Poverty affects the mental development of children

Having money does not only influence being able to buy more things. Many experts warn of the real risks for children living in poverty. In fact, a study published in July in the journal JAMA Pediatrics ensures that Growing up in poverty hinders the mental development of children and leads to lower academic performance in schools.

Although it was already known that low socioeconomic status is associated with lower school performance, this research comes to insist on the idea of ​​other recent studies that have found associations between poverty and a smaller brain surface. In particular, it links both lines of thought by revealing that up to 20 percent of the difference in the performance among high and Low resources can be explained by differences in mental development.


The work, developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (United States), used a sample of 389 healthy children and adolescents between four and 22 years. The researchers, led by psychologist Seth Pollak, compared the results of academic performance tests with tissue volume in certain areas of the brain.

Lack of economic resources is detrimental to infant brain development

The researchers subjected these children to magnetic resonance imaging studies with the goal of scanning and measuring their gray matter volume in areas of the children's brain that are "critical to the cognitive processes required to succeed academically and that are vulnerable to environmental conditions in the early life of people, "they explain in Scientific American, who have echoed the work.


Likewise, the study contemplated that some of the children returned to make reassessments at 24 months. These same people were followed up visits for a period of up to six months.

The conclusion was to find that children who were growing up in families that were below the poverty line had volumes of gray matter that were "between eight and ten percent below normal development." A difference that was not seen between middle class children and those from wealthy families, although those who were 50 percent above the poverty line showed volumes of gray matter that were between three and four percent below the norm .

This means, as they explain in Scientific American, that more money does not necessarily have better performance, "but at a certain point there is a fall in income effect that occurs where the lack of economic resources is detrimental to development".


In this regard, the main researcher of the work believes that the reason why you do not see a continuous effect "is that humans are very resistant", that is, "children can learn to adjust to a wide variety of circumstances, but what happens with the extreme poverty is that we are moving outside the range in which the human brain can adjust, "he says.

Gap between some children and others

On this, Pollak explains in his work that he hoped that the gap between children and others would be closed as children spent more time in school and away from home, but his research did not observe it: the differences in mental development were they continued to appreciate in the cases studied of 22-year-old boys.

Identify the specific causes that relate poverty with less mental development It is not a simple job, but in future studies Pollak and his team claim to try to identify how different social programs, such as free lunch or housing vouchers, can help children who grow up poor in their school performance. "I used to think of poverty as a matter of social policy, now I see it as a biomedical problem, an environmental condition or a toxin that affects children," the researcher concludes.

Angela R. Bonachera

Video: Poverty and Brain Development


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