Research on indicators related to the state of child well-being is a growing field that has experienced several changes over time. The growing supply of data on children, as well as the need to facilitate conclusions and to track trends, has led researchers to develop a number of child well-being indexes. This paper critically reviews the most recent and relevant child well-being indexes, i.e., the Index of Child and Youth Well-Being in the United States, the Child Well-being Index for the European Union, the Microdata Child Well-being Index, and the Deprivation Index. The study focuses primarily on the contributions and innovations the indexes have brought to the field, making a critical assessment of the methods used in the construction of the indexes and identifying their main limitations.

Subjective well-being (SWB) -here understood as a person's cognitive and affective evaluations of his/her life as whole and with regard to particular aspects of his/her life (Rees et al. 2010) -is an important concept. Its relevance arises for a number of reasons, including its important role in understanding variations in the well-being of populations and in identifying what aspects and factors are most salient in people's lives. As such, SWB has received growing attention, both from academia and the political world.Most SWB studies have, however, focused on adults' SWB, whereas interest in children's SWB is quite recent (Casas 2011; Ben-Arieh 2012). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child's acknowledgment of the importance of taking into account children's views in matters that affect their lives heavily contributed to this recent trend.Current studies on the SWB of children have produced evidence on how children's life satisfaction seems to be important to their positive development, but also in identifying possible risks and vulnerabilities (Rees et al. 2010). Moreover, children's SWB can act as an important buffer against negative outcomes. On the other hand, studies focusing on what may affect children's SWB have suggested that children's happiness may be influenced by factors such as housing, safety, bullying, school achievements or social interactions (Bradshaw et al. 2013). However, much is still to be learned about these relationships and deeper research is necessary in order to grasp a Child Ind Res (2015) 8:1-4

It has been a decade since a landmark piece of work on child well-being measurement based on a summary index was developed in the United States, the Index of Child and Youth Well-Being. Several research studies, both in the U.S. and Europe, followed on from this work. Despite these studies' valuable contribution, scope exists for further improvements at the methodological level. In the present paper we draw the methodological basis for a new, micro-based summary child well-being index in which children's views on their own well-being assume a central role and distinct weights (based on the children's perceptions) to each component that is included in the index are used. Based on 914 pairs of responses of Portuguese children and their carers, the newly proposed index was tested vis-à-vis other methodologies. The econometric estimations show that the significance of all potential well-being determinants (e.g., age, school cycle, mother's and father's level of education) remains the same across the distinct methods of calculation of child well-being indexes. However, the consideration of subjective components (degrees of importance and weights) allowed to evidence that the most relevant determinants of child well-being are the set of variables related to the child's parents, namely education and professional status. In particular, when compared to their counterparts, children whose fathers have higher education degrees reveal an increased overall well-being by around 25 %, whereas children whose fathers are unemployed present a decreased well-being by around 11 %.

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