Take care of the children – demand a promotion!
Poverty sharpens the brainPyotr Smirnov, "Newspaper.
The connecting link in this logical chain is the constant physiological stress, undermining the already weak child's body.
Fate in a certain form can even be a completely "scientific" concept: genes and various factors inherited largely determine further development. And here future parents have something to work on – often the cause of mutations and subsequent developmental anomalies is precisely the lifestyle and habits of older people.
Moreover, even the social status and well-being that contribute to the development of the child plays a certain role, at least in Western culture. In particular, good earnings of parents are reliably associated with health, education and, in turn, the situation of their children.
Poverty, on the contrary, leads to constant physiological stress, a decrease in working memory and poor academic performance in kindergarten and school.
Gary Evans and Michelle Shambarg from Cornell University were by no means the first to establish a causal relationship between poor financial situation and low academic performance of children. Their predecessors even managed to find a suffering intermediate link – "working memory", where our brain places new facts either for processing – solving some task, or in order to then redirect them to storage in long-term memory.
There is no doubt that this value is decisive in the learning process. As for the second part of the logical chain, the psychologist Marta Farah four years ago published data on a significant difference in the size of working memory in children and adolescents from families with low and medium socio-economic status.
But the presence of correlation does not prove the existence of a causal relationship.
Firstly, everything can be attributed to heredity – in this case, poverty will only be a demonstration that parents do not have sufficient intelligence to get out of the line established by the American government (it was used in all works as a selection criterion).
Secondly, if we assume that poverty is still the reason for the decline in working memory, then the mechanism of this connection is unclear, which may be malnutrition, poor home conditions, and even poor-quality medical care, not to mention the characteristic environment in kindergarten and school.
According to the authors of the publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Gary W. Evans and Michelle A. Schamberg, Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory), a potential link may be chronic physiological stress.
Scientists measured several indicators characterizing the load on the body at rest: blood pressure, mass-growth index and the level of cortisol, adrenaline and norepinephrine. The total index of the so-called "allostatic load" was higher in children and adolescents living below the poverty line.
Evans and Shambarg believe that this is what affects working memory, because fluctuations in hormones and blood pressure do not affect the development of the nervous system in the best way. Moreover, the duration of stay below the poverty line is significantly related to the health of children. Of course, the chain "poverty – physiological stress – low working memory – low academic performance, etc." looks much more attractive from the point of view of common sense than the reverse, but another option is not excluded: the same factor can affect health and memory, in which case it should also be associated with success and parents' earnings.
So far, the only contender for this remains the vagus nerve, the tone of which correlates with health, life expectancy, material and social status, and even race (see A small mutation of one gene – huge consequences for the whole person).
But the Evans chain (poverty – stress – memory) has one undeniable advantage: the absence of inherited factors. So, "poverty is not a vice" and with due diligence, you can still get away from fate, breaking this vicious circle in time.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru31.03.2009