Excerpts from the report: This Report Card provides a comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and young people in 21 nations of the industrialized world. Its purpose is to encourage monitoring, to permit comparison, and to stimulate the discussion and development of policies to improve children's lives. The report represents a significant advance on previous titles in this series which have used income poverty as a proxy measure for overall child well-being in the OECD countries. Specifically, it attempts to measure and compare child well-being under six different headings or dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people's own subjective sense of well-being. In all, it draws upon 40 separate indicators relevant to children's lives and children's rights. Although heavily dependent on the available data, this assessment is also guided by a concept of child well-being that is in turn guided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The implied definition of child well-being that permeates the report is one that will also correspond to the views and the experience of a wide public. Each chapter of the report begins by setting out as transparently as possible the methods by which these dimensions have been assessed.