Children, Childhood and Social Capital: Exploring the Links

Abstract

This article is concerned with exploring how children develop and utilize stocks of social capital. It draws on two research projects illustrating children’s family, peer and community networks. In the burgeoning literature on social capital, children’s accounts remain under-researched. Indeed most of the literature operates with a simplistic view of adults passing social capital assets on to children without a subsequent consideration of how children perceive and make use of existing networks and create and manage additional networks. The article will examine the limited treatment of children and childhood in the conceptualization of social capital put forward by Putnam, Coleman and Bourdieu. One of the most important attributes of social capital is its supposed ability to be converted into other forms of capital. A focus on children’s networks calls into question the ease with which social capital can be transformed into other types of capital.