News
The “Childhood, Well-being and Parenthood” Chair has produced a special issue in the Revue des Politiques Sociales et Familiales (RPSF) devoted to the well-being of children. You can now consult the articles of this bilingual issue here.
Chair team
Claude Martin holds the “childhood, well-being and parenting” Chair. He is a sociologist, CNRS research director, affiliate professor at the EHESP School of Public Health and member of the UMR 6051 ARENES-Crape.
The team is composed of Zoé Perron and Julia Buzaud, research engineers, and Kevin Diter post-doc fellow.
Objectives
- Write and provide summaries (working papers) of international literature to understand what is involved in promoting the well-being of children and youth.
- Exploit data from major international surveys to formulate new hypotheses and offer a new analysis.
- Coordinate an international network through seminars and an international symposium on well-being, its promotion and evaluation, the respective roles of parents and public policies in the socialisation of children.
Research themes
Relationships between public policies and promotion of child well-being
Public policies for the family and childhood have undergone new developments in recent decades. The topics of subjective well-being or happiness but also parental responsibility have become increasingly important. Among these new programmes, a new sector of intervention known as “parenting support” has emerged in France, as in many other countries. These programmes directed at parents and future parents raise several questions.
These include:
- What changes do these policies bring about with regard to childhood and parents?
- What can we learn from international comparisons in this field?
- On what knowledge are these interventions, measures and programmes to support the well-being of children based on?
- Should we focus on a specific period of childhood?
The “childhood, well-being and parenting” Chair intends to synthesise the relationships between public policies and the promotion of children’s well-being.
Socialisation and well-being of children
Understanding the socialisation contexts of French youth from childhood to adulthood is one of the central areas of the “childhood, well-being and parenting” Chair. It involves drawing up a current state of knowledge on the role of those involved in that socialisation and questioning their contribution to creating (or not) conditions for well-being or restoring it.
In this sense, the “childhood, well-being and parenting” Chair intends to question, deepen and synthesise the scientific (neuroscience, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, social sciences) and professional knowledge (mother-child protection, juvenile justice, child care). These types of centres of knowledge and normative production should be decompartmentalised in order to synthesise them and draw up a current state of knowledge in order to make them accessible to public decision-makers and childhood professionals.
Seminars
The team of the Chair “Childhood, well-being and parenting” organises seminars , once or twice a year, with international specialists on topics related to its research themes.
- Seminar 1: “Understanding and comparing well-being: determinants and indicators” (29th November 2017)
- Seminar 2: “Children’s subjective well-being” (28-29th June 2018)
- Seminar 3: “Parenting cultures, parenting determism and child well-being” (29-30 November 2018)
- Seminar 4:”Child well-being, school and parental mediation” (26-27th June 2019)
Partners
The Chair “Childhood, well-being and parenting” is based on a partnership between the EHESP and the CNAF (National Fund for Family Allowances).