Child Well-Being, by editors Colette McAuley and Wendy Rose, provides a timely and well-informed text that offers essential reading about a notion - well-being - that, while in common currency, has been exposed to relatively little critical treatment of its value for driving policy, practice and research in children's services... The book casts much needed light on a central element of welfare discourse - well-being - and charts the likely direction of future debates in this field. Essential reading.