“I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told.” — Paul Simon
Photo: www.urbanministries.org

It seems we are slowly starting to unveil what constructs the “person” that each of us become. Will she be an extrovert, a success story, a victim of poverty or an intellectual? These questions are on the forefront of nearly all parent’s minds, and it seems we are getting closer to figuring out just what constitutes who we are. Now, before I discuss the topic of poverty, let me set the stage for this discussion.

I subscribe to the theory that our consciousness is the sum-total of our entire neuronal network. The formation of memories, the pathways and associations for processing information, the concentration of activity in differing regions of the brain and the individualized balance of neurotransmitters all add up to how we think, behave, interact and love. I believe that is what consciousness is. With that being said, it is not a surprise that researchers are finding out that extreme situations and/or events in our early life, when the brain is still developing, can wreck havoc on our future adult self.

A while back, I wrote an article about how childhood depression may be a major factor in the seemingly ramped up cases of ADD/ADHD. Here is a quote from the article:

… How we feel and perceive the “world” around us affects our neural chemistry and physiology. While reading a published article from EurekAlert!, “an online, global news service operated by AAAS, the science society,” about depression and its affects on nearly the entire spectrum of chemistry and physiology, one can just imagine the impacts depression could have on a developing brain. It is said in the article:

“The areas of the brain that are most affected by the changes caused by depression are the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus, which are central to emotion, memory and learning. Structural and functional changes as a consequence of stress and/or major depression are a reduction in volume, neuronal size and density, associated with changes in cerebral blood flow and glucose metabolism (see figure 1). In addition, there is a reduced density of glial support cells that are instrumental in the communication between nerve cells, which is particularly relevant to the reduced volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. The shrinkage might explain some of the emotional changes observed in people with depression.” …

In another article by Scientific America titled “Bored?” mentions a trial that researched people’s ability to focus or “pay attention” and its relationship with their Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS). Here is what they found:

“The researchers found that the students who were prone to memory lapses and attention failures scored relatively high on the BPS. What is more, statistical models suggested that attention failures underlay the elevated scores for boredom proneness as well as for depression—an illness that shares documented similarities with boredom, including a negative mood and loss of meaning in life, Cheyne says. A chronic inability to focus on activities may render them effectively meaningless, the researchers surmise. “Attention is the common link between lack of meaning, depression and boredom,” Cheyne says.” …

Fast-forward to the present, and we now have more research that is starting to back up this theory and relating it to why poverty seems to be passed from generation to generation even when opportunities to climb out of such destitution present themselves. It’s well known that depression, stress and illness are all strongly correlated with poverty, but what most don’t realize is that these psychological and physical states permanently alter a young child’s brain. It now looks as though working memory is added to already saddening list of neuronal damage.

The Economist.com reports that 17 year olds that come from poverty have an 11% reduction in working memory compared to their middle-class counterparts. Working memory, aka. short-term memory, is vital to many daily functions that make people competent and successful in their lives. This decline in working memory was directly proportionate to the “[measured] amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life … ” Here is what they had to say:

That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain. Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the “remodelling” of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.

Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same circumstances on their own children.

Dr Evans’s 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 bottom line to all of this research is we need to be more considerate to the amount of stress to which we subject our children. We need to address many things in our culture, and one of the most important is our stance on birth control, abortion and adoption. We cannot continue to ignore the fact that the poor, on average, have more children than the middle class and wealthy. This only exacerbates the problem. These poor children grow up and have children that are stressed, depressed and socially deprived. Then their children’s children have children …

The second problem, in my honest opinion, could very well be the capitalistic and individualistic society of America. Like Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, “Greed, for a lack of a better term, is good!” My response to that may be, “Okay, for those in business, but what about those not in business?” What about the retired? The sick? The disabled? But, most importantly, the youth? They don’t benefit from it at all. It forces whomever they depend on to work longer and harder to “keep up.” As greed becomes the top priority in this country, our children and those less fortunate, become damaged goods.

We are making our children sick; we’re lessening their chances for success, happiness and love. We need to bring these issues to the forefront and create policies addressing how we, as a society, will try to avoid the perpetuation of our society’s ills. If not, we will collapse under our own stupidity.

There is no better time than the present. We have already voted for change.