Socioeconomic Status And Child Stress

On the other hand, this research emphasizes how one’s family background and the surrounding neighborhood as specific contexts that impact individuals psychologically. In my opinion, higher SES families may live in wealthier communities that have better educational resources and environment. At this point, human development tend to be context specific instead of universal. As what we learned in class, poverty brings negative impacts to children, which is the biggest risk for parenting as well. More specifically, parents/caregivers bring direct influences to their children, and the neighborhood is one of the vital factors that impact children simultaneously. (Cole’s lecture, April & May 2017).

In article How Kids Learn Resilience, Paul Tough argues that stress can push a child into a cycle of failure in school, harmfully impacting a child’s education and outside life. He claims that stress is apparent in every student’s life; however some have more and this stress has a direct connection on the child’s success both in school and out. Stress can be caused by many things, such as economic, family, or even social problems. The stress prevents a student from staying focused in school because they are distracted by other problems. Since they are not able to focus, they do not perform well at school, leading to bad grades, which leads to more stress. This cycle continues and the student is unable to learn as the workload gets more complicated.

Throughout life, both children and adults experience varying amounts of stress in their everyday lives. For the most part, this has been proven to be healthy and crucial in strengthening their response to such stimuli later in life. This paper will focus on the findings of various studies in which researchers have found links between stress exposure and childhood development. Specifically, this paper will focus on the effects of what is known as toxic stress and its effects on the development of a child and its role in the development of mental disorders as the child transitions into adulthood.

is through socioeconomic status. According to Sean Reardon, a main outcome of the widening income gap for families has been a widening gap in achievement among children, which he refers to as the income achievement gap (Reardon, 2011). Therefore, the children of the poor remain at an educational disadvantage when their parents’ income becomes as much of a predictor of their educational achievements, as their parents’ educational obtainment. To emphasize the results of the income achievement gap, Reardon states, “As the children of the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely to become rich, we risk producing an even more unequal and economically polarized society” (Reardon, 2011, p. 111). For example, as standardized testing shifted towards standardized achievement testing to determine a student’s academic achievement, parental investment in their children’s cognitive development began to increase. Educational disparities occur when affluent families can very easily afford tutoring outside of the classroom for their children to perform highly, while children being raised in impoverished homes are at a disadvantage, and at a lower chance of doing well on these exams. This becomes problematic when SAT reading, math, and writing scores increase with income as exemplified by the disproportionately small amount of minority students in higher education (Brand lecture,

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

Children in families with lower incomes at or below the poverty line have been connected with poor cognitive and social development in early childhood. The studies that I chose to use evaluate the cognitive and social development during early childhood using various surveys, evaluations, and observations completed by or with the children, parents, and teachers. Development of any kind is dependent on the interplay of nature and nurture, or genetics and environment. These studies draw from a child’s environment during the earliest years of development, specifically birth, pre-school, and early elementary school. The studies propose living in an impoverished environment as opposed to an environment above the poverty line imposes certain

However, to understand the impact of adversity on young children’s development and learning, our genes supply the basic blueprint for brain development. “Thus, toxic stress in early childhood not only is a risk factor for later risky behavior but also can be a direct source of biological injury or disruption that may have lifelong consequences independent of whatever circumstances might follow later in life (Shonoff and Garner, 2012, page 238). Poverty, neglect, or family stress can make it especially difficult for young children to develop the self-discipline and habits of mind they will need to succeed in the classroom and beyond. Researchers have found that chronic, sustained stress, such as that caused by neglect, abuse, or deprivation,

Early childhood. During the 1990s, the nation was inundated with reports on the importance of the early years on children's brain development and later cognitive achievement. While some of the reports may have overstated the issue and understated the importance of a child's later years on development, evidence suggests that the early years may be a critical period of development in which family poverty has particularly strong effects on young children. As seen in Table 1, poverty occurring early in a child's life (age two to four) is associated with large effects on indices of child school readiness and cognitive outcomes.

Turner, R. Jay, Blair Wheaton, and Donald A. Lloyd. 1995. “The Epidemiology of Social Stress.” American Sociological Review 60:104–25.

Using a sample of 389 healthy children and adolescents from age 4 to 22, psychologist Seth Pollak and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison compared scores on academic achievement tests with tissue volume in select areas of the brain. Researchers placed subjects in a magnetic resonance imaging machine to scan and measure gray matter volume in the temporal lobes, frontal lobes and hippocampus — brain areas that are critical to cognitive processes required for academic success and vulnerable to a

Poverty and how it can affect a child’s education and how attachment with a parental figure can affect a child’s education are two major claims made by Tough. Tough believes in general children who come from stressful environments and insecure attachments tend to do worse in school in comparison to others. Children who are surrounded by stressful situations in their home environment tend to be distracted emotionally, thus leading to their poor performance in school. In an attempt to explain this phenomenon, stress psychologists described how the part of the brain that is critical in self-regulatory, cognitive and emotional responses is the part that is mainly affected by early stress. Using this information, Burke Harris conducted a study where she assigned ACE scores to thousands of patients based on childhood trauma including growing up in an abusive home. Based upon these results, Burke Harris found a powerful correlation relating ACE scores and people’s performance in school (17). In order to make sense of this information, McEwen described

Louis, Missouri conducted a research study on preschool children to investigate the effects of poverty on brain development. They did not have a main research question; however, they wanted to assess parts of the brain, including total white and total cortical gray matter volume, hippocampus and amygdala volumes to see if there were linkages between select areas of the brain and poverty. Based on their assessment, there were two hypotheses. The first hypothesis stated there would be an effect of poverty on brain volume outcomes. The second hypothesis involved variables associated with poverty such as caregiving support, caregiver education, and stressful life events and their relationship to brain volumes and poverty (Luby, 2013). To determine the accuracy and validity of their hypotheses, the researchers performed a longitudinal observational study, which was conducted over a ten year period, along with a brief questionnaire. The research design compared poverty to brain volumes and poverty to outside variables, which is a characteristic of a correlation design as well. The study included one hundred forty-five right-handed children, who were observed at various ages over the ten year span of the study. This study was peer reviewed for its accuracy and credibility and for the importance of its contribution to the field of study as determined by the fact that it was written by

Chronic stress stemming from poverty can cause a setback in the working memory of young adults and decrease the ability for them to store long term information, critically think, comprehend, write and read ( Evans & Shamberg, 2009, p. 6545-6549). Working memory allows individuals to temporarily store information over a certain amount of time and then manipulate that information in order to critically think and produce more ideas and thoughts. Working memory is crucial to a child’s development because it helps them store information for the long term, practice critical thinking

The development of children can depend on many factors, one of the important ones being socioeconomic status (SES). SES can be defined as a multidimensional construct, including measures of social factors such as power, prestige and hierarchical social status, and economic resources (Hackman and Farah, 2009). Child development can be studied from multiple dimensions such as physical, mental, social, and emotional development among others. For the purposes of this study, I will be focusing on how socioeconomic status affects child cognitive development.

The first area I would like to look at is Behavior. In the textbook chapter 2 discusses behavior genetics and heritability. It discusses the relationship between the genetic and the environmental influences using SES as an example on environment as it relates to intelligence. The book states that some studies find middle class families to have higher heritability of intelligence not due to different genes than those in a lower SES but because they have access to greater resources. (Arnett, 2016) Another study used a Family-based training program in lower SES preschoolers. “Children from different socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds display profound disparities in cognitive skills, brain structure and function, and academic outcomes (e.g., refs. 1⇓⇓–4). Because academic disparities associated with SES are increasing in many societies (5), there is strong motivation to develop and implement training programs that can narrow these achievement gaps.” (Neville, et al., 2013) This study did find that the children in the Family-based program showed significant changes in the reduction of problem behavior and improvement in their social skills. The implementation of parent or caregiver