How Families Shape the Formation of Social Capital

With a growing focus on revitalizing local communities and strengthening welfare, social capital (SC) has attracted increasing attention. Receiving warm, supportive parenting at home may well be the root of an individual’s social capital.

• What Is Social Capital?
• Why Bonding Capital Matters
• Acquiring Social Skills
• Effects of the Parent–Child Relationship
• Links to Identity Development
• Self- and Other-Acceptance and the Family

What Is Social Capital?

Amid weakening family functions and eroding place-based ties, recognition is growing that social capital (SC) is vital for energizing communities and enhancing local welfare. Traditional SC research has often highlighted bridging SC—ties among people from different social backgrounds. Yet bonding SC—close ties among people with similar backgrounds who live near one another, such as family and neighborhood communities—is indispensable for mutual help. Research on the development of relational abilities suggests that high-quality caregiving at home lays the foundation for building and accumulating bonding SC.

Let us briefly define SC. Definitions vary, but typically include trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks (稲葉, 2021). A commonly used classification distinguishes bonding and bridging SC. Bonding refers to close, frequent ties or groups that share some social background (e.g., family, neighborhood communities). Bridging refers to relations or groups that connect diverse backgrounds (e.g., many NPOs).

Each type has distinct features. Bonding ties—often geographically close (family, neighborhood)—excel at providing instrumental support (lending/borrowing, everyday help) and psychological support (advice, emotional aid). Such support reduces stress and raises life satisfaction, and dense ties make it easier to share norms and sustain reciprocity (小藪, 2021). Bridging ties connect people with different attributes, creating access to new knowledge and information, facilitating diffusion across wider circles, and contributing to broader identity formation that spans multiple groups (稲葉, 2021).

Source: Compiled by the author based on Koyabu (小藪, 2021) and Inaba (稲葉, 2021).

Why Bonding Capital Matters

Much SC research has emphasized the problems of bonding SC—namely, the narrowness of relationships (小藪, 2021). When bonding is too strong, groups may lapse into in-group favoritism, exclusion of outsiders, or sectionalism. Internally, overemphasis on norm compliance can create conformist pressure that restricts individual freedom.

Given such concerns, bridging SC has drawn high expectations: by expanding ties (even if not intimate) beyond one’s daily sphere, bridging may help prevent social divisions.

However, simply expanding bridging while neglecting bonding also causes problems. Bridging ties are typically “weak ties”—less intimate, face-to-face, or frequent (小藪, 2021). They are less suited to day-to-day instrumental and emotional support. Because weak ties bring little pressure to build and maintain relationships, people may associate only with the like-minded while avoiding those who think differently or require steady neighborhood engagement, leading to thinning social ties overall. A society rich in SC requires both robust bonding and bridging.

Acquiring Social Skills

How, then, can we promote bonding SC? One avenue is to raise the quality of childrearing in families. As noted, bonding relations can be viewed as networks that exchange instrumental and psychological support—collectively, social support. The breadth of one’s support network is known to be a developmental outcome that accumulates from early psychosocial development (スルーフほか, 2022). In other words, high-quality parenting fosters healthy psychosocial development and, in turn, supports the formation of mutual-support networks. Inaba (稲葉, 2011) likewise argues that early family experiences enhance an individual’s capacity to form networks.

Source: Extracted from Table 4 in Sakiya et al. (崎谷ほか, 2016).

More concretely, social skills acquired through parenting affect adaptation to groups beyond the family. Social skills are “the cyclical process by which, in interpersonal situations, a person decodes others’ reactions, selects interpersonal goals and responses accordingly, regulates emotions, and carries out those responses” (相川, 2009). Put simply, they are the ways we speak and behave to build and smoothly maintain relationships—abilities tied to problem solving, relationship formation, and maintenance (see the table in the original). Meifu (命婦, 2020) finds that preschoolers who participate in family interactions of three or more persons proactively acquire social skills. Conversely, lacking such skills in early childhood makes it hard to form positive peer relations and can harm later peer relations and school adjustment (命婦, 2020). Social skills thus influence the formation of bonding networks like peer groups.

Effects of the Parent–Child Relationship

Studies also show that parenting style and caregiving experiences shape children’s social skills. Otaka et al. (大鷹ほか, 2009) surveyed junior-high and university students to examine links between parenting attitudes and social skills.

They found that when parents were strict/rejecting, students’ social-skill scores were lower at both ages (大鷹ほか, 2009). “Rejecting/strict” refers to emotionally charged, parent-centered control—harsh scolding for noncompliance, unilateral decisions without consultation, or dismissing the child as “too busy” to engage. Such parenting negatively affects the child’s internal working model of relationships (e.g., “Will others help me? Am I worthy of help?”), which in turn lowers social-skill scores.

Sakiya (崎谷ほか, 2016) similarly analyzed elementary students and found that children’s social skills were positively associated with supportive maternal parenting—respecting feelings, encouraging after failure, trying to understand the child’s thoughts. In contrast, directive involvement (giving orders, insisting the child “do it alone”) was distinguished from support. Notably, even when directive scores were high for either parent, high supportive scores still predicted higher social skills (崎谷ほか, 2016).

These findings suggest that parenting at home influences children’s social skills, and that warm, supportive attitudes foster them.

Links to Identity Development

Supportive parenting likely promotes social-skill acquisition by nurturing self-acceptance and acceptance of others—core elements of identity formation, which itself is closely tied to relational development. Sugimura (杉村, 1998) argues that identity is formed by recognizing/expressing others’ expectations, needs, and interests, and mutually adjusting self–other discrepancies as they arise.

Self-acceptance is the stance of accepting oneself as one is—objectively, without moral judgment (春日, 2015). Such individuals are less self-doubting and less preoccupied with social comparison. Acceptance of others is the stance of accepting those who think differently (上村, 2007)—listening even when criticized by intimates, and considering others’ feelings when pursuing one’s own important goals.

Ideally, both self-acceptance and other-acceptance develop sufficiently. Uemura (上村, 2007) shows that people high in both display mature tendencies in self-realization and social adaptation. By contrast, high self- and low other-acceptance correlates with proactive self-realization but poorer coexistence; low self- and high other-acceptance correlates with passive self-realization and one-sided dependence or overadaptation.

As both forms of acceptance develop during identity formation, individuals gain the capacity to be autonomous yet relationally adept—abilities that surface as social skills.

Self- and Other-Acceptance and the Family

Family dynamics also relate to levels of self- and other-acceptance. Fujikawa and Omoto (藤川・大本, 2015) surveyed high-school students on conversation frequency with parents, perceived parental empathy, and perceived parental understanding, and examined links with self- and other-acceptance. More frequent conversations, feeling that parents empathize with one’s disappointment, and feeling understood were all positively associated with both self- and other-acceptance.

Patterns differed by student gender and mother/father. Conversation with fathers related to both self- and other-acceptance for boys and girls; conversation with mothers related to other-acceptance for both. Those who reported “occasionally talk” scored as low as or lower than those who “rarely/never talk,” suggesting conversation must be sufficiently frequent.

Regarding empathy, perceiving fatherly empathy was linked to higher self- and other-acceptance regardless of gender; maternal empathy also related positively, with a stronger effect on self-acceptance among girls. Students who did not share disappointments with parents scored low—similar to those who felt “not understood at all.”

For perceived understanding, boys who felt understood by both parents scored higher on self-acceptance; boys who felt little understood scored lower on other-acceptance, suggesting that feeling misunderstood undermines other-acceptance. Among girls, feeling understood by both parents related to higher self- and other-acceptance, with maternal understanding exerting a stronger influence on other-acceptance than among boys.

Source: Compiled by the author

These findings suggest that accepting support—being empathized with and understood by parents—positively shapes self- and other-acceptance in high school, aiding identity formation.

Through good parenting at home, self- and other-acceptance develop, leading to a stable identity. This, in turn, yields relationship-building and -maintaining abilities—social skills—and supports the formation of personal support networks, i.e., individual-level bonding SC. Such networks affect how livable life feels for individuals. As more people become rich in SC at the individual level, community-level SC also rises (上野, 2011).

While bridging SC often steals the limelight today, we must also foster bonding SC in balance. Improving caregiving experiences in families contributes to raising SC across society.

(Published with additions and revisions in the August 2024 issue of "EN-ICHI FORUM")

References

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