Capital at Home and at School: A Review and Synthesis

Human, financial, and social capital from several contexts affects child and adolescent well-being. Families and schools are among the most important, and research is increasingly studying how effects of capital across such contexts affect child and adolescent academic and social outcomes. Some research suggests that families may be more powerful than schools in promoting child and adolescent well-being. Additional research is needed to more fully understand how capital across institutions interacts in producing child well-being, when and why multiple institutions or levels of analysis are relevant, and how several contexts can form chains of causation. Theories of social capital may promote increased conversation among researchers who study the same outcomes yet focus their analyses on different contexts. Key Words: crime and delinquency, inequality, neighborhood, parental investment/involvement, schools, social capital. A major function of the family is to produce and socialize children. But children grow and develop in the contexts of multiple institutions. Although the family provides the first social context relevant for infants and very young children, the wider world takes on a larger role as children mature (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1989). Bronfenbrenner and Morris (1998) made a strong argument in favor of looking at child development within this framework: Their model has won widespread support in the behavioral sciences (see Han, Waldfogel, & Brooks-Gunn, 200 1 ; Johnson, Crosnoe, & Elder, 2001 ; Seginer, 2006). In this review, we focus on how two such institutions, families and schools, combine to affect child and adolescent social and academic well-being, and the findings from those studies form the basis for our review. These ideas are important because there is widespread agreement that inequality begins early in life. The families into which children are born are a major determinant of the resources to which they first will have access; families have unequal resources, and those differences influence the extent to which parents invest in their children, as well as which investments they choose. As children mature, other contexts, such as schools, become consequential. These contexts are also unequal in their resources, again with implications for investment in students. We identify three forms of investment, each of which is relevant in each context. We believe that these investments play a major role in the unequal learning and social outcomes that children display as they move into later adolescence. These ideas are also relevant to policy. Of particular importance is rhetoric that surrounded the 2008 presidential election, with President Obama declaring that families and schools need to work together to improve youths' educational performance (Reforming and strengthening America 's schools for the 21st century, 2008). Other speeches by the president have elaborated on this theme, calling for parents to communicate to their children the importance of education (Obama, 2009). Thus, both theory and policy motivate us to review how and why social contexts matter for children, and how investments at home and at school might work together to benefit child and adolescent wellbeing. Despite the importance of these ideas, the national policy conversation tends to isolate discussions of investment at home from investment at school. Although psychologists argue that parental involvement at school helps children (Hill & Tyson, 2009), this emphasis understates the extent to which resources from families and schools could work together to better support child academic and social outcomes. Our review is organized as follows. First, we offer a theoretical approach featuring human, financial, and social capital that helps unify what otherwise might seem to be unrelated studies of child and adolescent outcomes. Second, we describe a few studies that focus on either family or school effects, and we trace the implications of those choices for the production of our knowledge. …