One difficulty of international comparisons of children’s subjective well-being stems from the fact that the same concepts used in interviews with children may be understood in different ways. As a contribution to an international project on Children’s Understanding of Well-Being (Hunner-Kreisel et al., 2014), the author proposes a systemic theory of action (Stoecklin 2013, 2014, 2016) to lessen the effect of barriers linked to language, social positions, cultural codes and individual competence in expression, that impede full acknowledgement and understanding of the actor’s meaning-making and accounts of experience. The related method called “kaleidoscope of experience” (Stoecklin, 2009) has been used in Switzerland. The method and the theory highlight the dynamics of well-being as a phenomenon evolving as much because of objective factors as within the subjective appraisal of the actors. These elements are identified through “sensitizing concepts” (Blumer, 1969) like motivations, images of self, activities, relations and values. Their links highlight the recursive dynamics of well-being which can be related to the theory of structuration (Giddens, 1979, 1984).