Resilience to Poverty in Chinese Children’s Subjective Well-being: The Role of Family Social and Cultural Capitals

In the resilience research, family social capital is generally recognized as an important means to combat poverty, while the roles of the family cultural capital on reducing the negative impacts of poverty on children’s subjective well-being have been rarely examined. This research attempts to explore whether the two-dimensional family capitals (from the Bourdieu’s capital theory framework) can serve as resilience factors to help reducing the negative impacts of poverty (a lack of economic capital) on children’s subjective well-being in the Chinese context. We employed stepwise regression models to analyze the data from the 2018-wave of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) - a nationally representative survey, to examine the relations among poverty, family social/cultural capitals, and children’s subjective well-being. The sample included 3245 children aged from 9 to 18 years old (M = 13.5; SD = 2.47; boys 52.9%; girls 47.1%) from 25 provinces. Findings reveal that only family social capital served as resilience factors to reduce the negative impacts of poverty on Chinese children’s subjective well-being. Further heterogeneity analysis indicates the negative impact of poverty on the well-being of female/ rural / aged 9–12 children is more severe than that of male/ urban/ aged 13–18 children, though family social capital can almost offset the negative effects of lack of economic capital on subjective well-being of these children. Our findings have the potential to contribute to the social ecology framing of resilience. This study provides theoretical and practical implications for social policies and social work intervention toward Chinese poor children.