Does Caregiver’s Social Bonding Enhance the Health of their Children?: The Association between Social Capital and Child Behaviors

Little is known about the association between social capital and child behaviors. This study aims to investigate that association. A complete population-based, cross-sectional survey was conducted for all the caregivers with preschool children in a rural town in Okayama prefecture in Japan. Two dimen-sions of individual-level social capital and unhealthy child behaviors were reported by parent-adminis-tered questionnaire. We analyzed 354 preschool children (57.6 ｵ of all children for whom question-naires were completed). Children whose main caregiver had high cognitive social capital were 89ｵ less likely to miss breakfast (odds ratio [OR]＝0.11; 95 ｵ confidence interval [CI]: 0.01-1.03). Children whose caregiver had high structural social capital were 71 ｵ less likely to wake up late (OR ＝0.29; 95 ｵ CI: 0.12-0.71) and 78 ｵ less likely to skip tooth brushing more than once per day (OR＝ 0.22; 95 ｵ CI: 0.05-0.93). Both cognitive and structural social capital were negatively associated with unhealthy child behaviors. A further intervention study is needed to confirm the impact of social capi-tal on child behavior. Key words: tooth brushing, child health, social capital, skipping breakfast, watching TV ocial capital has been broadly defined as the resources that individuals access through thei