All Children Deserve to be Happy

Think about the lifetime and prepare a list of the periods of human development. It would be probably childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. We were all once children, and there are still things about our childhood in us. It is indisputable that childhood is one of the most crucial periods of human development. Cabieses et. Al (2016, p. 245) defined the childhood as the period of human life that goes from birth to the age of thirteen while early childhood is defined as the period before entrance into formal schooling in most countries. The emotional, mental, cognitive, social and physical development of children period has a direct influence on forming their entire life. Thus, it’s important to understand how well they are in this period, because it will definitely affect their future well-being. And, here the term well-being is arisen. According to The Children’s Society, well-being means to the quality of people’s lives which is basicly about how fine we are, and how our lives are going. In this case health, poverty, education, relationships can be measure of childs well-being. Uyan Semerci and Erdo?an (2017, p. 4) stated that the child well-being approach is multidimensional and holistic which foregrounds the quality of life and happiness of the child and aims at enhancement the capabilities of the them.

All children deserve to be happy with their lives that is why measuring the children's well-being is important. UNICEF recognised that half of the world’s children are below the international poverty line of $2 a day and suffer from multiple deficiency and violations to fundamental human rights. Hungriness, lack of food and deficiency of safe drinking water make consistently contribution to at least half of child mortality. More than eight million children die each year (approximate 22,000 per day), and most of deaths can be prevented (2012, p. 1). However, some children may be more privileged than others. It is obvious that they cannot make a decision about coming from a poor family or a different ethnic background. Woodhead et. al stated that the most prominant inequalities among children participated the Young Lives study relate to household prosperity, urban-rural location, belonging to an ethnic or language minority or low-caste group, and education level of their parents (2013, p. 10).

Understanding the factors that may impact on childeren’s well-being is important. The term well-being represents how their lives is going , how much they are healthy, how they feed properly, how much qualified their education is. They all are related to how they acces the public and private goods and services. It is obvious that accessing the public needs may not be a direct measurement for the children's well-being in early childhood period. However, it is closely linked the geographical region that children live in.

In the light of this brief explanation, this paper has focused on how spatial inequality affects childeren’s well-being. The first section of this paper describes the theoritical concept of spatial justice in order to present a background knowledge on the topic. The second section discusses the various explanations that have been proposed to explain the situation of children in urban and rural areas. This is followed by a case study in China in order to explore the relationship between spatial inequality and children’s well-being. 

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