There is major public concern about the well-being of children in the UK. Recently, this concern has been sharpened with a UNICEF 'report card' ranking the UK in the bottom-third for child well-being (United Nations Children's Fund, 2007). The Government's recent agenda reflects this concern, with the Every Child Matters: Change for Children programme of reforms placing a duty on local authorities and key partners to cooperate in order to improve the well-being of children. More information, however, concerning the factors mediating the development of wider well-being in young people is needed. This project proposes to provide an initial investigation into the development of wider well-being in young people through the childhood life course from infancy, through middle childhood to early adolescence. The maturation of the ALSPAC dataset, making available longitudinal detail of psychological and behavioural trajectories of children from birth to 14, offers the opportunity to study a broader spectrum of childhood life course well-being while taking into account socio-economic background, aspects of parenting and the home environment, and the school through a number of developmental dimensions. This work will first attempt to develop indices of well being based primarily on the Development and Well-being Assessment (DAWBA) from 8 and 14 years combining these with other measures collected from parent report, child report and clinical assessments. The indices will consist of separate dimensions of well being: emotional, social, behaviour, and school. For example, for the emotional component, scores will be used for DAWBA Particular Fears, Separation Anxiety 8 to 14, the parent report of Mood and Feelings questionnaire from 8 to 14, as well as items of Strength and Difficulties over the same period. The component for social competences is expected to include DAWBA Social Fears 8 to 14, Skuse Social Cognition 7, 11 and 14, Peer Relations 8 to 14, Bullying and Victimisation age 8 and 11. Measures for earlier childhood will be mapped onto these component areas. The second step in this study will involve modelling predictors of these component scores. This is intended to simultaneously control and test for the relative contribution of factors established in the literature that determine well-being from childhood to early adolescence. We will first examine how children's earlier components of well-being predict their later well-being. This stems from our earlier research (Gutman and Brown, 2008) indicating that children's social competence at age 4 predicted their later involvement in bullying and/or victimisation. We wish to expand this previous research by examining the processes that may mediate the relationship between earlier and later well-being, particularly in the social realm. Previous research suggests that children who have more social difficulties also have lower emotional well-being, which, in turn may contribute to greater problems with their peers and in school (Gutman and Brown, 2008; Gutman and Feinstein, 2008). We expect, therefore, that emotional well-being may mediate the relationship between social competence in early childhood and later social competence in primary school. We are also interested in the role of parenting behaviours in this process. Waylen (2008) found that health changes in ALSPAC affected parents' feelings and attitudes regarding their children and child rearing at 61 months, but socio-economic status was not an influence. Our recent work (Gutman and Brown, in progress) shows that parents' feelings and attitudes used by Waylen (2008) were one of the leading predictors of quality of parent-child interaction at 61 months (Thorpe) in addition to breast feeding and parental social competence. We are interested in testing a model wherein parental health predicts parents' feelings and attitudes, which, in turn, influences parenting and lastly predicts later child well-being, controlling for earlier well-being. We are also interested in examining whether specific developmental periods are more important in determining well-being than others. We expect, for example, that well-being is particularly vulnerable during the transition from primary to secondary school. Protective factors, such as teacher and friend support, may buffer the impact of such transition. We expect, therefore, that those pupils who have better relationships with their peers and teachers may experience fewer negative changes in their well-being during such transitions than other pupils. Lastly, we are interested in how such pathways may be moderated by gender and socioeconomic status. Our research has found that low socioeconomic boys are more likely to experience a trajectory of low and declining well-being compared to other primary school children (Gutman and Feinstein, 2008). Boys are also more likely to engage in bullying behaviours (Gutman and Brown, 2008). Therefore, we might expect that earlier factors such as child social competence are more important for boys than for girls in determining later well-being. This proposal mirrors elements of the ESRC large grant on adolescent development especially the components led by Anna Vignoles and Paul Greg on peer effects and socio-economic impacts. This study complements the larger studies by offering an initial examination of the predictors influencing the developmental trajectory from childhood to early adolescence. This study will be carried out in 6 months and therefore only offer baseline findings to will inform the larger scale investigations. Owing to the different time constraints and different client readership, the methodologies of this proposed study are very different from the exhaustive approach possible in the ESRC study. This proposal therefore aims to control for the primary background factors using regression analyses rather than refine large models using advanced statistical techniques. Our study offers a further benefit from a more constrained study to identify the main effects with publication in a shorter time frame, by spring 2009. Additionally, the DCSF have expressed great interest in less methodological-based description of the main findings of well being trajectories from childhood to adolescence in a format appropriate for a non-specialist policy-based readership and feel that it would make a significant contribution to the development of debate on how the state my intervene most effectively to improve life chances.