Much research has been conducted on what children need to grow up healthy, ready to learn, and to succeed in school. Many aspects of a child's growth and development, family circumstance, and school success have been studied, analyzed, and reported on in an effort to help parents, educators, health care professionals, and policymakers better understand what they can do to assure a child's success. A review of this research reveals two significant circumstances that seem to have the most impact on a child's growth, development, and ultimate educational success: poverty and family interactions. Barring significant birth defects or injury, these two circumstances hold the key to virtually every aspect of a child's life that affects his or her ability to grow up healthy and to learn. However, it must be noted that these two factors overlap in many respects and cannot be viewed in isolation. In addition, while it is recognized that a child's behavior is what is sometimes most disruptive to the family, due to the child's drug abuse, mental illness, disability, or other factors, the focus here is on the effects of outside factors on the growth and development of the otherwise normal, healthy child.
Effects of Poverty on Children
All other things being equal, children living in extreme poverty or below the poverty line for many years have the worst outcomes for health and school success. (The most chronically poor counties in the United States are in rural areas of Appalachia and in the South.) The effects of poverty are multiple and profound. Children who are born into families living in poverty generally do not receive adequate prenatal care. Lack of good nutrition for a pregnant woman can result in a baby that has a low birthweight, is more vulnerable to illness, is underdeveloped, and is likely to require more care, compared to the child of a well-nourished mother. Healthy brain development in children from birth to three years of age is critical in the development of speech and language, coordination, and reasoning. Children who suffer from poor brain development are at high risk for delayed speech and motor skills, neurological disorders, learning disabilities, and
behavior problems.
Children living in poverty do not usually receive proper and timely health care, which can lead to chronic illness, such as asthma, or chronic infections, such as ear infections that can lead to hearing loss. They often do not receive required immunizations, which can delay school entry and lead to serious childhood illnesses. They are also more prone to complications from minor injuries or illnesses. Many mothers living in poverty suffer from depression, making them less able to properly nurture, stimulate, and interact with their children. As a result, their children suffer from neglect, failure to thrive, and decreased brain development.
Poverty frequently means that a family lives in a neighborhood that has a high rate of violence. Housing in these neighborhoods often exposes children to unsafe living conditions, including environmental toxins, poor ventilation, and infestations of rodents and insects. Low-income children have more than triple the risk of lead poisoning, which causes neurological damage and has been linked to lower IQ and long-term behavior problems such as impaired concentration and violence.
Poor families are more likely to be single-parent families with a parent who is young with unstable employment and low earning potential. These parents suffer stress associated with the constant strain of trying to provide adequate food, housing, clothing, and health care for their children. Parents under stress have a more difficult time providing the nurture and support necessary to establish positive bonding, enable speech acquisition, teach problem-solving skills, and promote early learning activities that affect school readiness. Parents living in poverty are more likely to have low educational attainment and less knowledge about early childhood education and brain development in infants. There are generally fewer books, educational toys and games, and outside opportunities for learning, such as family vacations and trips to a museum.
Children living below the poverty line are 1.3 times more likely to experience learning disabilities and developmental delays than are children who are not poor. Children with learning disabilities and developmental delays are more likely to experience school difficulties, and school failure at an early age is a leading indicator in school drop-out rates.
Families living in poverty also experience housing instability. Children who move frequently tend to have fewer friends, experience social isolation, and have higher truancy rates than those who grow up in more stable homes. In addition, social and educational services designed to support families in poverty are disrupted when the family moves frequently. Many families in poverty experience periods of homelessness, which exposes children to communicable diseases and the chaos found in shelters. Homeless children suffer increased rates of illnesses such as diarrhea, asthma, anemia, and infection. Simply being born into poverty affects a child's ability to grow up healthy, to be nurtured in a safe and stable home, to enter school ready to learn, and to remain in school and complete a high school education.
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