How Developmental Neuroscience Can Help Address the Problem of Child Poverty

Abstract

Nearly 1 in 5 children in the United States lives in a household whose income is below the official federal poverty line, and more than 40% of children live in poor or near-poor households. Research on the effects of poverty on children's development has been a focus of study for many decades and is now increasing as we learn more about the implications of poverty for children. A recent addition to the study of the implications of poverty for children has been the application of neuroscience-based methods. Various techniques including neuroimaging, neuroendocrinology, cognitive psychophysiology, and epigenetics are beginning to document ways in which early experiences of living in poverty affect infant and child brain development. In this paper, we discuss whether there are truly worthwhile reasons for adding neuroscience and related biological methods to study child poverty, and how their use and the knowledge they produce, might help guide developmentally-based and targeted interventions and policies for these children and their families.

Early adversity, stress, and neurobehavioral development

“…Two of the papers in this issue tackle this question. Pollak and Wolfe (this issue) argue that neuroscience measures can be harnessed to not just examine but to address the problem of childhood poverty. They make a number of arguments, but two seem especially pertinent.…”

“…Once identified then we may be able to develop or expand on the tasks that elicited the predictive neural responses and deploy those as more refined and subtle behavioral measures that capture emerging deficits in key capacities. In another section, Pollak and Wolfe (this issue) argue that neural measures might one day allow us to evaluate interventions and policies earlier. This point is related to the first.…”

Maximizing research on the adverse effects of child poverty through consensus measures

“…There are many good reasons for considering neuroscience and related biological methods alongside social science approaches to study child poverty (See Pollak & Wolfe, in press, for extended discussion). For example, it is well‐established that early experiences are critical for shaping many aspects of brain development related to children's behavioral functioning (Birn, Roeber, & Pollak, ; Fox, Levitt, & Nelson, ; Johnson, ; Romens, McDonald, Svaren, & Pollak, ; Wismer Fries, Ziegler, Kurian, Jacoris, & Pollak, ).…”

A Brain Capital Grand Strategy: toward economic reimagination

“…Finally, neuroscience-based public health policies such as early childhood support, nutrition, quality education, jobs, and skills-training are critical to productivity, flourishing, and brain health [22,36,37]. Key findings and advances in neuroscience hold overt potential to improve public policy.…”