“Early childhood is more than a time to prepare for school, but also a time to reduce stress levels caused by economic hardship,” began Jack Shonkoff, Director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. “New research shows that stress during early childhood gets translated into the bodies and organ systems [of the child] and continues to be expressed into adulthood.”
It is not news that children that grow up under economically difficult conditions struggle to thrive in adulthood. However, a panel of scientists, convened at the February meeting of the AAAS in San Diego Calif., has added a new twist to this story. The panel consisting of a pediatrician, an economist, a social scientist, and a neurologist tackled the question of how poverty in the first five years of life impacts how the body functions for the rest of the person’s life.
This approach usurps the Nature versus Nurture debate because it shows how early childhood stress affects biological development. “This is a revolution in viewing how stress is reflected in the body using epigenetic expression of DNA,” said Shonkoff. “By comparing social studies and neurological studies, it is possible to track how these effects propagate throughout the body through time,” said Katherine Magneson, University of Wisconsin Madison School of Social Work.
This study is important because the panel now feels there is a strong correlation to early childhood stress and adult productivity. In this case productivity is defined as the number of work hours performed per year.
“The biology is telling us maybe the reason we are not getting the bigger bang for our buck economically is that there are other factors affecting success — physiological impediments are preventing childhood learning, including brain circuitry connections, cardiovascular development, metabolic development, and immune functions,” said Thomas Boyce M.D., professor of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
“It may be possible to isolate economic components of poverty that affect children and reduce these stressors simply by changing the income level of low economic earners slightly,” said Greg Duncan of the University of California, Irvine. This concept combined with policy changes could greatly affect the productivity of future generations.
“We examined policy changes that put more money into the pockets of economically struggling families,” said Magneson. Normally, social policies do not take into account the age of a child. “This research suggests that we should be particularly sensitive to the early childhood years,” concludes Magneson. “Increasing the income of a struggling family with a young child by $3,000 can have meaningful effects.”
It is important to remember that this is not a magic number. According to Duncan, “increasing a struggling family’s income by $1,000, $3,000, or $5,000 was all shown to be beneficial.” Magneson warns that this is not a quick-fix approach like a magic pill to this problem, but this work is a way to explore and understand how to relieve stress from social experiences to help children develop into more productive adults.
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