Researchers claim to have shown for the first time that “the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.” A University of California, Berkeley study shows that normal 9- and 10-year-olds “differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.”
“Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult,” says Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. “We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response.” He adds:
This is a wake-up call. It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.
This is reversable, he cautions. “It’s not a life sentence,” Knight emphasizes. A news release on the study alludes to the well-known 1995 Hart-Risley word gap study, which shows children from poor families hear 30 million fewer words by the time they are four than do kids from middle-class families.
“In work that we and others have done, it really looks like something as simple and easily done as talking to your kids” can boost prefrontal cortex performance, notes W. Thomas Boyce, a pediatrician and UC Berkeley professor emeritus. “We are certainly not blaming lower socioeconomic families for not talking to their kids – there are probably a zillion reasons why that happens,” he said. “But changing developmental outcomes might involve something as accessible as helping parents to understand that it is important that kids sit down to dinner with their parents, and that over the course of that dinner it would be good for there to be a conversation and people saying things to each other.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The rich are different.
