Whatever It Takes, the new book by Paul Tough that profiles Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone, is one of the most bracing, sobering and inspiring books I’ve read in a while. It’s the story of one man’s attempt to systematically disrupt the cycle of poverty, and fundamentally alter the nature of childhood in Harlem. Fixing the schools is only a small part of the solution: Canada realized that it was also crucial to change the typical parent-child interaction, and so he developed a Baby College where new parents are given lessons on how to speak to their child in the supermarket. In other words, poverty is a culture, a contagious way of life, and not something that can be fixed with smaller class size.
But this isn’t simply a book about social work and education. Tough also deftly summarizes much of the recent work done on the cognitive neuroscience of poverty, or how our brain is changed by the details of our upbringing. (One crucial finding is that “middle-class” parents are much more verbose than parents living in poverty. For instance, one study found that wealthier parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” towards to their child per hour. In contrast, homes with a parent on welfare averaged a mere 178 utterances per hour. This leads, over time, to dramatic differences in the vocabulary size of the child, which strongly correlates with IQ.) Martha Farah is doing some of the most interesting work in the field right now:
Farah knew that cognitive neuroscience generally divided the higher mental functions into five different systems. And neuroscientists had developed tests to measure the strength of each of the systems in any individual. When Farah gave tests to several different groups of children in Philadelphia and New York City, she found that middle-class children scored higher than poor children, on average, on the tests as a whole. But there were four specific areas where the poorer children lagged most significantly: language; long-term memory; working memory; and cognitive control, the ability to resist obvious (but wrong) answers and find unexpected ones.
Already, Farah had broken new ground. She had deduced precisely which mental abilities seemed to correlate most strongly with socioeconomic status. But she still didn’t know why that correlation existed. What was it about growing up in a poor household that hindered the development of those four systems? To answer that question, Farah turned to the HOME inventory. [The HOME inventory, or the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment, is a popular way to evaluate parental behavior.] [SNIP] Farah then compared each family’s HOME score with the child’s scores on the various neuroscience tests. The result? For the first time, Farah was able to ascertain exactly which systems in a child’s brain are affected by which parental behaviors. Children’s scores on the language tests were predicted by cognitive stimulation. Children’s scores on the memory tests were predicted by social/emotional nurturance. In other words, a child with loving but not particularly educationally oriented parents would be likely to do well on memory tests and poorly on language tests.
The point is that poverty isn’t just an idea, or a state of mind: it actually warps the mind. Some brains never even have a chance. Consider this depressing finding from the lab of Elizabeth Gould. She found that if a pregnant rhesus monkey is forced to endure stressful conditions–like being startled by a blaring horn for 10 minutes a day–her children are born with reduced neurogenesis, even if they never actually experience stress once born. This pre-natal trauma, just like trauma endured in infancy, has life-long implications. The offspring of monkeys stressed during pregnancy have smaller hippocampi, suffer from elevated levels of glucocorticoids and display all the classical symptoms of anxiety.
There are no easy answers in Whatever It Takes. While Canada’s efforts have led to some important gains in test scores, he’s also found that it’s incredibly difficult to teach or reach a child in the grip of poverty by middle-school. In other words, every intervention must start early, while the brain is still a wet ball of clay.