Pervasive social and material inequalities, combined with theories of economic self-regulation, have led to the view that the poor themselves are primarily to blame for poverty, as they are unable to work, make bad decisions, and are subject to vice and laziness. Which group one belongs to determines one’s access to the resources of life in the broadest sense of the word, from education to water and even air. Poverty, research has shown, is one type of stress that restructures the human brain in this fatal way. People from poor families often have a harder time controlling their emotions – as do those who suffer from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Self-education, learning new skills, and any intellectual activity in general – the more people load the brain with such work, the more active and “younger” it is.
The most unprotected group of people are children, and when it comes to poverty, they are doubly vulnerable: Human cubs are forced to be born with an unformed brain. It can be compared to open code, which users adjust to themselves. The environment, emotional state and character of speech of people around, peculiarities of nutrition, variety of toys – all this influences the structure and work of the brain of the future adult. Not only genetics determines the peculiarities of the development of this most complex organ, but also environmental factors: toxic substances, poor diet, the use of drugs and drugs by parents, social deprivation and domestic violence. All of these signs are more characteristic of life in and around the poverty line.
In addition to these, there are other stressors: the parents’ hard work or frequent job changes, regular food shortages, limited access to necessary medicines, unemployment and homelessness.
According to data obtained by American scientists, the brain volume of members of a family with an income of 1.5 minimum standards is 3-4% smaller, and for children living below the poverty line, this lag reaches 10% (Wise, 2016). A difficult financial situation affects the frontal lobe, which controls attention, emotion regulation and learning processes, the temporal zone, which is important for learning speech, and the hippocampus, which allows information to be processed and remembered. Researchers attribute about 20% of the responsibility for poor and impoverished children’s poor academic performance solely to an environment that slows brain maturation.
The poor person, because of this cognitive overload, may find it difficult not only to plan financial behavior, get an education and think strategically – but also to educate their children, shaping their brains against the patterns of poverty. Affluent parents, on the other hand, will find it all easy: asking leading questions, involving the child in decision-making, listening to his desires, letting him explore and overwhelming mom and dad with endless “how?”, “why?”, “why?”, teaching him to curb impulses in exchange for long-term rewards (Wise, 2016). Science shows that financial hardship can physically rob us of the ability to do the right and reasonable thing. Thus, poverty reproduces itself for generations at the level of brain structure and epigenetic traits.
Growing up in poverty can change the way our brains work through neuro-management and training – but this is very difficult to achieve without transforming the environment around us, making it friendlier, more empowering and stimulating to learn. If training the brain is in the realm of personal responsibility, then changing the environment and eliminating enormous inequalities is clearly a collective task. Because of discoveries in the field of neuroplasticity today, it should not be seen in the context of charity, but in terms of social necessity and the common good.
Poverty has a profound effect on a child’s education; it starts early. Children born into poverty are less likely to read to their parents. One study found that 61% of families living in poverty have no children’s books at home (Wise, 2016). These children enter kindergarten with 50% less vocabulary than their peers, and that is just the beginning. Public schools in the U.S. get most of their funding from property taxes, and in most cases, families have no way to send their children to school outside of the neighborhood in which they live (Wise, 2016). This means that children living in poorer neighborhoods are forced to go to underfunded, often overcrowded, dysfunctional schools with high teacher absenteeism rates and generally low expectations of their students.
Families living in poverty are almost always food insecure. Free and reduced-price lunches are available in most schools for children whose families earn less than a certain annual income. Free breakfast is becoming more common, but is not yet available everywhere and this meal is only available on school days. The foods they have access to are often unhealthy. Fat, sodium and preservatives increase the shelf life, which makes foods cheaper.
Poor children often do not have access to quality health care, so they are sicker and more likely to miss school. Poor children are less likely to have well-fitting, weather-appropriate clothes that are not only uncomfortable and distracting, but also make them more susceptible to injury, illness and bullying. Poor children are socially ostracized because they cannot afford to participate in extracurricular activities and do not have all the cool toys and tech gadgets that other kids have. They often come from families that are not educated enough themselves and are ill-equipped to help with homework. They are likely to have seen or experienced several traumatic events, which pretty much guarantees that they will develop PTSD, but they do not have the resources to get the treatment and support they need They are likely to be wrongly labeled as having “behavioral problems” or learning disabilities because they do not have adequate coping strategies for stress.
Tests conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania showed that preschoolers from poor families have two crucial neurocognitive functions – language and executive function (which is responsible for making decisions and choosing which stimuli to respond to) – that perform markedly worse than middle-class peers. Researchers also tested older children, in elementary and middle school – the gap in the performance of these systems persisted. That is, poorer children have underdeveloped specific brain areas “responsible” for language skills and situational awareness, namely the prefrontal cortex and areas of the left hemisphere around the lateral sulcus (Wise, 2016). Areas on which memory depends are poorly developed. The researchers did not find a similarly pronounced difference in the activity of other systems – visual and spatial thinking.
The two most important external factors that make those growing up in poverty get smarter are purely social. Such children lack the right cognitive stimuli – books, toys, movies and, yes, parental attention. Life at the lower rungs of the social hierarchy is full of vicissitudes and unpleasant emotions. Neuropsychologists have found that a stimulus-poor environment (such as a lack of toys) negatively affects the brain’s language system, and stress affects memory.
When people try to build a wall between our children and poorer children, they unknowingly widen the mental gap associated with wealth inequality. They deprive children from poorer families of the important cognitive stimulus of communicating with their more advanced peers, and create additional stress by provoking social hostility. If we don’t do this, and take it for granted that everyone learns and plays together in public school, we can hope that the world in which our children will live will not be as wolfish as it is now. They would not have to spend their lives hiding behind fences, playing in ghettos, moving around their city as if they were behind enemy lines.
Reference
Wise, P. H. (2016). Child poverty and the promise of human capacity: Childhood as a foundation for healthy aging. Academic pediatrics, 16(3), S37-S45.