In childhood, it must be kept in mind that the people who influence children expand from caregivers to peers. Even if caregivers or facilities provide children with sufficient welfare, conflict with their peer group can have the greatest effect. So in this period there may be aspects of children's welfare that rules on care facilities alone cannot protect. But childhood, covering kindergarten through elementary school, overlaps with school laws and the Juvenile Protection Act as well as child welfare laws, so it is hard to discuss simply. For children in this period, child welfare laws should therefore be made to fill the gaps that other laws leave.

So far, this paper has reviewed the main provisions of the current child welfare law and, based on the characteristics of each stage of child development, discussed what welfare should be provided to children and what direction legislation should take.

Article 1 of the Child Welfare Act states that its purpose is to secure children's welfare so that they are born healthy and grow up happy and safe. Given today's frequent cruel and heartless incidents involving children, children's rights can be said to be seriously violated. The child welfare laws made for this aim to protect children as much as possible, but they tend to focus on preventing abuse and protecting children, and so somewhat neglect support for families. The revised act makes the child's family the main agent of child welfare and focuses on measures for child protection, creating various systems to protect children, which is good, but as a result measures for children abused in their own families are practically lacking. Another shortcoming of the act is that it is too passive. This passivity has two sides. The first, mentioned earlier, is that it focuses only on abused children. Children's welfare can be harmed by what is done to them, but also by nothing being done for them, and the act does little about the latter. The act also imposes duties on heads and staff of child welfare facilities and calls for compliance, yet lacks penalty provisions, which is another way it is passive.

To add: the National Center for the Rights of the Child was established in July 2019 to support child policy, and from October 2020 investigations of child abuse were taken over by child abuse officials employed by city, county and district governments. In January 2021, Article 915 of the Civil Code, which gave parents a right to discipline their children, was repealed, removing the legal basis for corporal punishment in the name of discipline. Child abuse can be reported by calling 112, and teachers, childcare workers and medical staff are mandatory reporters. In 2023, Korea also adopted a birth notification system under which medical institutions report births.