Brain Differences in Kids from Different Socio-Economic Backgrounds

Article is here

Excerpts:

In a study recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.

They used an EEG, a cap dotted with electrodes and found that the brain patterns of kids from lower socioeconomic families had patterns similar to those of adults who had frontal lobe injuries.
However:

“We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response.”

I would like to know more about those who did not and what the differences are in their backgrounds and home-life and why. I think this is key, and that question is neither asked nor answered in the article.

Robert Knight is director of UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology:

“This is a wake-up call,” Knight said. “It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.”

Knight et all believe that

“with proper intervention and training, you could get improvement in both behavioral and physiological indices.”

That ‘proper intervention’ phrase makes me nervous. We already have Head Start, which supposedly takes these children from low socioeconomic backgrounds and ‘intervenes,’ and yet any differences between these children and their non HeadStart peers disappears by the middle of grade school. So what do they mean by ‘proper intervention?’

It is a heartbreaking situation to contemplate, but some cures can be worse than the disease, and when we talk about the government intervening in people’s lives to manipulate their intelligence, it makes me twitch. After all, it turns out that Headstart and similar government sponsered early intervention programs actually harm children by separating them from their parents far too early.

There is a method that works, but I’m not sure the government needs to meddle with it. It would be better suited to private charities, churches, neighborhood programs, and local charitable organizations.
I first read about it back in the 80s when I was combing through my local libraryreading everything I could get my hands on about early childhood development and parenting.

Another 1987 study used three different Head Start delivery models to compare the relative effects on parents and children. The three models were center-based, home-based, and a combination of center and home-based. The study then measured from the time children were enrolled in Head Start through kindergarten and found that, “No difference was found in children’s cognitive development across the three delivery models. Parents enrolled in the home-based model demonstrated greater gains in academic stimulation of their children; in the use of toys, games, and reading material; and in encouraging their children to learn. Home-based parents also demonstrated greater growth in knowledge of child development and parent empowerment. (University of Delaware, 1988).”

That’s from an HSLDA article.

What I remember reading from my studies in the 80s was a study where two groups of teachers worked with babies and preschoolers, presenting educational games to the children and playing those education games with them several times a week. In one group, it was childhood development experts working with the children. In the other group, the childhood development experts worked with the mothers and then the mothers played those games with their children. They then compared how the children did. The children whose mothers were the ones introducing those educational games did far better than those taught by professionals.

A 1988 study in Minnesota compared two groups of children, one group in a typical Headstart program, the other in an ‘enhanced’ program where parents were involved in learning activities two or three times as often as those in the typical Headstart program:

Results indicate that family dysfunction scores diminished significantly for families in “enriched” programs, and diminished somewhat for families in the regular Head Start program, compared to control group families. In addition, mothers in both Head Start groups were more likely to assess their child as competent –and were more competent themselves–compared to control group mothers (Leik and Chalkey, 1989).

Other studies show that even where there are apparent cognitive gains in math and language skills, there are detrimental effects on social development:

The effect of center attendance on children’s social development. We find that attendance in preschool centers, even for short periods of time each week, hinders the rate at which young children develop social skills and display the motivation to engage classroom tasks, as reported by their kindergarten teachers. We use a composite measure of social-behavioral growth which includes indicators rooted in three domains of development: children’s externalizing behaviors (such as, aggression, bullying, acting up), interpersonal skills (such as, sharing and cooperation), and self control in engaging classroom tasks.

This study touches on another question I have:

The Berkeley-Stanford study found that child care centres suppressed children’s social development, self-control, interpersonal skills, and motivation once they entered kindergarten. Kids were more aggressive and impulsive with one another. The worst affected were children who attended early learning centres before age 2. “So if kids spend more [than 30 hours a week] in preschool centres, they’re simply not keeping pace in their acquisition of social skills,” says Fuller. Another C.D. Howe study, this one published in February, came to a similar conclusion. It examined Quebec’s universal early education and child care program. Its conclusion: “children were worse off” since the program started in 1997; it connects the increased use of child care to a decrease in the well-being of children, who exhibit anxiety and hyperactivity. “Parents have to think, when their child comes home counting to 30, do those skills outweigh some modest slowdown in social development?” says Fuller.

And is counting to 30 and reciting the alphabet at 2 or 3 really that important? Is that rote memory the sort of thing they are calling cognitive gains? Couldn’t THAT be the reason differences between Headstart children and their peers disappear by the middle of grade school?

Let’s look again at the article that prompted this post. With each child:

the researchers measured brain activity while he or she was engaged in a simple task: watching a sequence of triangles projected on a screen. The subjects were instructed to click a button when a slightly skewed triangle flashed on the screen.

The researchers were interested in the brain’s very early response – within as little as 200 milliseconds, or a fifth of a second – after a novel picture was flashed on the screen, such as a photo of a puppy or of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

“An EEG allows us to measure very fast brain responses with millisecond accuracy,” Kishiyama said.

The researchers discovered a dramatic difference in the response of the prefrontal cortex not only when an unexpected image flashed on the screen, but also when children were merely watching the upright triangles waiting for a skewed triangle to appear. Those from low socioeconomic environments showed a lower response to the unexpected novel stimuli in the prefrontal cortex that was similar, Kishiyama said, to the response of people who have had a portion of their frontal lobe destroyed by a stroke.

“When paying attention to the triangles, the prefrontal cortex helps you process the visual stimuli better. And the prefrontal cortex is even more involved in detecting novelty, like the unexpected photographs,” he said. But in both cases, “the low socioeconomic kids were not detecting or processing the visual stimuli as well. They were not getting that extra boost from the prefrontal cortex.”

“These kids have no neural damage, no prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, no neurological damage,” Kishiyama said. “Yet, the prefrontal cortex is not functioning as efficiently as it should be. This difference may manifest itself in problem solving and school performance.”

They suspect stress at home and ‘cognitive impoverishment’ as the causes, although, again, they did not find that ALL children of low socioeconomic backgrounds showed the same cognitive dysfunction, and I think it would be imperative to discover what made the difference for those kids.

And as Boyce noted, previous studies have shown that children from poor families hear 30 million fewer words by the time they are four than do kids from middle-class families.

Government interventions usually focus on institutions and programs that offer things like controlled, ordered, organized activities of the sort that other studies show hinder social development in preschools. But these researchers suggest that encouraging families to eat dinner together and actually communicate, talk to one another at dinner would make a big difference, as would reading books together.

Boyce’s UBC colleague, Adele Diamond, showed last year that 5- and 6-year-olds with impaired executive functioning, that is, poor problem solving and reasoning abilities, can improve their academic performance with the help of special activities, including dramatic play.

Silvia Bunge, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has been saying that adolescent brains are different (and she’s been trying to change the laws to reflect that), and she

hopes that, with fMRI, she can show improvements in academic performance as a result of these games, actually boosting the activity of the prefrontal cortex.

“People have tried for a long time to train reasoning, largely unsuccessfully,” Bunge said. “Our question is, ‘Can we replicate these initial findings and at the same time give kids the tools to succeed?'”

But what are the tools? Why do some families from lower socio-economic backgrounds have them and others don’t? How do we share them?