Housing: an under-explored influence on children’s well-being and becoming

Publication type

Journal Article

Author

Publication date

April 9, 2018

Summary:

Research on housing has tended to focus on adult outcomes, establishing relationships between housing and a number of aspects of health and well-being. Research exploring the influence of housing on children has been more limited, and has tended to focus on adult concerns around risk behaviours, behavioural problems and educational attainment. While these outcomes are important, they neglect the impact of housing on children’s lives beyond these concerns. There are a number of reasons to believe that housing would play an important role in children’s well-being more broadly. Family stress and strain models highlight how housing difficulties experienced by adults may have knock on effects for children, while Bronfenbrenner’s ecological approach to human development emphasises the importance of children’s experiences of their environments, of which the home is among the most important. This paper summarises the existing evidence around housing and child outcomes, predominantly educational and behavioural outcomes, and argues for the extension of this work to consider the impact of housing on children’s lives more broadly, especially their subjective well-being.

Published in

Child Indicators Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-018-9550-7

ISSN

1874897

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

Open Access

© The Author(s) 2018

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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