Family Support, Peer Support, and Children’s Subjective Well-Being: The Mediating Role of School Belonging

Background/Objectives: Children’s subjective well-being is multidimensional and shaped by proximal contexts such as family, peers, and schools, yet how these contexts work together remains less clear. This study examined whether family support and peer support were associated with children’s subjective well-being directly and indirectly through school belonging. Methods: Using the United Kingdom (UK) component of the Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe (MiCREATE) survey, the analysis treated relational support, school belonging, and subjective well-being as linked child-reported indicators spanning relational, school, and evaluative well-being domains. The analytic sample comprised 463 children aged 8–16 years. A cross-sectional secondary structural equation modelling analysis compared a partial-mediation model, a full-mediation alternative, and reliability-corrected specifications for the brief support measures. Results: The preferred model was a refined reliability-corrected structural model. Family support and peer support were both positively associated with school belonging, and school belonging was positively associated with subjective well-being. Both support constructs also retained direct associations with subjective well-being, while their indirect associations through school belonging were statistically significant, supporting partial rather than full mediation. Peer support showed the stronger total association with subjective well-being. The final model explained 43.0% of the variance in school belonging and 78.8% of the variance in subjective well-being. Conclusion: The findings suggest that school belonging is an important school-domain indicator linking children’s relational support with subjective well-being in diverse school settings.