Two recent scientific studies on poverty and the brain provide compelling rationales for anti-poverty policies and interventions for children. In August, researchers published a study in the Journal of Science showing that people living in poverty spend so much brainpower trying to deal with financial problems like paying the bills, making a bag of groceries stretch for a week, and keeping their housing, that takes away brain energy to devote to other activities. The researchers asked people what they would do if their car needed a $150 or $1,500 repair. Before answering the question, the researchers gave the subjects a series of cognitive tests; for example, identify a sequence of shapes or numbers. When the amount of repair on the car was only $150, poor and rich people performed the same on the tests. However, when the repair was $1,500 poor people did much worse than rich people on these tests.
The basic point the research brings across is that just asking people who are poor to think about financial problems meant they had less brainpower left to devote to other tasks. When you don’t have an extra $1,500 saved for emergencies and don’t make that much money to begin with, you have to think long and hard about what expenses to cut and what resources you have to meet this unexpected expense. Doing this mental calculation takes serious brainpower, which leaves little brainpower for other life problems. Not to say that all people don’t encounter financial problems, but when you’re poor, financial problems are part of everyday life and every decision you make.
Although most children don’t have car repairs and are not balancing budgets, financial stress increases the likelihood of other stressful situations in the home like domestic violence and substance abuse. For parents, worries about financial problems means that they have less mental energy to devote to their children, to finding a job, or going back to school – all the things that we encourage poor people to do in order to lift themselves and their children out of poverty.
In the second study, researchers focused directly on how living in poverty in childhood affects the brain in adulthood. Published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that children who grew up poor had impaired brain function as adults. You could say that their brain was now wired differently to deal with life’s problems. The researchers followed a group of children from the age of 9 through their early 20s. When the children were 24 years old, researchers scanned their brains to see how they regulated their emotions and managed stress. Brain scans showed that the adults who had been poor when they were nine years old had more problems regulating their emotions. The results did not change when researchers controlled for income when the subjects were 24 years old; what seemed to matter to adult brain function was the subject’s family’s income at the age of 9. Essentially, early childhood poverty really stays with you all your life. It doesn’t mean you are going to be poor, but it matters. Now, imagine a child who grows up poor and who is now as an adult raising their children in poverty. Multi-generational poverty can really deplete a family’s ability to cope and also increase the likelihood of other stressful situations in the home.
This research brings home the importance of policies that lift children out of poverty early on in life.