How healthy behaviour supports children’s wellbeing

This briefing aims to provide a useful resource for a range of agencies, including local authority public health teams, children’s commissioners and providers of children’s services, schools, children’s centres, youth workers and parents/carers.

The content of this briefing draws on:

• an analysis of how the UK compares internationally on key indicators of health behaviour and wellbeing among children
• key themes from a secondary analysis of existing datasets6 focused specifically on children aged seven (using data from the Millennium Cohort Study7) and young people aged ten to 15 (using data from Understanding Society8) to explore associations and predictors of wellbeing
• a complementary academic literature search that examined associations between the behaviours of healthy eating (including eating breakfast), physical activity and reducing screen time, and the following outcomes: concentration, social relationships, truancy and wellbeing among children under the age of 11.

The focus of the academic literature search was children under the age of 11 in order to identify key messages to inform one of Public Health England’s major social marketing campaigns, Change4Life, which targets families of children aged five to 11 years.