The stresses of growing up in poverty can lead to tremendous emotional, physical and mental harm. A new study shows that having an attentive, responsive mother protects children from at least some of the harm, specifically to their emotional resilience and working memory.
The study, (authored by Stacey N. Doan, Ph.D. ’10, assistant professor of psychology at Boston University, and environmental psychologist Gary Evans, professor of design and environmental analysis and of human development in the College of Human Ecology and) published in Development and Psychopathology (23), provides insight into why some children remain surprisingly resilient despite growing up in difficult, high-stress situations.
Evans previous studies demonstrated that the chronic stress suffered by children living in poverty produced working memory deficits in young adults. Working memory — the ability to temporarily hold information in mind — is critical for tasks like learning and problem-solving.
The new study focused on children and families in rural upstate New York with children about 9, 13 and 17 years old. More than half of the families were low-income. Stress loads were assessed by tests of the children’s hormonal, cardiovascular and metabolic systems. The researchers assessed maternal responsiveness by observing maternal behaviors such as cooperation, helping and adaptability to their child’s mood and abilities, and by querying their children’s perception of how much their mothers helped with homework, were willing to talk when needed, spent time doing enjoyable things with the child or knowing where the child was after school. They tested the children’s working memory at the age of seventeen.
Low-income children with higher levels of stress tended to have worse working memory — but only when maternal responsiveness was medium to low.
“Although high chronic stress in childhood appears to be problematic for working memory among young adults, if during the childhood period you had a more responsive, sensitive parent, you have some protection,” Evans said.
Next, the researchers plan to determine whether stress has direct effects on brain areas associated with working memory and to explore whether maternal responsiveness buffers some of the effects of chronic stress via better self-regulation/coping strategies in their children or by influencing levels of stress hormone, for example.
Evans noted that the study underscores the potential for interventions to break the poverty-stress-working memory link, which may be one pathway by which children growing up in poverty fall behind in school. He also emphasized, however, that parenting is not sufficient or even the best way to overcome the adverse consequences of childhood poverty. The overall harm of poverty, he said, far outweighs the protective effects of maternal responsiveness.
