ABSTRACT
This chapter endeavours to support early years settings to reach a working defi nition for wellbeing in relation to the babies and children under three in their care. It merely ‘endeavours’ to do so because research suggests that it is notoriously diffi cult to defi ne the often unstable nature of the term, particularly in the United Kingdom. Wellbeing is a term that appears in many policy documents worldwide, but when we talk about children’s wellbeing, what does it actually mean? One of the lines of thinking in this chapter is to consider the notion of wellbeing in relation to babies and children under three within three considered frameworks: the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Pollard and Lee’s fi ve domains of child wellbeing and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Two case studies, one from Norway and one from New Zealand, add a wider global perspective to the debate. To this end, the fi rst chapter provides a foundation from which to move thinking forward, following wide-ranging considerations and application.
