Children from lower-income households are at increased risk for poor health, educational failure, and behavioral problems. This social gradient is one of the most reproduced findings in health and social science. How people view their position in social hierarchies also signals poor health. However, when adolescents’ views of their social position begin to independently relate to well-being is currently unknown. A cotwin design was leveraged to test whether adolescents with identical family backgrounds, but who viewed their family’s social status as higher than their same-aged and sex sibling, experienced better well-being in early and late adolescence. Participants were members of the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, a representative cohort of British twins (n = 2,232) followed across the first 2 decades of life. By late adolescence, perceptions of subjective family social status (SFSS) robustly correlated with multiple indicators of health and well-being, including depression; anxiety; conduct problems; marijuana use; optimism; not in education, employment, or training (NEET) status; and crime. Findings held controlling for objective socioeconomic status both statistically and by cotwin design after accounting for measures of childhood intelligence (IQ), negative affect, and prior mental health risk and when self-report, informant report, and administrative data were used. Little support was found for the biological embedding of adolescents’ perceptions of familial social status as indexed by inflammatory biomarkers or cognitive tests in late adolescence or for SFSS in early adolescence as a robust correlate of well-being or predictor of future problems. Future experimental studies are required to test whether altering adolescents’ subjective social status will lead to improved well-being and social mobility.

来自低收入家庭的儿童健康状况不佳、教育失败和行为问题的风险更大。这种社会梯度是健康和社会科学领域最常见的发现之一。人们如何看待自己在社会等级中的地位也表明健康状况不佳。然而，目前尚不清楚青少年对其社会地位的看法何时开始独立地与幸福感相关。利用 cotwin 设计来测试具有相同家庭背景但认为家庭社会地位高于同龄和同性兄弟姐妹的青少年是否在青春期早期和晚期体验到更好的幸福感。参与者是环境风险纵向双胞胎研究的成员，该研究是对英国双胞胎 ( n = 2,232) 生命前 20 年的代表性队列进行跟踪。到青春期后期，对主观家庭社会地位（SFSS）的看法与健康和福祉的多种指标密切相关，包括抑郁症；焦虑; 行为问题；使用大麻；乐观; 不处于教育、就业或培训 (NEET) 状态；和犯罪。在考虑了儿童智力（IQ）、负面影响和先前心理健康风险的衡量标准以及使用自我报告、线人报告和行政数据后，研究结果通过统计学和 cotwin 设计控制了客观的社会经济状况。几乎没有发现支持青少年对家庭社会地位的看法的生物学嵌入（以青春期后期的炎症生物标志物或认知测试为索引）或青春期早期的 SFSS 作为幸福感的强大相关性或未来问题的预测因子。未来的实验研究需要测试改变青少年的主观社会地位是否会导致福祉和社会流动性的改善。