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24 April 2015

Assessing Child Development: A Critical Review and the Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI)

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Department of Environmental Technology, Technische Universität Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 135, 10623 Berlin, Germany
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Sustainability2015, 7(5), 4973-4996;https://doi.org/10.3390/su7054973
This article belongs to the Section Social Ecology and Sustainability
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Abstract

Children are an important stakeholder group for sustainable development, as they represent the interface between current and future generations. A comprehensive assessment of child development (CD) in the context of sustainable development is still missing. In this paper, as a first step, a literature review is conducted to identify relevant aspects and gaps related to the assessment of CD. The main issues of CD are categorized into seven themes: health, education, safety, economic status, relationships, participation, and newly proposed environmental aspects. The corresponding subthemes and criteria are classified accordingly (e.g., nutrition, child mortality, immunization, etc., are assigned to the theme health). However, gaps in current studies, such as the heterogeneous classification of relevant aspects, regional and societal bias in addressing certain aspects, the limited number of subthemes, and criteria and the missing inclusion of environmental aspects impede the assessment of sustainable child development. To address the existing gaps, a comprehensive framework, the Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI), is proposed. The SCDI is based on sustainable development as the core value, considers relevant aspects of CD with regard to newly-proposed environmental aspects and includes 26 aspects on an outcome and 37 indicators on a context level to tackle the heterogeneous classifications and interdependencies of relevant aspects. The proposed index intends to strengthen the stakeholder perspective of children in sustainability assessment.

1. Introduction

Sustainable development (SD) has become an ultimate goal for societies globally. SD was defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” by the Brundtland Commission [1]. This definition not only refers to intra- and inter-generational equity, but also to the right for every human being, whether adult or child, to be granted the opportunity to develop in freedom and in a well-balanced society by satisfying basic needs and protecting the environment [2,3,4]. Correspondingly, based on the definition stated by the United Nations, sustainability refers to use of the biosphere by present generations while maintaining its potential yield for future generations and/or non-declining trends of economic growth and development that might be impaired by natural resource depletion and environmental degradation [5]. In this context, the term environment refers to “the totality of all the external conditions affecting the life, development and survival of an organism [6]”. With regard to SD and sustainability, the definition of environment is specified, considering its carrying capacity [7,8]: “the use of renewable resources should not exceed regeneration rates and the rate of non-renewable resource use should not exceed the development of renewable substitutes…[7,8]”. The International Union for Conservation of Nature Resource et al. [9] stated that “we have not inherited the Earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children”. This statement highlights the significant relationship between inter-generational equity, children and SD.
Children (here defined as aged under 18 [10,11]) are the stakeholders inheriting and shaping the society. Child development (CD) is affected by external circumstances, and children are more vulnerable than adults [12]. For example, children are more susceptible to diseases, environmental pollution, violence and abuse. Furthermore, children’s basic rights to express opinions and to have access to education can be deprived by adults [12,13]. Disregard and violation of these basic rights and the principles of well-being can lead to irreversible and severe impacts on child development and, consequently, future societies.
There are several approaches for the assessment of sustainability. Recently, the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) method has received increasing attention. LCSA combines life cycle assessment (LCA), social LCA (SLCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) to comprehensively cover environmental, social and economic aspects [14,15]. To investigate social issues from a whole-population perspective, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) [16] proposes five stakeholder groups for SLCA: workers, consumers, local communities, value chain actors and societies. Despite the fact that children form future societies and their relevance in the context of SD, children are neglected as a relevant stakeholder group. However, any sustainability assessment method neglecting children’s interests and their influence on SD is insufficient. Consequently, the stakeholder group children should be added to LCSA or, for a simplified assessment, even replaces the current five stakeholder groups, acknowledging children’s relevance for the achievement of inter-generational equity.
As the needs of children and their susceptibility to external factors are different from those of adults, schemes and indexes for evaluating SD from a child perspective, that is sustainable child development (SCD), need to be developed independent of whole-population-oriented assessments, such as the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI was introduced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the 1990s to measure the state of a country to enable people to have long, healthy, and creative lives by combining indicators of life expectancy, educational attainment, and income into a composite index based on national average data of the whole population [17]. Although HDI has been widely adopted to measure the degree of development of a country, relevant drawbacks remain. For example, environmental and resource consumption aspects are neglected, criteria related to income and gender equity are missing and impacts on future generations are ignored [18,19,20]. The NGO, Save the Children, proposed a Child Development Index (CDI) in 2008 [21,22] by applying an integrated index to evaluate the development of children with regard to health, education and basic needs. The CDI was designed as a mirror of the HDI, and both indexes address health and education themes. However, an indicator related to nutrition was taken up in the CDI to describe the basic need of children instead of using the indicator ‘income’ as proposed by in the HDI (the indicators are shown in Table 1). Similar to the HDI, the CDI still has several drawbacks and does not allow a comprehensive assessment of environmental and resource-consumption aspects in the context of SD.
Table 1. The themes and indicators of HDI and CDI, adopted from the save the children Fund [21].
Table 1. The themes and indicators of HDI and CDI, adopted from the save the children Fund [21].
ThemeHuman Development Index (HDI)Children Development Index (CDI)
HealthLife expectancy at birthUnder five mortality rate
EducationMean years of schooling for adults aged 25 years;
expected years of schooling for children of school entering age		Percentage of primary age children not in school
Basic needsGross national income per capitaUnder-weight prevalence among children under five
A comprehensive assessment of issues that affect the well-being of children is needed to acknowledge and give consideration to children’s vulnerability and the strong connection of CD and SD [13]. In recent years, according to the Handbook of Child Well-Being [23], studies related to CD and well-being have undergone five relevant movements: shifting from assessing single aspects, like health, to including multi-dimensional topics, such as child rights and well-being, including positive aspects instead of only negative ones, considering new themes (e.g., participation), reflecting what a child feels and needs from a child’s perspective and developing a composite index [24,25]. Several NGOs proposed child well-being indexes to include additional aspects, such as relationships with family, schooling and community, emotional well-being, safety, or social engagement [26,27,28]. These themes and associated subthemes can broaden and improve the CDI. However, other relevant themes (e.g., environmental aspects, such as resource vulnerability) are not yet considered in the Handbook of Child Well-Being and other current studies [23]. There is still no widely-accepted, clearly-stated and comprehensive index system to evaluate CD in the context of SD.
The objective of this study is to review literature related to the assessment of CD and to systematically identify the different aspects addressed in existing studies, including their frequency of being mentioned. Based on these results, existing gaps are identified from a top-down SD perspective.
On this basis, the Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI) is proposed as a holistic concept covering existing priority areas of CD and addressing existing gaps by considering regional conditions and including environmental aspects. The SCDI intends to take a SD perspective in defining relevant themes, subthemes and criteria that affect CD. The SCDI framework will provide an innovative perspective to evaluate SD and highlights the fact that children and SD are mutually supporting [12]. In the following sections, current themes, subthemes and criteria related to CD, as well as existing gaps are identified and classified as a basis for the development of the SCDI.

3. The Sustainable Child Development Index

Based on the literature review and the identified themes, subthemes and criteria, a new concept is proposed: The Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI). The SCDI aims to provide a consistent and comprehensive assessment of CD from a sustainability perspective and to address existing gaps by identifying subthemes and criteria according to their relevance, distinguishing between an outcome and context level, considering regional conditions and including environmental aspects.
An integration of sustainability aspects, especially environmental aspects, is needed to acknowledge the connection between present and future generations [8]. Among various concepts of sustainability, the triple-bottom-line theory is widely adopted, especially in politics, as it considers environmental, economic and social aspects as outlined in LCSA [14]. This triple-bottom-line theory is also adopted in the SCDI framework to demonstrate the relationship of CD and sustainability thinking. The three dimensions are partially overlapping and correlate with each other. In Figure 1, the themes identified in the SCDI are assigned to the corresponding dimension of sustainability to highlight the consideration of all three dimensions of sustainability.
The SCDI is proposed as a two-level scheme, including an outcome and a context level. Both levels rely on the six earlier identified themes: health, education, safety, economic status, relationships and participation as a foundation and include the additional theme environment on the context level to live up to the requirements of sustainability. The outcome level refers to the development status of children, like child mortality and school attainment, including subthemes identified in the literature review. The context level considers aspects, such as relative family income, that can affect the outcomes of CD. This context level also includes aspects that have not been addressed in current literature (e.g., demography), but that are considered as relevant for achieving a comprehensive assessment of SCD.
Figure 1. Overview of the Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI) structure based on the triple-bottom-line theory.
Figure 1. Overview of the Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI) structure based on the triple-bottom-line theory.
As there is no generic agreement with regard to approaches and themes to be considered in CD studies, a framework is needed to broadly distinguish the subthemes and criteria in two parts: outcomes of CD and contexts that have the potential to influence the outcomes [32,41,54,61]. The contextual subthemes and criteria can affect CD, but this causal relationship is not binding. For instance, growing up in a single-parent family may, but does not necessarily have to increase the likelihood of having negative effects on CD. This implies that the contextual subthemes and criteria are associated with the outcome of CD, but should not be considered as direct measures of the outcome [54]. In this sense, on the outcome level, the subthemes showing children’s status and capability are selected based on the results of Table 3, Table 4, Table 5 and Table 6. For example, the subthemes nutrition, child mortality, injury, subjective health, oral health, mental health, chronic disease and disability are listed on the outcome level of the theme health in line with the literature review.
Furthermore, the additional theme environmental aspect is added on the context level to bridge current CD to SD and to highlight the relevance of the triple-bottom-line thinking. Based on the definitions of environment, resource accessibility is identified as relevant and needs to be considered in the development of the SCDI framework. A similar concept was also introduced in a proposal for the Sustainability Adjusted HDI (SHDI) [8]. The SHDI proposes to include, for instance, fresh water withdrawals, land use for permanent crops, biodiversity lost and greenhouse gas emissions into the evaluation of human development. For assessing SCD, freshwater vulnerability is proposed as a subtheme of the theme environmental aspects due to the close relation to everyday needs of children, the regional and local circumstances and the relevance to maintaining freshwater access for the achievement of inter-generational equity. The criterion hazardous pollutants is not considered under the theme environment aspects, as it is included under the theme health, in line with current literature.
On the context level, subthemes that have the potential to influence the outcome of CD are selected. In addition, new subthemes are proposed based on the gap analysis to strengthen the comprehensiveness of the evaluation. These subthemes include provision of vocational school, equality in education, youth unemployment, availability of media for children, fossil fuel energy consumption and demographic structure. An overview of the outcome and context level proposed in this work is provided in Figure 2. The new subthemes are written in italics in Figure 2 and are described as follows.
-
Vocational education (may include technical schools, workshop schools, development agencies, etc. [55]) is designed to prepare individuals for a vocation or a specialized occupation and is directly linked with a nation’s productivity, competitiveness and equality in education. It can increase further career development opportunities and professional status [62]. Quality of life of children and personal development, attitudes and motivation can also be affected by vocational education.
-
Equality in education is essential for all children. Gender equality in education plays a core role in protecting children’s basic right to education. If gender equality is low, this leads to a vicious circle in the further personal development of girls, human capital and gender conflicts in society.
-
The global youth unemployment rate in 2013 was 12.6%, close to a crisis critical peak [63]. Although children are defined as aged 0–18 earlier, youth (aged 15–24) unemployment can reflect the prosperity of job opportunities and can influence children’ plans for further education, career and development of skills. The economic and social costs of unemployment and widespread low quality jobs for young people continue to rise and undermine the potential of economies to grow [63].
-
Media (newspapers, periodicals, books, broadcasts, websites, television shows and news, etc.) designed for children is important for children to attain knowledge and to participate in public affairs by expressing their opinions. Furthermore, well-designed media can provide information without harmful content, such as violence and pornography.
-
Fossil fuel is a non-renewable energy source. High fossil fuel energy consumption speeds up the depletion of fossil fuel resources and damages the rights of future generation to access these resources. Each country should reduce the consumption of fossil fuel and should implement measurements to promote renewable energy.
-
Demographic structure (especially the sex ratio at birth, estimated as the number of boys born per 100 girls) can reflect the attitude towards gender equality in society. High sex ratios at birth may be attributed to sex-selective abortion, infanticide and underreporting of female births due to a strong preference for sons [64,65]. Exposure to pesticides and other environmental contaminants may be a significant contributing factor, as well.
Furthermore, a comprehensive assessment of SCD needs to enable the inclusion of additional subthemes into the assessment that might be only of regional relevance. The necessity of adapting to the circumstances in, for example, developing countries can be considered on both levels by including subthemes related to societal value and prerequisites in the SCDI, which can be adapted according to country-specific situations. These subthemes can refer to FGM, armed conflicts or critical diseases, for example HIV or malaria (see also the previous section).
By proposing a set of themes and subthemes and by differentiating the assessment into an outcome and context level, the SCDI can enable a comprehensive evaluation of SCD. Though the arrangement of the subthemes into the two different levels can be debated with regard to different approaches developed among CD-related studies and there are still potential missing issues not addressed in the index, the SCDI is a first step towards a common and consistent assessment of CD in the context of sustainable development.
To further develop the SCDI, as a next step, relevant criteria need to be identified that properly represent the identified subthemes, and the quantification of these criteria for the calculation of the numerical SCDI needs to be defined. The goal is to provide quantitative values to compare the performance of countries and to reflect their potential toward SD. The SCDI can then be used to support decision making in policy and societal development and bridge SCD to current sustainability studies.
In addition to its application on the country level, the SCDI framework intends to complement SLCA methodologies as part of LCSA. SCDI could be used to fill the current gap of SLCA and to introduce children as an additional stakeholder group in SLCA, respectively LCSA. As SLCA is struggling with lacking data, children could even replace the current stakeholder groups for a high-level assessment, and SCDI could provide the basis for an indicator framework.
Figure 2. The structure of the Sustainable Child Development Index.
Figure 2. The structure of the Sustainable Child Development Index.

4. Conclusions and Discussion

The study provides a new approach by treating children as the critical stakeholder group for SD, since they represent the link between current and future generations. In a comprehensive literature review, six relevant themes were identified, which need to be considered for assessing SD of children: health, education, safety, economic status, relationships and participation. Several relevant subthemes were identified and clustered correspondingly. Nevertheless, there are still critical gaps in current studies on CD, such as the lacking environmental aspect, biased perspectives in identifying critical issues and the correlation between themes. Based on these findings, the two-level Sustainable Children Development Index (SCDI) framework is proposed to comprehensively consider relevant themes and subthemes of sustainable child development in an outcome and a context level, but beyond current practices by including additional aspects. By including environmental aspects and enabling the integration of additional aspects with regional relevance, the SCDI enables the evaluation of the potential towards SD at a country level. The SCDI can be applied to support decision making in policy and be used to support decision making in policy and societal development.
However, several shortcomings remain. The relevant themes, subthemes and criteria considered in this paper depend on the reviewed literature. Thus, the proposed scheme will have to be revised when additional literature and information with regard to CD become available. Furthermore, the interdependencies between the different subthemes and criteria need to be discussed in more detail in future studies, as these interdependencies could influence the categorization of the criteria. Since CD aspects are often multi-faceted with complex and indirect cause-and-effect relations, interpretation is not always straightforward. This will be addressed in more detail in the future, and the SCDI will be tested in exemplary case studies. This study adopts triple-bottom-line thinking to construct the framework of SCDI; however, the definitions of sustainability are diverse and can influence the understanding of the integrated SCDI framework. This needs to be considered for interpretation and further developments of the SCDI.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge that the research presented here is partly funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) as part of the project “Methodische Nachhaltigkeitsbewertung von Maschinenkomponenten im Entwicklungsprozess” and the Collaborative Research Center CRC1026 (Sonderforschungsbereich SFB1026).

Author Contributions

Ya-Ju Chang is the leading composer of the manuscript. The research, including literature analysis and new method development, was completed and proposed by Ya-Ju Chang. Laura Schneider and Matthias Finkbeiner both provided substantial contributions to the design of the study. All authors proofread and approved the final manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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