Child and Adolescent Well-being: Global Trends, Challenges and Opportunities

Jose Marquez, Laura Taylor, Leoni Boyle, Wanying Zhou and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve

This chapter is the first across the 10+ years of the World Happiness Report that explores child and adolescent well-being in some detail. In this chapter, we examine data from four well-established international datasets with respondents aged 10-24. We present the global state of child and adolescent well-being, with a focus on levels, trends, inequalities, and correlates. An important aspect of this chapter is a discussion of the shortcomings of the available international data and what action should be taken to improve data quantity and quality, and thereby improve our understanding of child and adolescent well-being and how to improve it worldwide.

The World Happiness Report is a partnership of Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the WHR’s Editorial Board. The report is produced under the editorial control of the WHR Editorial Board.

From 2024, the World Happiness Report is a publication of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, UK.