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Social determinants of health influence child health behavior, development, and outcomes. This paper frames social capital, or the benefits that a child receives from social relationships, as a positive social determinant of health that helps children exposed to adversity achieve healthy outcomes across the life course. Children are uniquely dependent on their relationships with surrounding adults for material and nonmaterial resources. We identify and define three relevant aspects of social capital: 1) social support , which is embedded in a 2) social network , which is a structure through which 3) social cohesion can be observed. Social support is direct assistance available through social relationships and can be received indirectly through a caregiver or directly by a child. A child's social network describes the people in a child's life and the relationships between them. Social cohesion represents the strength of a group to which a child belongs (eg, family, community). Pediatric primary care practices play an important role in fostering social relationships between families, the health care system, and the community. Further research is needed to develop definitional and measurement rigor for social capital, to evaluate interventions (eg, peer health educators) that may improve health outcomes through social capital, and to broaden our understanding of how social relationships influence health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among various social factors associated with health behavior and disease, social cohesion has not captured the imagination of public health researchers as much as social capital as evidenced by the subsuming of social cohesion into social capital and the numerous studies analyzing social capital and the comparatively fewer articles analyzing social cohesion and health. In this paper we provide a brief overview of the evolution of the conceptualization of social capital and social cohesion and we use philosopher Erich Fromm’s distinction between “having” and “being” to understand the current research focus on capital over cohesion. We argue that social capital is related to having while social cohesion is related to being and that an emphasis on social capital leads to individualizing tendencies that are antithetical to cohesion. We provide examples drawn from the literature where this conflation of social capital and cohesion results in non-concordant definitions and subsequent operationalization of these constructs. Beyond semantics, the practical implication of focusing on “having” vs. “being” include an emphasis on understanding how to normalize groups and populations rather than providing those groups space for empowerment and agency leading to health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]