It is not difficult for six-year-old Ben to name five essential things for a good child's life: parents, food, drink, friends and a name of your own so that you can be recognized and called.
For Cora, who is the same age, every child should have a lamp in addition to delicious food, a bed and a weatherproof house, after all you have to be able to get up at night and turn on the light.
Children also desperately needed an S-Bahn close by, especially those who didn't live with their family but wanted to visit their parents.
At the time of the interview, Cora herself lived with her parents and younger brother in a large city in Brandenburg.
She shared another topic with the interviewer: “I worry that sometimes there could be war, someday again.
There used to be a lot of wars about who was allowed to govern and stuff like that.”
What is the "good life"?
Ben and Cora were interviewed for the second World Vision children's study.
It was published in 2010 and, like the follow-up studies in 2013 and 2018, examined the well-being of children between the ages of six and eleven through representative surveys, supplemented by detailed interviews with individual children.
In 2010, the question of the "good life" was asked, based on the capability approach and the view embedded in it of children's chances of realization and action.
In her specific interpretation of this approach, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum developed a list of the good life, and the children's study asked whether children would list similar things themselves.
In her list, Nussbaum mentions, among other things, health and access to medical care, personal ties, attachment to animals and plants, the ability to have ideas about the good and to be able to design a future, the ability to live your own life, to laugh , play and relax.
This universalist approach by Nussbaum has sparked controversy to this day, criticized for example for the paternalistic style and the strong normative setting.
Nevertheless, it offers interesting connections for childhood research that is interested in well-being, is historically informed and proceeds empirically.
After all, the general criticism of childhood research aims at the fact that children and young people are not included in the scientific, media and political discussions about a good life and its social formation, and that their needs and interests are not taken into account.
Nussbaum's theory offers the opportunity to talk to children and young people and to arrive at a childhood-theoretical position on social cohesion on the basis of empirical data.
Determinations of the good life and above all negotiations about its components are guided by two perspectives within the framework of childhood research itself: the view of the general aspects of the child as a human being and at the same time of the specific aspects of the child as a child.