Poverty Gets Hard-Wired into a Baby's Brain

If you've ever taken care of an infant, you know the big leaps they take every day. They roll over and then sit up, they scoot and then crawl, they creep and then walk. "Goo goo, ga ga" turns into words like "milk" and "blankie." Within a year, a baby goes from a tiny, helpless being to a walking, talking little person.

But kids in poverty? They don't make that kind of progress, a new study shows.

We know kids in poverty have worse outcomes over the long-haul: lower employment rates, bad health, poor education, and less chance of moving up the class ladder in the U.S.

But they don't just end up behind. They start out behind.

The study, released in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics showed that children who face more hardship were less likely to have normal developmental progress. They achieve their milestones more slowly than more affluent kids, or maybe not at all. Not having reliable nutritious food, stable housing or conditions like too much noise or no heat take a serious toll on young children.

The good news is that young children are very flexible. These developmental delays, if caught early, can usually be rectified. But most of these kids don't have access to those kinds of resources, and many of their parents don't even know there's a problem.

As poverty rises among families with young children, more and more kids are at risk. Once these kids get to school many of these deprivations are already hard-wired into their brains.

"We know that deprivations in early life can become biologically embedded, forcing children onto negative trajectories that jeopardize their health, their school readiness and their ability to earn a living as adults," said researcher Deborah Frank, a pediatrician at Boston Medical Center. "We also know that the remedies for many of these hardships are within reach if our society chooses to prescribe them."

The remedies are within reach. We can make sure that every kid in our communities has access to warm, stable housing, nutritious food and a safe environment.

We can't control what a child will grow up to be. But, in our land of opportunity, we should nurture the potential they were born with, rather than hold them back before they can even dream of what they will become.

Photo credit: Michael (mx5tx)