Parental human capital only benefits a child’s development when family relationships activate it.

Evidence

These examples illustrate the importance of social capital within the family for a child’s intellectual development. It is of course true that children are strongly affected by the human capital possessed by their parents. But this human capital may be irrelevant to outcomes for children if parents are not an important part of their children’s lives, if their human capital is employed exclusively at work or elsewhere outside the home. The social capital of the family is the relations between children and parents (and, when families include other members, relationships with them as well). That is, if the human capital possessed by parents is not complemented by social capital embodied in family relations, it is irrelevant to the child’s educational growth that the parent has a great deal, or a small amount, of human capital. — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 148

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the working definition of family social capital as the relations between children and parents.
• XREF: Connects to Coleman’s broader social capital theory and to later debates about parental involvement, e.g. Lareau’s work on cultural capital. — connects to: Parents low in formal schooling can still provide high social capital for children’s education — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 146; Family background splits into financial, human, and social capital that affect achievement differently — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 139; Parental education only benefits children when strong family relationships transmit it. — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 148 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 148

Related

• Parental education only benefits children when strong family relationships transmit it. (similarity 0.94)
• Strong parent-child relations are required to transmit parental human capital (similarity 0.92)
• Parents low in formal schooling can still provide high social capital for children’s education (similarity 0.89)
• Family background splits into financial, human, and social capital that affect achievement differently (similarity 0.88)
• Children need adults’ presence and attention to access parents’ human capital (similarity 0.87)
• Family and city life confer hidden educational advantages on privileged children. (similarity 0.85)
• Communal social capital shapes children’s development beyond family resources. (similarity 0.84)
• A working nuclear family lacks structural social capital. (similarity 0.83)
• Adult education levels barely affect child outcomes once social capital is held constant. (similarity 0.82)
• Adult-to-child ratio measures family social capital available for schooling. (similarity 0.81)
• Human capital extends the concept of physical capital to persons’ skills. (similarity 0.81)
• Declining family and community capital will reduce human capital unless formal organizations substitute (similarity 0.80)
• Community social capital substitutes for missing family social capital. (similarity 0.80)
• Social capital is productive, structural, and defined by its function. (similarity 0.79)
• Declining family and community bonds shrink each generation’s human capital. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Family background splits into financial, human, and social capital that affect achievement differently #expands (0.75) — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 139