Children’s Well-Being: Social Relationships Mediate the Effects of Income

• In Event: Translating Research Into Policies, Educational Reform, and Community Change for Children’s Well-Being

Abstract

Objectives
Children’s well-being is related to socio-economic status and social and contextual factors, such as relationships, health habits, and school experiences (Theokas, Almerigi, Lerner, Dowling, Benson, & Scales, 2005). This aim of this study is to examine these factors simultaneously, and to discuss their relative importance on children’s well-being.

Theoretical framework
Our study draws from the bio-ecological theory of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 2005). The theory proposes that (i) children’s well-being is fostered by consistent, supportive social relationships and positive daily experiences in family, school, and community contexts, and that (ii) research needs to examine mediating and moderating effects of these multiple factors to understand their relative developmental significance. In our study, we simultaneously examined the association of children’s (i) connectedness with adults in the family, school, and community context; (ii) connectedness with peers; (iii) health habits; (iv) school experiences; and (v) socio-economic background with their well-being.
Our hypotheses were that (i) all examined factors are significantly correlated with children’s well-being; (ii) connectedness with adults and peers have the strongest associations; (iii) socio-economic status is significantly correlated with the other predictor variables; and (iv) the significant relationship between socio-economic status and well-being is mediated by children’s connectedness with adults and peers.

Methods
Data on children’s well-being, connectedness, health habits, and school experiences were obtained from a population-level administration of a self-report questionnaire, the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI; Schonert-Reichl et al., 2010), with over 3,000 Grade 4 students (age 10), and the self-report data were linked to socio-economic data from the Canadian census. In Model 1, we examined the relationship between children’s well-being and their socio-economic background. In Model 2, we added five variables on children’s connectedness with adults and peers as predictors. Model 3 added four variables on nutrition and sleep, Model 4 added school belonging, school support, and victimization, and Model 5 added 12 dummy variables for children’s first language to control for differences in ethno-cultural background. Data were analyzed with multi-level regression to take into account the nested structure of the data (i.e., children within classrooms).

Results
Table 1 presents the results from the multilevel analyses. All hypotheses were confirmed: (i) The predictor variables were significantly correlated with children’s well-being; (ii) Connectedness with adults at home had the highest association with well-being in the multivariate analyses; (iii) Socio-economic status was significantly correlated with children’s well-being, but the association became insignificant once the social relationship variables were added to the model. The findings are congruent with the hypothesis that social relationships and associated processes mediate the relationship between children’s socio-economic background and their well-being.

Authors

• Martin Guhn, The University of British Columbia

• Anne Gadermann, Harvard University

• Kim A. Schonert-Reichl, The University of British Columbia

• Shelley C. Hymel, The University of British Columbia

• Clyde Hertzman, The University of British Columbia