Despite increased efforts within child wellbeing research to include children’s perspectives in our knowledge of child wellbeing, young children’s voices continue to be largely excluded. As the transition to school is widely understood as a key time to assess child wellbeing, preschool aged children are a frequent target of child wellbeing indicator use, making their exclusion from child wellbeing knowledge problematic. This study sought to redress preschool aged children’s exclusion from child wellbeing indicator research through investigating their perspectives of wellbeing. Using a citizen-child approach to participatory research, three-to-five-year-old children attending eight diverse early childhood education and care services in Australia shared their experiences and understandings of wellbeing. Children’s accounts were compared to adult derived child wellbeing frameworks to determine the way children’s accounts accorded and differed from current conceptualisations. The findings evidenced that young children’s accounts further validated current adult derived child wellbeing indicators. Additionally, children’s accounts uncovered two novel indicators yet to be explored in relation to child wellbeing social indicator frameworks: opportunities for play, and young children’s agency. The role of agency and play in children’s conceptualisations of wellbeing are considered in light of contemporary empirical research and will be of keen interest to those education and public health professionals and policy-makers concerned with improving child wellbeing outcomes.

尽管在儿童福祉研究方面做出了更大的努力，以将儿童的观点纳入我们对儿童福祉的认识中，但在很大程度上仍然排除了幼儿的声音。由于人们普遍认为过渡到学校是评估儿童福祉的关键时间，因此学龄前儿童经常成为使用儿童福祉指标的对象，这使他们无法从儿童福祉知识中受益。这项研究旨在通过调查儿童的幸福感来纠正学龄前儿童被排除在儿童幸福感指标研究之外。通过采用公民-儿童方法进行参与式研究，在澳大利亚参加八项不同的早期儿童教育和护理服务的三至五岁儿童分享了他们对福祉的经验和理解。将儿童账户与成人衍生的儿童福祉框架进行比较，以确定儿童账户与现有概念的对应方式以及与之不同的方式。调查结果证明，幼儿的账目进一步验证了当前成人衍生的儿童健康指标。此外，儿童账户还发现了与儿童福祉社会指标框架相关的两个尚待探索的新指标：娱乐机会和幼儿代理。考虑到当代的实证研究，考虑了代理和游戏在儿童幸福感概念中的作用，这对那些关心改善儿童幸福感的教育和公共卫生专业人员以及政策制定者将引起极大的兴趣。