The surprising cost of growing up poor in the shadow of wealth

Poverty hurts a child’s chances of getting ahead, of thriving in school, of growing up healthy. It touches the brain and influences the air children breathe. It fundamentally affects where they live and the kind of world they’re exposed to.

“We know a lot about how kids experience poverty,” says Candice Odgers, the associate director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. “That’s been a driving force of research with children — trying to understand the toxic effects of poverty, how they become biologically embedded, how they get under the skin.”

We don’t know much, though, about a related phenomenon: how kids experience inequality. And new research Odgers has published along with colleagues at Duke, UC Irvine and King’s College London suggests some of the answers may complicate policies designed to lift children out of poverty.

Read more from the Washington Post.