Building Resilience: Innovation in Research and Practice

It is too often that children’s mental health is not adequately supported. There is a lack of operational and actionable data and insight on the well-being of children as well as a lack of support for children to become more resilient. In this chapter, we argue that researching the well-being of children could work better with the aim of creating prompt and direct value for the children—promoting their agency and building their resilience. The chapter introduces an experiment in Estonia by Clanbeat carried out in cooperation with the national Accelerate Estonia programme. The study had two intentions: (1) to enable children to become more aware of their mental well-being and the steps they themselves could take to strengthen it, and (2) to provide input for relevant decisions by stakeholders: schools, local governments, the state, parents, and mental well-being service providers. In addition to the solution that was developed, the results of the first two pilots are introduced together with ideas for the way forward.