Family Capital: Implications for Interventions with Families

Social capital has been extensively discussed in the literature as building blocks that individuals and communities utilize to leverage system resources. Similarly, some families also create capital, which can enable members of the family, such as children, to successfully negotiate the outside world. Families in poverty confront serious challenges in developing positive family capital, because of lack of resources. For those families that are successful in developing positive family capital, family capital can help to create positive outcomes for family interactions. Thus, family capital can provide information about opportunities, exert influence on agents who make decisions involving the actor, provide social credentials that indicate a connection to a social network, and reinforce the actor's identity and recognition, which maintains access and entitlement to these social resources.