Stress of Poverty on the Body L ow socioeconomic status is generally believed to be linked to poor health, and many people assume that poor people have made unhealthy lifestyle decisions. However, stress seems to be the primary culprit for the health toll that poverty takes on both children and adults. It starts early in children’s lives and has consequences that continue through adulthood. Because of greater than common worries about money, the American Psychological Association states, “Poverty creates a ‘context of stress’ in which conflict, family violence, food insecurity, and residential mobility (to name a few) are also commonplace. We refer to this type of stress as poverty-related stress (PRS). In addition to the increased volume of stressors created by poverty’s context of stress, poverty amplifies the negative effects of all types of stress so that PRS impairs an individual’s ability to mount a response to new threats and challenges.” Our mental processing is finite, which is why we aren’t as sharp at the end of a long day. The limited brain power caused by poverty is likely to create a series of problems in handling everyday tasks, affecting areas such as awareness, decision- making, memory, patience, and focus, according to the Best Psychology Degrees blog. Poverty also damages self-worth—giving the perception of being inferior to people of a higher socioeconomic status and feeling that a person is not in control of his or her life. Children receive the brunt of poverty’s assault on mental health, suffering from the cumulative effect of the trauma of poverty: “becoming at-risk for poor health; impaired learning; and disrupted cognitive, emotional, and physical development. Kids in low-income communities face significantly more adverse experiences and environmental factors than children from a 14 WWW.CITYGATENETWORK.ORG MAY/JUNE 2019  On average, families need an income equal to about two times the federal poverty threshold to meet their most basic needs.  The percentage of low­income children under age 18 is greater than the percentage of low­income adults. In addition, children are more than twice as likely as adults 65 years and older to be poor.  Children are less likely to live in a low­income or poor family if their parents have higher education. Of children having at least one parent with some college or additional education, 28 percent live in low­income families and 11 percent in poor families. By contrast, of children whose parents have less than a high school degree, 82 percent live in low­income families and 50 percent live in poor families.  Housing is important for healthy child development; however, children living in low­income families are 50 percent more likely as other children to have moved in the past year, and nearly three times as likely to live in families that rent, rather than own, a home. Source: National Center for Children in Poverty Numbers Tell the Tale A surprising look at how parents’ income can affect kids’ futures