Flourishing is linked with health and well-being in childhood and adulthood. This study applied a promotive factors model to examine how neighborhood assets might benefit child and adolescent flourishing by promoting family resilience. Using data from the combined 2018 and 2019 National Survey of Children’s Health, structural equation models tested direct and indirect relationships between neighborhood physical environment, neighborhood social cohesion, family resilience, and flourishing among 18,396 children and 24,817 adolescents. After controlling for multiple covariates that may influence flourishing, the models supported that higher levels of neighborhood social cohesion were directly associated with higher levels of flourishing adolescents, and indirectly by positive associations with family resilience for both children and adolescents. No indirect effects between neighborhood physical environments and flourishing were supported by the data for either children or adolescents. However, neighborhood physical environments were positively associated with adolescent flourishing. Understanding social environmental factors that strengthen and enhance child and adolescent flourishing are critical toward designing prevention, intervention, and policy efforts that can build on the existing strengths of families and their communities.

Neighborhoods with higher levels of collective efficacy are associated with more favorable family outcomes such as lower teen pregnancy rates and less antisocial behavior among children. Collective efficacy is traditionally measured by combining the constructs of social cohesion and informal social control, yet these two constructs may have unique influences on family outcomes. While prior studies have examined collective efficacy’s factor structure, there is limited understanding of this construct among single-mother families, who have unique social and economic characteristics. In this exploratory study, we tested a single-factor model and two-factor model separating social cohesion and informal social control to examine the underlying factor structure of collective efficacy with a diverse sample of 2,084 unmarried mothers who participated in the third wave in-home survey of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. Results support that informal social control and social cohesion were best modeled as two distinct, but related, constructs.