Financial Stress and Subjective Wellbeing among Children -Evidence from Finland
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Financial Stress and Subjective Wellbeing among Children -Evidence from Finland Marja Lindberg 1
& Mikael
Nygård 1
& Fredrica
Nyqvist 1
& Mia
Hakovirta 2
Accepted: 22 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this article we analyse how subjective wellbeing amongst Finnish children is associated with experiences of financial stress, that is, worries about money and one’s financial situation. We focus on both affective and cognitive components of subjective wellbeing in order to receive a broader understanding on children’s subjective wellbeing. We use Finnish data from the International survey of children’s lives conducted by the Children’s Worlds Project during the years 2013–2014. The results show that experienced financial stress is negatively and more strongly associated with cognitive subjective wellbeing than with affective subjective wellbeing, even when controlling for socioeconomic and other factors found to be influential for subjective wellbeing in previous research. Keywords Children . Finland . Affective and cognitive subjective wellbeing . Financial
stress . Children’s worlds project
1 Introduction Children’s subjective wellbeing is a complex phenomenon and something that is related to time, place and the economic and social context that children live in. For instance, it may be shaped by the economic situation of the children’s own families, but also by the overall economic situation in the country (e.g. James and Prout 1998; Spyrou 2019). This article focuses on one aspect of this nexus, namely how financial stress – defined as worries about one’s economic situation – is related to two dimensions of subjective wellbeing among children, that is, affective wellbeing (AWB) as well as cognitive wellbeing (CWB). The aim of the article is to study these associations
* Marja Lindberg [email protected]
1
Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies, Åbo Akademi, Vasa, Finland
2
Department of Social Research, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
M. Lindberg et al.
among Finnish children by using survey data collected in 2013—2014, at a time when Finland was still suffering from the economic crisis following in the wake of the 2008—2009 financial crisis (Kajanoja et al. 2013; see also Kangas 2019). This crisis brought with it higher unemployment and tighter economic circumstances for many families in Finland (e.g. Ahrendt et al. 2015; Nygård et al. 2013; Save the Children 2015; Terraneo 2016). Between the recession in the 1990s and the financial crisis of 2008—2009, the child poverty rate in Finland had already tripled to approximately 9 %, making the situation especially difficult for single-parent and multi-child families (Statistics Finland 2017). In 2014, 5 % of Finnish children, or approximately 126,000 children, lived in families relying on basic security (Karvonen and Salmi 2014). During the 2010s, the child poverty rate has stabilized, but remained on a higher level than before the financial crisis (Nygård et al. 2019). According to the UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 12 ( 2014),
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