Poverty Can Influence Kids' Behavior
Excerpt by Alison McCook, Reuters Health

Take kids out of poverty, and they become less likely to exhibit behavior problems, new study findings suggest.

Among a group of children between the ages of 9 and 13, those who lived in poverty tended to show more behaviors linked to psychiatric problems than those who did not live in poverty.

However, when the families of some of the children moved out of poverty, the rate of certain behaviors -- such as acting out and temper tantrums -- among these "ex-poor" children began to match the rate of those behaviors seen in children who had never been poor.

"Moving families out of poverty was followed by a reduction in children's behavioral symptoms," study author Dr. F. Jane Costello of Duke University Medical School in Durham, North Carolina told Reuters Health.

These findings, which appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that poverty places stresses on people that can affect their mental health, she added.

Moving out of poverty had an effect on symptoms of conduct and oppositional defiant disorders, in which children act out or exhibit out of control behavior such as temper tantrums, respectively. Acting out includes behaviors that violate social norms, like lying, bullying, stealing or vandalism.

Costello and her colleagues obtained their findings by following a so-called "natural experiment," in which a certain percentage of the families of 1420 children living in western North Carolina changed their income levels midway through the study.

When the study began, the researchers tested psychiatric symptoms in the children -- 68 percent of whom were living in poverty -- then repeated the tests every year for 8 years.

Midway through the study, a casino opened nearby, and distributed enough supplemental income to the community to enable 14 percent of the poor families to move out of poverty.

Although children's symptoms related to conduct and oppositional defiant disorders decreased when family income increased, Costello noted that symptoms related to anxiety and depression did not.

To explain this discrepancy, she suggested that feelings of anxiety and depression among children living in poverty may be less influenced by changes in income, or may take longer to respond to those changes.

She added that when she and her colleagues examined why moving out of poverty appeared to help children's mental health, they found that the most salient explanation was that once parents had more money, they had more time to supervise their children.

This suggests that certain aspects of a child's mental health can be influenced by the impact of parents' financial problems on their free time and energy, Costello said.

"I should like to see America's parents, especially poor parents, given more help and support in the hard task of raising children, to take off some of the strain and give them more time to do the good job that they want to do," she noted.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Michael Rutter of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, UK notes that the study demonstrates that a family's income can influence much more than its bank account.

"Societies need to recognize that economic levels do have important implications for both family functioning and child mental health," he writes.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, October 15, 2003.

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