Children In Poverty More Likely To Have Smaller Brain Volume & Slower Growth, Linked To Cognitive & Behavioral Difficulties

Children living below the federal poverty level (FPL) are more likely to have cognitive and behavioral difficulties than their better-off peers due in part to differences in brain volume and growth. As preschoolers, children from low-income families had physical differences in brain scan results compared to other children. At age 3 to 5 years, the preschoolers from low-income families had smaller volumes of certain subcortical brain regions, including the hippocampus, caudate, putamen, and thalamus, and over the next 17 years, they had less growth in these regions of the brain.

These findings were presented in “Early Childhood . . .