Understanding the Subjective Well-Being of 10-and-11-year Old Foster Children in Wales: Relationships and Their Interconnectedness with Places, Possessions and Activities

More than one per cent of Welsh children are in public care, the majority of whom are aged 5–15 years and living in foster care. Well-being is at the heart of the Social Services and Well-Being (Wales) Act 2014. Under the Act, services are mandated to support the well-being of those they work with, including children who are in out-of-home care. The views of the children on what matters to their well-being are understood to be central to decisions about their care. International advances in researching child well-being has led to an understanding of the central importance of children’s subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is how the person evaluates their life and is based on whatever criteria they use to categorise what is most important in their own lives. When well-being is defined by children, the issues identified can often be very different to those that services, professionals or carers focus upon. Understanding children’s subjective well-being necessitates an exploration of what children feel is important to them in their daily lives. Quantitative and qualitative studies on children’s subjective well-being have increased substantially over the past decade. Most have concentrated on children in the general population, with few studies having focused specifically on children in special circumstances. There has been a gap in Wales in exploring the subjective well-being of children in out-of-home care through a qualitative approach. Such an approach would engage the children in direct face-to-face interviews to more fully explore the children’s own conceptualisation of well-being. This paper describes a qualitative study in Wales, using creative methods to engage younger children. An international Children’s Understandings of Well-Being Protocol, predominantly used with children in the general population, was adapted for use with children living in foster care. Twenty-six children from four Local Authorities in Wales volunteered to take part. They were aged 10–11 years and living in stable foster care and participated in multiple research sessions. The children were asked to map the people, places, possessions and activities which they viewed as important to their well-being. This paper concentrates on the children’s responses and their rationalisations. Relationships were found to be central to the children’s conceptualisation of well-being which aligns with earlier research with schoolchildren of similar age. However, these children were negotiating a much more complex set of family and wider relationships. From the children’s accounts, places, possessions and activities all contribute to the building and maintenance of relationships which are of importance to their well-being. Relational practices and the mechanisms to support and enhance them have been elucidated by the detailed children’s responses. The findings are considered from the point of view of contemporary sociological understandings of the family and childhood. They are also placed in the context of relevant UK and international literature.