Poverty's Hidden Harm to Youth Future Orientation: Suppression Through Eroded Relational Capital

Poverty is assumed to lower young people's aspirations, yet many disadvantaged youth sustain high future orientation. Research on hardship has rarely asked whether hardship reaches that capacity through the same relationships that carry it to emotional and behavioural problems. This study asks whether material deprivation reaches future orientation through the relationships that support it, and whether an overall association of about zero can conceal that route. Data are from the 2017 wave of the Taiwan Database of Children and Youth in Poverty, whose respondents were 54.8% female, with 4.8% aged 13-15, 26.6% aged 16-18, and 68.7% aged 19 or older; the analytic sample comprised 1,070 respondents enrolled in junior high through post-secondary education, and a prospective model linked 2013 predictors to 2017 outcomes for 821 of them. Deprivation showed no overall association with future orientation, yet it was associated with lower family functioning, teacher support, and peer intimacy, each of which was associated with higher future orientation. The resulting negative indirect association was offset by a positive direct path, which constitutes inconsistent mediation; the family pathway was the largest, and the peer pathway also predicted change in future orientation across four years. A null overall association is therefore compatible with relational harm, and an analysis that reads only the overall association reports no effect where harm is present.