How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

/pdf/from-neurons-to-neighborhoods-the-science-of-early-childhood-3bfl5g72ow.pdf

From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

Recent research consistently reports that persistent poverty has more detrimental effects on IQ, school achievement, and socioemotional functioning than transitory poverty, with children experiencing both types of poverty generally doing less well than never-poor children. Higher rates of perinatal complications, reduced access to resources that buffer the negative effects of perinatal complications, increased exposure to lead, and less home-based cognitive stimulation partly account for diminished cognitive functioning in poor children. These factors, along with lower teacher expectancies and poorer academic-readiness skills, also appear to contribute to lower levels of school achievement among poor children. The link between socioeconomic disadvantage and children's socioemotional functioning appears to be mediated partly by harsh, inconsistent parenting and elevated exposure to acute and chronic stressors. The implications of research findings for practice and policy are considered.

Socioeconomic disadvantage and child development

This article provides a comprehensive review of research on the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent well-being. The first section reviews key methodological issues. The following section considers links between neighborhood characteristics and child outcomes and suggests the importance of high socioeconomic status (SES) for achievement and low SES and residential instability for behavioral/emotional outcomes. The third section identifies 3 pathways (institutional resources, relationships, and norms/collective efficacy) through which neighborhoods might influence development, and which represent an extension of models identified by C. Jencks and S. Mayer (1990) and R. J. Sampson (1992). The models provide a theoretical base for studying neighborhood mechanisms and specify different levels (individual, family, school, peer, community) at which processes may operate. Implications for an emerging developmental framework for research on neighborhoods are discussed. Social science concerns about the effects of residence in a poor neighborhood on children and youth date back more than 50 years to the publication of Shaw and McKay's (1942) Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Historical accounts of the effects of living in a poor neighborhood date back even further. The current interest in neighborhood effects on, children and youth has multiple origins. First, Wilson's (1987) documentation of increasingly concentrated poverty in urban areas at the neighborhood level during the 1970s and 1980s served to reorient discussions of poverty from the individual to the neighborhood level. Second, and related to the work of Wilson, was the rejuvenated interest among sociologists and urban scholars in community social disorganization theory (Shaw & McKay, 1942) as an explanatory model for delinquency and crime, as well as other problem behaviors encountered in many poor urban neighborhoods (see, e.g., Bursik, 1988; Kornhauser, 1978; Sampson, 1992; Sampson & Groves, 1989; see Sampson & Morenoff, 1997, for a review). Social disorganization theory posits that neighborhood structural factors, such as poverty, residential instability, single parenthood, and ethnic heterogeneity, are of prime importance in explaining behavior through their ability to thwart or promote neighborhood organization (formal and informal institutions), which maintains public order. Other scholars, although not necessarily focusing on child wellbeing, drew attention to residential (or spacial) patterns as sources

/pdf/the-neighborhoods-they-live-in-the-effects-of-neighborhood-1ws5nup3j3.pdf

The neighborhoods they live in: the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent outcomes.

The pioneering longitudinal studies of child development (all launched in the 1920s and 1930s) were extended well beyond childhood Indeed, they eventually followed their young study members up to the middle years and later life In doing so, they generated issues that could not be addressed satisfactorily by available theories These include the recognition that individual lives are influenced by their ever-changing historical context, that the study of human lives calls for new ways of thinking about their pattern and dynamic, and that concepts of human development should apply to processes across the life span Life course theory has evolved since the 1960s through programmatic efforts to address such issues

/pdf/the-life-course-as-developmental-theory-96a1hzmecu.pdf

The life course as developmental theory.

We propose a theoretical framework on the structural sources and spatially embedded nature of three mechanisms that produce collective efficacy for children. Using survey data collected in 1995 from 8,782 Chicago residents, we examine variations in intergenerational closure, reciprocal local exchange, and shared expectations for informal social control across 342 neighborhoods. Adjusting for respondents' attributes, we assess the effects of neighborhood characteristics measured in the 1990 census and the role of spatial interdependence. The results show that residential stability and concentrated affluence, more so than poverty and racial/ethnic composition, predict intergenerational closure and reciprocal exchange. Concentrated disadvantage, by contrast, is associated with sharply lower expectations for shared child control. The importance of spatial dynamics in generating collective efficacy for children is highlighted-proximity to areas high in closure, exchange, and control bestows an advantage above and beyond the structural characteristics of a given neighborhood. Moreover, spatial advantages are much more likely to accrue to white neighborhoods than to black neighborhoods

Beyond Social Capital: Spatial Dynamics of Collective Efficacy for Children

Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City

Compared to residential segregation by race, economic segregation has received relatively little attention in recent empirical literature. Yet a heated debate has arisen concerning Wilson's (1987) hypothesis that increasing economic segregation among African Americans plays a role in the formation of urban ghettos. The author presents a methodological critique of the measure of economic segregation used by Massey and Eggers (1990) and he argues that their measure confounds changes in the income distribution with spatial changes. He develops a pure measure of economic segregation based on the correlation ratio and present findings for all U.S. metropolitan areas from 1970 to 1990. Economic segregation increased steadily for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics in the 1970s and 1980s, but the increases have been particularly large and widespread for Blacks and Hispanics in the 1980s. The author explores the causes of these changes in a reduced-form, fixed-effects model. Social distance and structural economic transformations affect economic segregation, but the large increases in economic segregation among minorities in the 1980s cannot be explained by the model. These rapid increases in economic segregation, especially in the context of recent, albeit small, declines in racial segregation, have important implications for urban policy, poverty policy, and the stability of urban communities

/pdf/take-the-money-and-run-economic-segregation-in-u-s-46yen4pz4c.pdf

Take the money and run: economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas.

Poverty and place

This article uses 1990 census data to analyze the changes in ghetto poverty among blacks in the 1980s. Ghetto poverty among blacks increased, both in terms of the number of blacks living in ghettos and as a percentage of the black population. The black poor became increasingly isolated in ghettos, with nearly half of the black poor in metropolitan areas living in a ghetto neighborhood. The physical size of ghettos expanded rapidly, even in some metropolitan areas where the percentage of blacks living in ghettos declined. There were striking differences between regions, with the Midwest and Southwest having the largest increases in ghetto poverty while the eastern seaboard had declines.

Ghetto poverty among blacks in the 1980s

/pdf/sprawl-concentration-of-poverty-and-urban-inequality-1fh2ylmjan.pdf

Paul A. Jargowsky

Papers

Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City

Take the money and run: economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas.

Poverty and place

Ghetto poverty among blacks in the 1980s

Sprawl, Concentration of Poverty, and Urban Inequality *