Childhood poverty and adult psychological well-being

Abstract

Childhood disadvantage has repeatedly been linked to adult physical morbidity and mortality. We show in a prospective, longitudinal design that childhood poverty predicts multimethodological indices of adult (24 y of age) psychological well-being while holding constant similar childhood outcomes assessed at age 9. Adults from low-income families manifest more allostatic load, an index of chronic physiological stress, higher levels of externalizing symptoms (e.g., aggression) but not internalizing symptoms (e.g., depression), and more helplessness behaviors. In addition, childhood poverty predicts deficits in adult short-term spatial memory.childhood disadvantage | psychological health | stress | helplessness | memory A n increasingly large body of work in public health and medicine reveals that childhood disadvantage is prospectively linked to adult physical morbidity and mortality (1-4). Moreover, early disadvantage may shape the long-term health trajectories of individuals in ways that are difficult to dislodge by subsequent upward social mobility. The present study builds upon and extends this life-course research on childhood disadvantage and adult physical health in two respects. First, we investigate psychological rather than physical health outcomes among adults as a function of childhood poverty. We examine multimethodological indices of adult psychological adjustment including mental health symptoms, short-term memory, helplessness behavior, and allostatic load. Second, because we have measures of these constructs early in childhood, we conduct prospective, longitudinal analyses, testing whether adults from more disadvantaged backgrounds manifest lower levels of psychological well-being 15 y later, independently of childhood well-being assessed at age 9.Thus, several measures of psychological well-being were investigated between ages 9 and 24 in relation to childhood poverty. The first of these, short-term memory, describes the number of bits of information individuals can hold in immediate memory. Short-term memory capacity is important because it influences the encoding of information into long-term memory and is associated with cognitive development among children (5, 6). Cross-sectional studies with elementary school children in two different samples reveal a positive association between household SES and shortterm memory span (7,8), and a field experiment shows that Mexican preschool children in households randomly receiving cash transfers of differing amounts, conditional on healthcare utilization and school attendance, yields a positive cash transfer dose-response for short-term memory (9). An important shortcoming in the poverty and memory literature is the paucity of longitudinal data, and no studies have investigated childhood SES and adult short-term memory.An aspect of psychological health that has garnered little attention in the poverty literature is helplessness. Disadvantaged children face a plethora of uncontrollable psychosocial (e.g., family turmoil) and physical (e.g., substandard ho...

How Adults’ Actions, Outcomes, and Testimony Affect Preschoolers’ Persistence

“…Across studies, children's persistence in the Success and Baseline conditions had high variance. This may arise from a number of factors, including stable individual differences in susceptibility to modeling, mindsets about the relationship between effort and outcome, differences in the child's estimate of their own self-efficacy with respect to the task, socioeconomic and cultural influences, as well as more transient factors such as the child's mood, fatigue, and opportunity costs with respect to other activities they could engage in (Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007;Dweck, 2006;Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van Ijzendoorn, 2011;Evans, 2016;Evans, Gonnella, Marcynyszyn, Gentile, & Salpekar, 2005). We showed effects of adult models, outcomes, and testimony when randomizing across these factors, but future studies might look at how these factors interact with children's learning about effort from adult models and testimony.…”

Linking financial hardship throughout the life-course with psychological distress in old age: Sensitive period, accumulation of risks, and chain of risks hypotheses

“…How childhood conditions impact later health is not fully understood. For example, some studies have found a direct association between childhood socioeconomic position and mental health later on (Evans 2016;Fors et al 2009), whereas others have found the effect to be mediated through other factors, such as education and income (Quesnel-Vallée & Taylor 2012;Laaksonen et al 2007;Berndt & Fors 2015). In the current study, which used a model that simultaneously tested the sensitive period, chains of risks, and accumulation of risks hypotheses, financial hardship in childhood was independently associated with psychological distress in old age at follow-up 2 (changes from age 61 to 70) but not follow-up 3 (age 81).…”

“…In 1994, Duncan and colleagues found that family income and poverty were strongly associated with cognitive development and behavior of children (Duncan et al 1994). Growing up in poverty was found to affect children's short-term memory, feelings of mastery and helplessness, psychological stress (allostatic load), and externalizing symptoms that have impact on future life (Evans 2016). In addition, if a family becomes poor during one's upbringing affect socioemotional behavioral problems in adolescence (Wickham et al 2017).…”

Understanding child disadvantage from a social determinants perspective

“…Given the ubiquity of child inequities,4 12 and continuing discussion about how adversity impacts development,40 our framework is likely to be of international interest. The indicators used to populate this framework are commonly collected within population-based cohorts, such as the Millennium Cohort Study (UK) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (USA).…”