“They are there for you”: The Importance of Neighbourhood Friends to Children’s Well-Being

An understanding of children’s own perspectives on their relationships and experience is essential in developing a comprehensive ‘whole child’ perspective on well-being in all its domains. Eliciting authentic accounts of children’s experience requires an approach which positions children as key informants, central to the research enterprise. This article reports some of the findings of a neighbourhood based study which sought to explore aspects of children’s daily lives, particularly those autonomous spaces of childhood away from the gaze and direction of adults, within which children enact and transact their daily lives. The study findings reveal the children to be significant users of their neighbourhood with detailed local knowledge and expertise and a unique perspective on the opportunities and risks they encounter. Their social relationships, especially their friends and friendships, were found to be critical to their sense of satisfaction, in tandem with the opportunity the neighbourhood terrain afforded for physically active movement and play. Friends and friendship are experienced by children as essential to their well-being and play is the means by which they actualise this key relationship. Consistently the children named ‘space’ and ‘friends’ as the things that they most liked about their neighbourhood.