We know poverty is stressful, and researchers suggested this week that stress can hamper a child’s brain development, creating memory problems that last into adulthood.
The research tackles one of the critical challenges in early learning, understanding and closing the income-achievement gap that prevents many poor students from starting school at the same level as others.
This time, though, scientists explored the biological impact of stress caused by poverty and reached a startling conclusion.
“We hypothesize that a plausible contributor to the income–achievement gap is working memory impairments in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood” researchers wrote in Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory.
The Washington Post made it even clearer when it broke the story on Monday:
Now, research is providing what could be crucial clues to explain how childhood poverty translates into dimmer chances of success: Chronic stress from growing up poor appears to have a direct impact on the brain, leaving children with impairment in at least one key area – working memory. – Research Links Poor Kids' Stress, Brain Impairment.
The study raises the idea of quality early learning as an anti-poverty tool to a new level. If you can lower stress on poor families, you might preserve a critical skill their kids will need to avoid poverty when they are adults.
It also fuels the idea that early learning extends far beyond the classroom to parent coaches, doulas, job training targeted to moms and dads, and other efforts that help alleviate the biological impact of this stress on working memory.
Why do we care about working memory?
“Working memory is essential to language comprehension, reading, and problem solving, and it is a critical prerequisite for long-term storage of information,” researchers wrote. “We integrated research from 2 research areas, neurocognition and physiological stress, to demonstrate that the greater the duration of childhood poverty from birth to age 13 years, the worse one’s working memory as a young adult,” they added later in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This research seems overdue, since we have known for generations living in poverty is stressful.