Culture, Poverty, and Education by Wages Michele;

Author:Wages, Michele;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Chapter 7

The Effects of Poverty on the Brain

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness and captivity would, without this comfort, be insupportable.

—William Samuel Johnson

A child’s home life affects their educational growth, including language and vocabulary skills. A study published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) found that children of higher income parents increased their vocabularies at twice the rate of children in poverty. Additionally, delays in brain development are 1.3 times more common in children who live below the poverty line nationally, according to the Connecticut Commission on Families. Overall, 5 percent of low-income children experience delays in brain development and 8.3 percent have learning disabilities, according to a study by Princeton University published in The Future of Our Children.

In general, we know that brains are built from the bottom up, with simple skills and circuits forming a foundation in early childhood for complex circuits and skills that are built later. Unfortunately, when children lack opportunities for positive serve-and-return interaction (when the responses from adults are sporadic, inappropriate, or missing entirely) their brain stimulation is greatly reduced, which prevents healthy brain development.

Past research has identified three factors in brain development:

1. the child’s relationships

2. learning resources

3. stress

Being born into a poor household increases the chance of exhibiting psychological symptoms when compared to those being born to a nonpoor household. In 1993, a group of researchers started an eight-year longitudinal study of children in the Great Smoky Mountains, a range of peaks along the North Carolina-Tennessee border. One thousand, four hundred twenty children were recruited—25 percent Native American, 7.5 percent black and the rest white—and given psychiatric exams annually. Unsurprisingly, the children from poor families were found to have problems, about 60 percent more than their middle-class counterparts.

There are also near-term consequences of poverty on adult brains. For instance, the stress of poverty has the same effect on a person’s cognitive ability as pulling an all-nighter every night, and can decrease a person’s IQ by as much as 13 percent (Covert, 2013). A study at the Washington University School of Medicine associates poverty in early childhood with smaller brain volumes from ages six to twelve (Templeton, 2013). This type of problem can lead to chronic depression and degenerative brain disease.

Unfortunately, it is often the case that when poor children do not meet the diagnostic criteria for psychiatric disorders, they are still prescribed amphetamines. This exposes them to the side effects, which can include stunted growth and stimulant induced psychosis. Poverty takes its toll on health in a number of other critical ways. It prevents families from buying healthy foods, makes people more likely to smoke, which means they are more likely to live in areas with poor air quality and, more disturbing, often these health problems begin in the womb.

There are three main types of stress:

1. Positive stress: (which is short lived, like the stress experienced on the first day of school) actually helps a child develop coping skills and a healthy stress-response system.

2. Tolerable stress: like that experienced when

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.