Over several decades, a policy framework focusing on child well-being improvement has emerged as one of the development goals (Bain et al., 2018;Coll-Seck et al., 2019;Hug et al., 2019). Yet, the lack of shared agreement on the child well-being concept and how best to measure it has limited its ability to achieve the expected outcomes (Biggeri & Cuesta, 2021;Street, 2021). Understanding the dynamics of child well-being, however, is crucial to the provision of better social facilities and improving the basic needs of children for effective transition from childhood to adulthood.Scholarly knowledge concerning child well-being was built on Western and developed countries' experience (Bradshaw et al., 2007(Bradshaw et al., , 2013D'Agostino et al., 2019;Idoiaga Mondragon et al., 2021), which has been found to be of little relevance in explaining child well-being in the Southeast Asia context (Cho, 2015). The insufficiency of research pertaining to children has resulted in difficulties to specifically capture the complexity of child welfare and its provisions in the Southeast Asia region. Most countries in this region share salient, distinct features in their approach to well-being. High economic growth has been prioritized, but child well-being was strongly related to "familistic" institutional arrangements or another informal mechanism (Abrahamson, 2017;Tonelli et al., 2021;.In Southeast Asia, compared to advanced welfare state countries, child well-being has been put on the public policy agenda in recent years through the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1995 (United Nations Children's Fund [UNICEF], 2019).After ratifying the convention, Southeast Asian countries have immediately made a number of important commitments to ensure holistic