About Poverty & Children
Facts on Children in Poverty:
About 15 million children in the U.S. – 21% of all children –live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold.
Most of these children have parents who work, but low wage leave their families struggling to make ends meet.
Children represent 33% of the nations' poor.
Poverty can impede children’s ability to learn and contribute to social, emotional, and behavioral problems.
Poverty also can contribute to poor physical health and poor mental health.
Risks are greatest for children who experience poverty when they are young and/or experience deep and persistent poverty.
Research is clear that poverty is the single greatest threat to children’s well-being.
Attachment can be affected by Poverty's far-reaching effects. Just as physical health is compromised from poverty, so is social-emotional, cognitive, and academic outcomes. Conversely, as these outcomes can affect attachment, so does attachment ultimately affect these areas of a human being throughout the lifespan.
About 15 million children in the U.S. – 21% of all children –live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold.
Most of these children have parents who work, but low wage leave their families struggling to make ends meet.
Children represent 33% of the nations' poor.
Poverty can impede children’s ability to learn and contribute to social, emotional, and behavioral problems.
Poverty also can contribute to poor physical health and poor mental health.
Risks are greatest for children who experience poverty when they are young and/or experience deep and persistent poverty.
Research is clear that poverty is the single greatest threat to children’s well-being.
Attachment can be affected by Poverty's far-reaching effects. Just as physical health is compromised from poverty, so is social-emotional, cognitive, and academic outcomes. Conversely, as these outcomes can affect attachment, so does attachment ultimately affect these areas of a human being throughout the lifespan.
Social class has a profound impact on every variable that influences an individual's physical and psychological growth and development including educational attainment, occupational aspirations, lifestyles, how children select friends, choice of activities, and social roles. The environment in which a child grows affects their ability to develop healthy attachments.
How many children are affected?
◆ 45 percent of children under age 3 years—5.2 million— live in low-income families
◆ 42 percent of children ages 3 through 17 years—25.4 million—live in low-income families
How does does poverty and attachment impact today's classrooms and schools?
Social behavior in the schools
The complex web of social relationships students experience—with peers, adults in the school, and family members—exerts a much greater influence on their behavior than researchers had previously assumed. This process starts with students' core relationships with parents or primary caregivers in their lives, which form a personality that is either secure and attached or insecure and unattached. Securely attached children typically behave better in school.
Once students are in school, the factors of socialization and social status contribute significantly to behavior. The process of socialization in schools often pressures students to be like their peers- or be at risk for social rejection.
Socioeconomic status constructs a large part of this equation. Children raised in poverty rarely choose to behave differently, but they are faced daily with overwhelming challenges that affluent children never have to confront.
Their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions in ways that downplay good performance in school.
Academic Performance in the Schools
Interestingly, academic performance is not only hindered by poverty, but also by the social and emotional responses of children that are poor. By contrast, children that are not in poverty typically develop strong, secure relationships that help stabilize children's behavior and provide the core guidance needed to build lifelong social skills. Children who grow up with such relationships learn healthy, appropriate emotional responses to everyday situations.
But children raised in poor households often fail to learn these appropriate responses, to the detriment of their school performance. For instance, students with emotional dysregulation may get so easily frustrated that they do not persevere on a task when success was just around the corner.
As a result, social dysfunction may inhibit students' ability to work well in cooperative groups, quite possibly leading to their rejection by group members who believe they aren't "doing their part” or "pulling their weight”.
This exclusion and the accompanying decrease in collaboration and exchange of information exacerbate at-risk students' already shaky academic performance and behavior.
Very important to learning, and laying foundations to later school performance, is that of language learning. Beginning at the preschool level, inattention from care providers has a huge impact on the child's developing language skills and future IQ scores. By age 3, the children of professional parents were adding words to their vocabularies at about twice the rate of children in welfare families. Interestingly, both the quantity and the quality of phrases directed at the children by caregivers are correlated directly with income levels. A pattern of slow vocabulary growth helped put in place a delayed cognitive pattern by the time children turned 3. In fact, IQ tests performed later in childhood showed that welfare students' scores falling behind those of the more affluent children by up to 29 percent. Parents of low socioeconomic status are also less likely to tailor their conversations to inspire thoughtful and logical responses from their children.
Going hand in hand with language acquisition, reading is one of the most important factors affecting the development of a child's brain. Reading skills are not hardwired into the human brain; every subskill of reading, including phonological awareness, fluency, vocabulary, phonics, and comprehension, must be explicitly taught. This teaching requires attention, focus, and motivation from the primary caregiver. The time and expertise to make this happen in the home environment, are unfortunately in short supply among poor families. Evidence suggests that poverty adversely alters the building of the developing reading brain.
Standardized intelligence tests show a correlation between poverty and lower cognitive achievement, and low-SES kids often earn below-average scores in reading, math, and science and demonstrate poor writing skills. However, effects of poverty are not automatic or fixed. Yet they often set in motion a vicious cycle of low expectations.
Poor academic performance often leads to lowered expectations, which can become a downward undermining of children's overall self-esteem.
This poses significant challenges in the lives of children in classrooms and schools across the nation.
◆ 45 percent of children under age 3 years—5.2 million— live in low-income families
◆ 42 percent of children ages 3 through 17 years—25.4 million—live in low-income families
How does does poverty and attachment impact today's classrooms and schools?
Social behavior in the schools
The complex web of social relationships students experience—with peers, adults in the school, and family members—exerts a much greater influence on their behavior than researchers had previously assumed. This process starts with students' core relationships with parents or primary caregivers in their lives, which form a personality that is either secure and attached or insecure and unattached. Securely attached children typically behave better in school.
Once students are in school, the factors of socialization and social status contribute significantly to behavior. The process of socialization in schools often pressures students to be like their peers- or be at risk for social rejection.
Socioeconomic status constructs a large part of this equation. Children raised in poverty rarely choose to behave differently, but they are faced daily with overwhelming challenges that affluent children never have to confront.
Their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions in ways that downplay good performance in school.
Academic Performance in the Schools
Interestingly, academic performance is not only hindered by poverty, but also by the social and emotional responses of children that are poor. By contrast, children that are not in poverty typically develop strong, secure relationships that help stabilize children's behavior and provide the core guidance needed to build lifelong social skills. Children who grow up with such relationships learn healthy, appropriate emotional responses to everyday situations.
But children raised in poor households often fail to learn these appropriate responses, to the detriment of their school performance. For instance, students with emotional dysregulation may get so easily frustrated that they do not persevere on a task when success was just around the corner.
As a result, social dysfunction may inhibit students' ability to work well in cooperative groups, quite possibly leading to their rejection by group members who believe they aren't "doing their part” or "pulling their weight”.
This exclusion and the accompanying decrease in collaboration and exchange of information exacerbate at-risk students' already shaky academic performance and behavior.
Very important to learning, and laying foundations to later school performance, is that of language learning. Beginning at the preschool level, inattention from care providers has a huge impact on the child's developing language skills and future IQ scores. By age 3, the children of professional parents were adding words to their vocabularies at about twice the rate of children in welfare families. Interestingly, both the quantity and the quality of phrases directed at the children by caregivers are correlated directly with income levels. A pattern of slow vocabulary growth helped put in place a delayed cognitive pattern by the time children turned 3. In fact, IQ tests performed later in childhood showed that welfare students' scores falling behind those of the more affluent children by up to 29 percent. Parents of low socioeconomic status are also less likely to tailor their conversations to inspire thoughtful and logical responses from their children.
Going hand in hand with language acquisition, reading is one of the most important factors affecting the development of a child's brain. Reading skills are not hardwired into the human brain; every subskill of reading, including phonological awareness, fluency, vocabulary, phonics, and comprehension, must be explicitly taught. This teaching requires attention, focus, and motivation from the primary caregiver. The time and expertise to make this happen in the home environment, are unfortunately in short supply among poor families. Evidence suggests that poverty adversely alters the building of the developing reading brain.
Standardized intelligence tests show a correlation between poverty and lower cognitive achievement, and low-SES kids often earn below-average scores in reading, math, and science and demonstrate poor writing skills. However, effects of poverty are not automatic or fixed. Yet they often set in motion a vicious cycle of low expectations.
Poor academic performance often leads to lowered expectations, which can become a downward undermining of children's overall self-esteem.
This poses significant challenges in the lives of children in classrooms and schools across the nation.