Family Income Differences

First, he points out the issue on how inner-city schools are still failing because they are lousy schools that use the same approach each year and still no improvement. Furthermore, science says that students lose ground in the summer, which causes them to lose what they learned the previous school year. Although, science has proven this to be true businesses to use science to better inner-city schools education. In addition to, inner schools failing and losing what they learned poor people are not aware of how critical and important the first three years of brain development. However, wealthy people and educated people are aware of the role of language, stimulus, and response. This causes those who are educated and wealthy children to have an advantage over poor

“Environmental influence during the first few years of life is crucial to all later abilities, especially intellectual ones”(Lightfoot et al., 2013, p.437). In the United States many children don’t receive an excellent education due to living in neighborhoods that are economically poor, typically where many minority children grow up. Children usually learn through social enhancement, imitation and explicit instruction that are provided in their culture from their families. The children who come from low-income backgrounds are found to do poorly in subjects, as well as standardize testing. Some thoughts are whether standardized testing discriminates against ethnic minority students and students from low income backgrounds, which usually rank below from other students in other socioeconomic status.

This chapter is intended to “review the history of SES and provide an overview of the association between SES and children's well-being for three major domains of development (cognitive, socioemotional, health)” (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002, p.372). Since it is a more of a review of knowledge already published than a study in itself, the methodology included reviewing prior studies. Their search ended in finding that there is an extremely complex relationship between socioeconomic status and cognitive attainment that may not always be seen in a concrete answer. Where some researchers argue that specific cognitive skills are reliant on family income and others are completely independents, different researches assert the opposite. Something they mentioned that I would like to consider in my study is the relationship between socioeconomic status and attendance. Bradley and Corwyn (2002) say “SES also appears to affect school attendance and number of years of schooling completed” (p.378). While these two aspects have enough information to be a study of their own, they do play a role in my personal

It is to be said in a new research that was done, showing that “low-income kids” aren’t developed fully in certain parts of their brains and behind other kinds in their same age group. The results of this came to be that children that come families with a low income household, happen to have a thinner neocortex, which is a “particular area of the brain” and its role is in memory and the ability to learn (Woodruff.) This is something that should really concern people, because children are our future. How and why is this happening? Well it’s all based from the nutrients, the health care, the education, and the amount of stress they enter counter, that affects children’s lives and this is all caused by Income Inequality. “The brain of a child whose family earns less than $25,000 annually is 6% smaller in surface area than a child whose parents earned more than $150,000, according to the study” (Woodruff.) Which is very surprisingly but sadly it makes sense, since children who grow up in an environment where that have access to things that children from low income environments

Moving on to the third chart, the author talk about how in reality it’s even more difficult for poor children to make up for their parents’ lost ground. A child born to parents with income in the lowest quintile is more likely to end up even less than what their parents had made. Statistics shown that it was 43% vs. 4% comparing the low-income side, in contrast to the higher income children who could end up in higher quintile than their parents. In figure 4, a chart more distinguished than others the author talks about how the income level have very small effect on the mental function of children under age one. Instead of income inequality having such a big impact like the other graphs, this one has less impact. Furthermore, the wealthy that have two incomes and parents with college degrees have more money to spend on their children shown in figure 5. The numbers have increased from 1972 to 2006 for the top quintile yet for low quintile it has its own pattern but the bars do not sky rocket as the high income. Ms. Woodruff explains in figure 6 that the achievement gap between low and high-income

They did not find differences between children from middle class and affluent families but those only 50 percent above the poverty line showed gray matter volumes 3 to 4 percent below the norm. In other words, more money does not necessary mean better outcomes but at a certain point a “drop-off” effect of income occurs where a lack of financial resources is detrimental to development. “The reason I think we’re not seeing a continuum is that humans are very hardy,” Pollak says, “I think the human child can learn to accommodate quite a wide variety of circumstances — what’s happening in extreme poverty is that we’re moving out of the range where the human brain can

Income and socioeconomic status-based differences in test scores occur because of the environment in which students were raised and the ability of their parents, and contribute to racial differences because of the racial income gap. DeNavas-Walt and Proctor (2015), of the Census Bureau, reported that black and Hispanic households had incomes lower than average, while the income of Asian and white, non-Hispanic households was above average. This means that discrimination based on income and socioeconomic status is more likely to affect black and Hispanic students. Guryan, Hurst, and Kearney (2008) found that mothers with at least a college education spent an average of 4.5 hours more caring for children per week than those with a high

Furthermore they believe that this gap in achievement between rich and poor may be caused by growing up poorer or living in poverty. This study was conducted by taking tissue (gray matter) samples from 389 adolescents (children ranging from age 4-12) and analyzing them through MRI(magnetic resonance imaging scans). The exact same analysis was performed on the same test subjects in a follow-up years later. The result remained the same, and it was apparent in the final test outcome, that 8 to 10 percent of the gray matter in the “poorer”

In a dismal macroeconomic context, the gaping social inequities that the MET aims to alleviate continue with statewide and national declines in median family wealth by education level. In the first place, only 26.4% of Michigan residents 25 or older hold Bachelor’s degrees, which is beneath the national average of 29.3%. Arguably, a sizable part of the 73.6% of Michigan residents who do not hold Bachelor’s degrees must struggle to overcome the socio-economic barrier of the widening family wealth gap. Federal Reserve Bank data show that the gap in median family wealth widened among families with college education in contrast to those without it. Between 1989 and 2013, families holding 2 and 4-year college degrees experienced a slight median

The American Psychological Association studies have shown that environmental factors can contribute to an individual’s intelligence factor. Different revolution factors, natural selection factors, and environmental differences have an impact (Saletan 4). For example, a black kid living in a run down neighborhood may do worse than a white kid living in a rich neighborhood. Due to this, most children feed off of their peers, either at school or even at home. People in disadvantaged groups generally score lower on IQ tests than those who are not disadvantaged (Jackson 1). Different races have different advantages due to

So, what was socioeconomic status? What were the components that constructed socioeconomic status? Socioeconomic status was defined by multiple factors: educational attainment, income, occupational prestige, wealth, and much more. Educational attainment component of socioeconomic status had a long term prevalence on a person’s health. Research shown that children who grew up in low-socioeconomic status households and communities developed academic skills more slowly than other children. Some potential reasons was the lack of literacy in their environment, chronic stress, under resource, inadequate education provided in an area, and much more influenced an individual’s opportunity of learning at an early age (American). The lack of literacy in an environment was attributed

In IQ Study Finds Class Effect by Rick Weiss, he discusses why poor children, and especially black poor children, score lower on average than their middle-income and white counterparts on performance tests. Studies have repeatedly found that genes, not environment, explain most of the differences in IQ among individuals. However, a new study of the interaction among genes, environment and IQ finds that the influence of genes on intelligence is dependent on class.

In “To Create a Better World for Children and Families: the case for ending childhood poverty”, Dreyer pointed out that racial/ethnic minority are more likely to be poor and can associate with severe impact on cognitive and social-emotional development. Although Drey's family is not experiencing extreme poverty, but near poverty can also negatively affect the same cognitive, mental health, social, emotional, and academic outcomes. Due to their family economic hardship, Drey's mother works on shifts and did not provide the needed nurture for her children.

When parents seek for locations to live and raised their children, they consider different aspects within a neighborhood. Elements such as affordability, dominant culture, ethnicity and quality of education are just a few. For the most part, parents do not think how neighborhoods create inequality or how environments alter their children's outcome. While many scholars claim inequality initiates within and between families, others attribute inequality to the educational system. For the purpose of this paper family and education are contributing factors to social inequality, nevertheless both are a representation of what composes a neighborhood. These authors claim that family and education are responsible for the creation of inequality, however

Another study to study SES and cognitive development was done by Merete Osler1, Kirsten Avlund, and Erik Lykke Mortensen to examine the influence of social circumstances early in life on changes in cognitive function from young adulthood to middle age (2012). They looked at the impact of birth characteristics like birth weight and maternal age, childhood activities in leisure time, education and adult social class on the expected relationship. A sample of 11 532 men aged 12, 18, and 57 were assessed. To find the association of early-life characteristics with cognitive test scores, a linear regression was used. They found that the scores at age 57 years highly correlated with the scores at ages 12 and 18 years. Participants who had a father in the working class at birth were related to having lower cognitive function at all three ages. It was also found that a decline in cognitive function was present with low education, many social activities and minimum intellectual activities during childhood in leisure time and low adult social class.