Positive Psychology in Practice: Promoting Human Flourishing in Work, Health, Education, and Everyday Life, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18Teaching Well-Being and Resilience in Primary and Secondary School

CHIEKO KIBE AND ILONA BONIWELL

The true measure of a nation's standing is how well it attends to its children—their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families into which they are born.

UNICEF, 2007

Contrary to societal growth, the wealth of countries in the 21st century appears to provide relatively little protection for their youth. Recent international data on children's well-being reveals a worrisome picture. The 2007 UNICEF report, which presents an overview of child well-being in developed countries, ranked the United States and the United Kingdom as the bottom two countries of a list of 21 industrialized countries (UNICEF, 2007). In the same report, children of Japan were reported to be the most deprived of educational and cultural resources out of 24 listed countries, with 30% of young people in Japan agreeing with the negative statement “I feel lonely.” This number exceeds the second-highest-scoring country by nearly 3 times (UNICEF, 2007). As members of the global society, as educators and parents, the authors have long believed in innate human potential for positive development—Chieko Kibe, as a mother of two children, who had multicultural experiences while raising her children and has now taken her passion for positive education further into a PhD in child resilience, and Ilona Boniwell, ...