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Title: Poverty, Nutritional Status, Growth and Cognitive Development of Children in the United States
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Miller, Jane E. Korenman, Sanders D. |
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Poverty, Nutritional Status, Growth and Cognitive Development of Children in the United States Working Paper No. 93-5, Princeton NJ: Office of Population Research, Princeton University, 1993 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Office of Population Research, Princeton University Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Birthweight; Child Development; Child Health; Childhood Education, Early; Children, Academic Development; Cognitive Ability; Cognitive Development; Health, Mental/Psychological; Height; Height, Height-Weight Ratios; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Mothers, Height; Nutritional Status/Nutrition/Consumption Behaviors; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Poverty; Verbal Memory (McCarthy Scale); Weight; Well-Being Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper describes deficits in nutritional status, physical growth, and cognitive development among poor children in the United States. Data are taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which has collected measures of family income each year from 1978 to 1990, and measures of height, weight, and cognitive development of children in 1986, 1988, and 1990. The results suggest that, first, there are substantial nutritional and developmental costs to children in chronically poor families; second, single-year income measures do not adequately capture the effects of chronic poverty on child nutritional status and cognitive development; and third, the adverse effects of chronic poverty are large even when we control for other characteristics associated with poverty such as low educational attainment of mothers, family structure, young maternal age, low academic ability of mother, minority racial identification, and when we control for weight and height of the mother and size of the infant at birth. Both long-term poverty and poor nutritional status are associated with impaired cognitive and socioemotional development in early childhood. Further research is needed before definitive, causal statements can be made. Nonetheless, we find evidence that, compared to children from higher-income families, poor children are at heightened risk of wasting, stunting and cognitive impairment, and experience reduced rates of physical growth in early childhood. |
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Bibliography Citation
Miller, Jane E. and Sanders D. Korenman. "Poverty, Nutritional Status, Growth and Cognitive Development of Children in the United States." Working Paper No. 93-5, Princeton NJ: Office of Population Research, Princeton University, 1993. |