Chronic stress from growing up poor appears to have a direct impact on the brain, impairing working memory, researchers at Cornell University in New York report that The 14-year study of 195 children from households both above and below the poverty line found that chronic stress played a major role in their cognitive development. The study suggests that greater proportion a child in a family spent in poverty, the poorer their working memory, and that link is largely explained by this chronic physiologic stress. The findings have implications for education where stress at home may have to be included as a factor in teachers’ efforts to help underachieving children. (The Washington Post, 4/6/09)
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