Abstract
Nearly 1 in 5 children in the United States lives in a household whose income is below the official federal poverty line, and more than 40% of children live in poor or near-poor households. Research on the effects of poverty on children’s development has been a focus of study for many decades and is now increasing as we accumulate more evidence about the implications of poverty. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently added “Poverty and Child Health” to its Agenda for Children to recognize what has now been established as broad and enduring effects of poverty on child development. A recent addition to the field has been the application of neuroscience-based methods. Various techniques including neuroimaging, neuroendocrinology, cognitive psychophysiology, and epigenetics are beginning to document ways in which early experiences of living in poverty affect infant brain development. We discuss whether there are truly worthwhile reasons for adding neuroscience and related biological methods to study child poverty, and how might these perspectives help guide developmentally based and targeted interventions and policies for these children and their families.
Highlights
In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics added “Poverty and Child Health” to its Agenda for Children (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2013) as a recognition of the broad and enduring effects of poverty on children’s development. These public health implications are so profound that both UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) the World Bank have recognized the serious problems caused by child poverty, they have called for the need to end extreme poverty by 2030 (UNICEF and World Bank Group, 2016)
Even while objective indices such as the federal poverty line may provide a useful parameter for recruiting a study sample, there is no evidence that a child living marginally above the federal poverty level is appreciably better off than one marginally below, and some researchers include those living below 133% or 200% of the Federal Poverty Line (FPL) as poor or near poor
We examined the trajectories of brain development in infants and toddlers between 5 months and 4 years of age, as children began to experience the effects of poverty
Summary
40% of children in the United States live in poor or nearpoor households (Child Trends Database, 2018; Figure 1). Causal factors that have been proposed to link poverty to poor outcomes in children have included limited access to medical care and insurance (Wherry & Meyer, 2016); high exposure to pollution and environmental toxins known to affect neurological functioning (Currie, Greenstone, & Moretti, 2011; Currie et al, 2014; Rowe et al, 2016); high exposure to violence (Cancian, Slack, & Lang, 2010); inadequate nutrition (de Groot et al, 2015); high exposure to infectious diseases (Hotez, 2011); social pressure associated with income inequality or low income relative to a local community (Buttrick & Oishi, 2017; Halfon, Larson, Son, Lu, & Bethell, 2017; Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015); low economic mobility (Baulch & Hoddinott, 2000; Chetty & Hendren, 2018); environments characterized by instability and chaos, as reflected in factors such as food insecurity and unstable housing (Evans & Garthwaite, 2014; Schneider, 1992); and institutionalized racism (Chetty, Hendren, Jones, & Porter, 2018) and, stress which we discuss in depth below. Rather than any one or two of these factors being primary in influencing a child, it may well be that it is the confluence of multiple factors that threatens a child’s well-being
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