adulthood, are overexposed to consumerism, and marry late or perhaps not at all. Increasingly, their “glocal” identities are reflecting the simultaneous influence of local, national, and globalizing forces (Cregan & Cuthbert, 2014; Gielen & Roopnarine, 2016).