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New studies claim that the stress that the poor inevitably suffer adversely impacts children’s working memory, causing them to be under-achievers in later life and thus remain poor
The Economist’s latest print edition April 2, 2009, carries an article under the title ‘I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told’ which might have special significance for India, where according to latest reports from the World Food Programme, more than 455 million Indians survive on US$1.25 a day or less, compared with 420 million in 1981. The Economist report states that one of the enduring problems of modern society is that children of the poor under-achieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves. The Economist refers to two important studies: “The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use -- the digits of a phone number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading, and for solving problems. Entry into the working memory is also a prerequisite for something to be learnt permanently as part of declarative memory -- the stuff a person knows explicitly, like the dates of famous battles, rather than what he knows implicitly, like how to ride a bicycle. “Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail. As they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.” Dr Evans’ and Dr Schamberg’s study followed the participants -- 195 men and women, about equal in number, all white, from New York State -- from birth, enabling them to estimate what proportion of each child’s life had been spent in poverty. To measure the amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life, they used a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and body-mass index, a measure of obesity. For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class. The researchers found that those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle. The Economist adds: “Dr Evans’ and Dr Schamberg’s study does not examine the nature of the stress that the children of the poor are exposed to, but it is now well established that poor adults live stressful lives, and not just for the obvious reason that poverty brings uncertainty about the future. The main reason poor people are stressed is that they are at the bottom of the social heap as well as the financial one.” The article also refers to Sir Michael Marmot of University College London and his intellectual successors, who have shown repeatedly that people at the bottom of social hierarchies experience much more stress in their daily lives than those at the top -- and suffer the consequences in their health. Even quite young children are socially sensitive beings and aware of such things. Source: The Economist, April 2, 2009
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