Personal and Socio-Emotional Well-Being of Secondary School Students

An Analysis

Abstract

Social Wellbeing is a state of affairs were the basic needs of the populace are met. It is a state of being healthy, happy or prosperous; welfare. The term ‘Social’ means relating to society. Someone’s ‘well-being’ is their health and happiness. Measures of human wellbeing are increasingly used to compare and monitor performance within and across countries. Social stress eventually weakens societies’ care-taking mechanisms, producing socioemotionally impoverished community structures that deprive children and adults of the socio-emotional resources necessary for coping with the requirements of an unpredictable future. Thinkers such as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (1999) have made it clear that the current levels of deprivation, destitution and oppression in the world can only be overcome if humanity succeeds in creating social, political and economic arrangements that enhance “individual agency” and “freedom”. A child’s capacity to reach out, to connect with others and to explore the world is the product of an “emotional resourcefulness” nurtured across cultures through particular social support systems or networks that are sensitive and responsive to a child’s emotional needs, and which make a child feel that it is being loved and cared for. The quality of socio-emotional upbringing determines a person’s capacity to become an effective caretaker in return, whereas abuse or neglect create experiences of disconnectedness, frustration of fundamental emotional needs, and eventually leads to emotional numbness, and possibly aggression, violence and domination. Children who grow up in socio-emotionally impoverished contexts will find it difficult to develop those care-taking capacities that will enhance their children’s chances for becoming caring, non-violent, optimally functioning citizens (Staub, 2001). Socio-economic development discourse has neglected the interaction between the psychological and social aspects of human behaviour. The question whether development interventions inhibit or strengthen “socio-emotional efficacy” does not appear to be a priority in international development circles. The depletion of emotional resources necessary for creating lasting social support structures appears to become the challenge of the 21st century.