The scourge of poverty remains an urgent crisis worldwide and directly effects childhood brain development. In the United States alone, it has been "estimated that 28.6 million children live in low-income families and 12.7 million children live in poor families." Beyond the borders of the United States, tit has been estimated that "in nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 47 million children live below national poverty lines. These figures pertain to industrialized countries; rates of child poverty in some developing nations exceed 60 per cent." It is believed that "a range of early social and material deprivations affect structural and functional brain organization and cognitive and socioemotional development postnatally and throughout childhood."
Although a number of young children demonstrate a resilience to the effects of poverty and are able to avoid being overcome by it's damaging effects, there are many young children for whom there remains little doubt that "poverty poses serious threats to children’s brain development." Researchers have asembled evidence that there is "a sensitive period when the brain is most able to respond to and grow from exposure to environmental stimulation. This window of optimal brain development is from the prenatal period to the first years of a child’s life. While all children are potentially vulnerable to a number of risk factors which can impede brain development during this sensitive period, a disproportionate number of children in poverty are actually exposed to such risk factors." Another recent report demonstrates that being poor is a cause for stress that effects the brain. Gary W. Evans1 and Michelle A. Schamberg of the Departments of Design and Environmental Analysis and Human Development, Cornell University have found that "cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory." Evans and Schamberg write that "Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement." In addition, poverty stricken young children are not prepared to acquire educational skills and benefits when they go to school since their home lives do not provide them with an environment that stresses education and the children are forced to eat low-nutritional meals and are availed little or no access to health care.
Studies have suggested that stress-related biological after effects confront the sufferers of childhood poverty and can be manifested in cardiovascular diseases, several forms of cancer, and diseases commonly associated with aging.
It is the opinion of researchers that increased hormone production apparently aids poor children cope with difficulties, "from unsafe neighborhoods to bad schools to at-home worries. But those hormones could produce heightened levels of inflammation, ultimately leaving their immune systems weakened and vulnerable."
Researchers also cited: "Nutrition, exposure to environmental chemicals and disease (that) could also explain ... long-term biological effects." The researchers went on to add that “We are unable to determine the relative importance of these exposures here, but doing so needs to be one of the top priorities for future research in this area.”
Wired Science Blog reports that: "For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care."
Wired continues: "Evans and Schamberg's findings pull the pieces of the puzzle together, and the implications are disturbing. Sociological explanations for the achievement gap are likely correct, but they may be incomplete. In addition to poverty's many social obstacles, it may pose a biological obstacle, too." The two researchers from Cornell explained: "A plausible contributor to the income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood."
The Cornell researchers concluded that: "The income-achievement gap is a formidable societal problem, but little is known about either neurocognitive or biological mechanisms that might account for income-related deficits in academic achievement. We show that childhood poverty is inversely related to working memory in young adults. Furthermore, this prospective relationship is mediated by elevated chronic stress during childhood."
The researchers' findings build on work previously done by Elizabeth Gould who has linked stress to a wide range of neurological defects and Jonah Lehrer of Wired has added his own analysis to shed some light on Gould's findings: "Subsequent experiments [by Gould] have teased out a host of other ways stress can damage the developing brain. For example, if a pregnant rhesus monkey is forced to endure stressful conditions--like being startled by a blaring horn for 10 minutes a day--her children are born with reduced neurogenesis, even if they never actually experience stress once born. This pre-natal trauma, just like trauma endured in infancy, has life-long implications. The offspring of monkeys stressed during pregnancy have smaller hippocampi, suffer from elevated levels of glucocorticoids and display all the classical symptoms of anxiety. Being low in a dominance hierarchy also suppresses neurogenesis. So does living in a bare environment. As a general rule of thumb, a rough life--especially a rough start to life--strongly correlates with lower levels of fresh cells.
"Poverty is stress," Gould says, with more than a little passion in her voice. "One thing that always strikes me is that when you ask Americans why the poor are poor, they always say it's because they don't work hard enough, or don't want to do better. They act like poverty is a character issue."
Gould's work implies that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. Because neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise above them, the monotonous stress of living in a slum literally limits the brain."
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