Childhood poverty damages your mind
I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told. I have squandered my resistance, For a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises.
All lies and jest.
Poor girl, Oklahoma City, 1936
Why are people poor? The question echoes down the ages. Is it their destiny, their upbringing, their character, their misfortune?
Recently the Economist published a story describing scientific findings that, if confirmed, places a firm evidentiary dot on the graph of nature-versus-nurture, choice-versus-fate.
I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told
Apr 2nd 2009 From The Economist print edition
How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain
As the twig is bent, so shall the tree lean.
Sleeping children, Jacob Riis, New York City, 1890
That the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.
The Economist’s story takes as its uncredited title the first line of Simon & Garfunkel’s exquisite ballad The Boxer. Its lyrics (for a haunting rendition, sung with the pathos of age, click here) tell the same story now found by the researchers.
Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Since Biblical times, the cause of poverty has driven our attitude toward affordable housing specifically and poverty relief generally. From the English almshouses through the Pilgrims’ work houses right into the New Deal’s public housing, proponents of affordable housing have argued that circumstance – luck, upbringing, prejudice – were the reason. Opponents have laid poverty on sloth, drunkenness, moral weakness, choices made by the poor.
Sherry Levine, After Walker Evans
Children, as we all know, are impressionable. How many parents have found themselves shuddering when they hear, piping from a four-year-old’s unseen mouth, the exact cadences and phrases of reproof and scorn that mom and dad have themselves used in unguarded moments?
The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children.
Stress destroys cognition. And stress is a byproduct of uncertainty, where the imagination is in constant fearful arousal. In an experiment with dogs wearing shock collars, divided into three groups:
Those who received a shock whenever they performed a specific behavior
Those who received a shock when they did not obey a command
Those who received random shocks
The first group did not show a significant rise in cortisol levels; the other two groups did show a significant rise, with the third group showing the highest level of cortisol.
Dogs who could clearly associate the shock with their action, and as a result were able to predict and control whether they received a shock, did not suffer from considerable or persistent stress.
Ethiopian refugees, 1984
Poverty of housing is defined by insecurity of tenure. Fear of losing one’s possessions, fear of violence done in the night-time, all disrupt the brain’s recuperation and growth.
When I left my home and my family I was no more than a boy, In the company of strangers, In the quiet of a railway station, runnin’ scared.
Around the world, the great challenge of slums is to provide security of tenure. From that flows capital reinvestment – and, if this study’s findings are right, emotional development of our world’s next generation.
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters, Where the ragged people go. Lookin’ for the places, only they would know.
Insecurity of tenure permanently damages the brain:
Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail. As they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.
Street children, Philippines
As your brain is damaged, you cannot learn; and being unable to learn, you cannot earn.
Asking only workman’s wages I come lookin’ for a job, But I get no offers, Just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue. I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome, I took some comfort there.
Oooh la, la, la …
The evidence is from a longitudinal study:
Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s volunteers were 195 participants in a long-term sociological and medical study that Dr Evans is carrying out in New York state. At the time, the participants were 17 years old. All are white, and the numbers of men and women are about equal.
The researchers sought to pick a homogenous starting group, so as to eliminate other potential sources of difference:
To measure the amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life, the two researchers used an index known as allostatic load. This is a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; the concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and the body-mass index, a measure of obesity.
Here’s a point of retrospective interpolation. Rather than observe the stress the individuals had suffered over their preceding seventeen years, they looked at the physiological residues of stress, just like smoking researchers estimating someone’s previous habit by looking at his lungs today.
Care to guess her income level?
For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class.
So we have physiological indicators of a stressful life; and we have past indicators of their parents’ economic situation. But to those current variables, they were able to add a fifteen-year-historical record:
Moreover, because Dr Evans’s wider study had followed the participants from birth, the two researchers were able to estimate what proportion of each child’s life had been spent in poverty. That more precise figure, too, was correlated with the allostatic load.
Though correlation is not causation, when you eliminate extraneous variables, the odds of causation rise.
The capacity of a 17-year-old’s working memory was also correlated with allostatic load. Those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle.
Now we have not only correlation but linear correspondence; as we move up the stress, we move down the brain’s capacity to hold ideas.
These two correlations do not by themselves prove that chronic stress damages the memory, but Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg then applied a statistical technique called hierarchical regression to the results. They were able to use this to remove the effect of allostatic load on the relationship between poverty and memory discovered originally by Dr Farah. When they did so, that relationship disappeared. In other words, the diminution of memory in the poorer members of their study was entirely explained by stress, rather than by any more general aspect of poverty.
If this holds up – and I have no reason to doubt it – the finding is huge. Children are damaged by poverty, and by one particular aspect of poverty – stress.
Street children, Zambia
And the years are rollin’ by me. They are rockin’ evenly. I am older than I once was, and younger than I’ll be. That’s not unusual. It isn’t strange, After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same. After changes, we are more or less the same.
Lie-la-lie …
Providing security of tenure and with it a safe family environment can relieve that stress.
Mary Ellen Marks, The Damm Family, Los Angeles, 1987
To confirm this result, the researchers also looked at characteristics such as each participant’s birthweight, his mother’s age when she gave birth, the mother’s level of education and her marital status, all of which differ, on average, between the poor and the middle classes. None of these characteristics had any effect. Nor did a mother’s own stress levels.
Stress in children leads to diminished cognitive capacity, which leads to adult poverty.
That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain.
If you’ve ever said, I’m so mad I can’t see straight, then you know how our limbic and adrenal chemicals can take over our brains.
Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the “remodelling” of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.
Like acid, stress corrodes the brain’s circuitry.
Southeast Asia
Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same circumstances on their own children.
Whenever I work with very poor people, I am struck by how deeply suspicious they are. Don’t you know I’m on your side? I think to myself. And the answer comes, Why should you be? How many other people have claimed to be on their side, and not been?
Then I’m laying out my winter clothes and wishing I was gone, Going home, where the New York City winters aren’t bleedin’ me. Leadin’ me, to goin’ home.
Stress leads to stress; poverty to poverty.
Boys, Mukuru Sinai, Nairobi, Kenya, 2009
Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s study does not examine the nature of the stress that the children of the poor are exposed to, but it is now well established that poor adults live stressful lives, and not just for the obvious reason that poverty brings uncertainty about the future.
The main reason poor people are stressed is that they are at the bottom of the social heap as well as the financial one.
Sir Michael Marmot, of University College London, and his intellectual successors have shown repeatedly that people at the bottom of social hierarchies experience much more stress in their daily lives than those at the top—and suffer the consequences in their health. Even quite young children are socially sensitive beings and aware of such things.
So, it may not be necessary to look any further than their place in the pecking order to explain what Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg have discovered in their research into the children of the poor. The Bible says, “the poor you will always have with you.” Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg may have provided an important part of the explanation why.
In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade, And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down, Or cut him ’til he cried out in his anger and his shame, “I am leaving, I am leaving!”
… But the fighter still remains.
Mukuru Sinai, Nairobi, Kenya, 2009
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