Where Bad Things Happen

Child poverty is a public health crisis that no one is talking about.

A dangerous world in the dark

Poverty is different. It looks different, it sounds different — it feels different. You hear sirens and sounds of distress from unstable people. You see a neglected and unsafe world that is largely ignored by the rest of American society. The danger is often not far away for a child living in poverty, and protective factors are scarce.

But scarcity and socioeconomic disadvantages are just the beginning. Chronic poverty is traumatic for a child because they are much more at risk of experiencing abuse and adversity than children who are not living in poverty.

It’s an under-resourced landscape of marginalization where bad things happen.

Growing up in poverty can cause long-term damage and developmental problems and has been strongly linked to many negative life outcomes, including poor academic achievement, increased exposure to violence, neglect, hunger, parental incarceration, substance addiction, mental illness, and even a shorter life expectancy.

Developmental damage

It’s a complex issue — child poverty, and as a society, we often only scratch the surface of what’s happening behind closed doors.

Children living in poverty experience the daily impacts that come easily to mind — hunger, illness, insecurity, instability — but they also are more likely to experience low academic achievement, obesity, behavioral problems and social and emotional development difficulties.

The above is from the American Psychological Association who articulates the discourse on child poverty. Everyone knows a child shouldn’t have to experience hunger due to economic instability, but we don’t talk about how child poverty harms the nervous system and causes life-long consequences.

The New York Times continues the conversation in A Novel Effort to See How Poverty Affects Young Brains, using neuroscience to understand the connection between child poverty and disparities in educational achievement, health, and employment.

Over the past 15 years, dozens of studies have found that children raised in meager circumstances have subtle brain differences compared with children from families of higher means. On average, the surface area of the brain’s outer layer of cells is smaller, especially in areas relating to language and impulse control, as is the volume of a structure called the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning and memory.

Scarcity changes the nervous system. An animal living in an environment with a diminished food supply is under more heightened stress than an animal living in abundance. Poverty does the same thing to humans, especially children.

In the article Poverty as an Adverse Childhood Experience, the North Carolina Medical Journal describes how children living in poverty are more at risk than their peers of experiencing frequent and intense adversities. Protective factors, like safe and stable adults — that buffer a child from the harmful effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)— are also more scarce, which causes toxic stress that can change a child’s neural architecture and result in emotional disorders and cognitive deficits.

Poverty is a strong reinforcing factor in the accumulation of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and subsequent toxic stress correlated with unfavorable health outcomes in adulthood. Being poor is associated with so many childhood adversities that it may be considered an ACE in itself, more pervasive and persistent than all others.

A public health crisis

Nadine Burke Harris describes toxic stress as how ACEs can accumulate, “get under our skin,” and cause long-term damage on biological and even genetic levels in The Deepest Well.

The unsafe conditions of poverty cause the child to be autonomically dysregulated too often and for too long. Since this is a dose-response relationship— the more ACEs a child is exposed to, and the more frequent or severe the exposure is — the more their stress response (commonly known as “flight or fight”) is repeatedly activated, which increases their risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, autoimmune and inflammation disease, substance addiction, poor academic achievement, even early death as well as many other poor health and life outcomes.

While the article in the North Carolina Medical Journal focuses on North Carolina, I believe its conclusion is widely relevant:

we must begin to address child poverty as an ACE and a public health emergency.

A dismissed emergency

So why do we ignore this issue if it’s been identified as a public health emergency? Why are the adverse effects of childhood poverty often not included in intersectional conversations? Why do we tend to reduce it to just a variation in experience in this country when it is, in fact, so traumatizing for children?

It’s because we have been doing it for centuries. Ignoring the tragedies and brutal struggles for people living in poverty is nothing new. The New Yorker talks about Michael Harrington’s book, “The Other America,” released in 1962, that exposes poverty in the U.S. where the poor were described as the “socially invisible”. It is believed that the “War on Poverty” began with the release of Harrington’s groundbreaking release.

What can we do?

Once again, child poverty is a complicated issue but there are poverty alleviation strategies that have been successful. For example, Biden’s child tax credit helped protect 3 million children from poverty in 2021. So, you know, make change by voting for the right policymakers.

Talk about it. Talk about it. Talk about it. Talk about child poverty and the harmful adversity that accompanies it. Why? Because generations of social conditioning has trained us to ignore and justify poverty and minimize its effects on children. We need to stop pretending it’s not there and start appropriately intervening.

Speaking of intervening — we need allies. I know this concept makes people uncomfortable but kids who come from child poverty are more likely to have higher ACE scores, and higher ACE scores increases our risk of a plethora of tragic health and life outcomes. We’re born in tragedy and we die in tragedy, unless we get help. Help will only happen if people care and recognize that someone is vulnerable. I talk more about this in You Don’t Belong Here: The Dangerous and Disconnected World of High ACEs.