The purpose of this article is a sociological analysis of child well-being in the context of modern understanding of childhood and new approaches to the analysis of children's life. The authors identified the phenomenon of childhood as an object of research, focusing on the concept of child well-being in the context of difficult life situation. In contemporary research, childhood is regarded as a social construct formed by the interaction of children with the surrounding cultural and social environment.

Childhood is concieved as an active process of creating and interpreting social reality, where children actively participate in shaping their own experiences. This is a discursive, pluralistic approach, different from the usual universalism. Modern research on childhood actualizes the question of the ethics of research involving and in relation to children.

The authors conducted desk research by analyzing data obtained from official Internet resources, scientific articles, reports revealing the results of the analysis of the phenomenon of childhood, including the database of peer-reviewed scientific literature Scopus over the past five years. The method of obtaining primary sociological data was an expert survey, which was attended by 111 specialists working with children: social workers, school and university teachers, medical professionals, psychologists, lawyers, representatives of juvenile justice, government officials, as well as employees of sociological research structures and NGOs.