Children’s Perspectives on Happiness and Subjective Well-being in Preschool

The study investigates what creates well-being in kindergarten seen from the perspective of children. Based on the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Danish Day Care Act, both of which state that children’s perspectives must be emphasised in the evaluation and development of child environments, the researcher has asked kindergarten children the question: What makes you happy in kindergarten?

The children took a total of 200 pictures, and kindergarten staff were the subject in only two of them. The results show that the children associate well-being in the kindergarten with friendship, free play, experiences of nature and being challenged by and experiencing things out of the ordinary. Experiencing satisfaction produced by the need to experiment made the children happy. Well-being and joy occurred when the children could explore and develop a kindergarten life that was hidden from the adults, but at the same time did not come at the expense of the relationship with the kindergarten staff and the ability to follow the code of conduct. Therefore, the children’s happiness depended on a positive relationship with the staff: The children’s well-being depended on the adults in the kindergarten, but also on the opportunity to do more than the adults expected, or saw.

The ethnographic investigation took place in a Danish kindergarten over a period of two months. 16 children between the ages of four and five were put together in pairs and asked to photograph everything in kindergarten that made them happy. The conversations the children had with each other while photographing were audio recorded. Afterwards, the pictures the children took were displayed on a laptop computer while the children were encouraged to say something about each picture. These conversations were also audio recorded.

Koch, A. B. (2018). “Children’s Perspectives on Happiness and Subjective Well-being in Preschool”. Children & Society, 32(1):73–83.