It’s well known that living in high-poverty neighborhoods has a significant effect on the mental health of children. Now a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association offers a nuanced look at what happens after children leave these environments. It highlights a paradox: According to the study authors, led by Harvard professor Ronald Kessler, boys who move into more affluent neighborhoods report higher rates of depression and conduct disorder than their female peers.
The reason for the disparity between boys and girls isn’t exactly pinned down. Kessler points to various factors—community perception, interpersonal skills—as major points of influence: “We had an anthropologist working with us, and the anthropologist went and talked to and watched the kids in the old neighborhoods and the new neighborhoods, and their perception was that when the boys came into the new neighborhood they were coded as these juvenile delinquents,” says Kessler. “Whereas with the girls, it was exactly the opposite. They were embraced by the community—‘you poor little disadvantaged thing, let me help you.’”
Kessler’s study was conducted using data from Moving to Opportunity (MTO), a decades-spanning housing mobility experiment financed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Within this project, 4,604 volunteer families with 3,689 children were randomly divided into three groups. Two of them received different versions of rent-subsidy vouchers that enabled them to move into a better neighborhood. A control group did not move.
In follow-up interviews conducted 10 to 15 years later, boys reported higher proportions of major depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and conduct disorder than boys within the control group—rates of PTSD comparable to those of combat soldiers. The opposite occurred with girls, who reported mental health that was substantially better than the girls who stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods.
The results represent something of a conundrum. Over the past few decades, urban policy has focused on breaking up clusters of poverty, planning cities so that poor residents could live in areas that also had middle-class people. Does this new research mean projects like MTO are actually a bad thing?
I suspect similar conclusions can be drawn for refugee families too, albeit they often START with PTSD and trauma as well as being backwards in the new country language.
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Am I wrong to suspect that racism may have an element here? I am only guessing based on stereotypes, but since stereotypes are significant when taking about general reaction from people: does this study focus on black children and how past racist culture that portrayed black men as "brutal savages by nature"? It's a notion I've come across from time to time and I wonder whether this is a cause. Or does the study also take this into account, does this discrimination also happen with other ethnicities?
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I would argue that it's also a matter of what age the child is when they're relocated, whether there are other same-aged boys that they befriend, and what activities are available to keep them busy. Part of the problem is that, coming from an urban environment, where there's always something going on, to a suburban or rural environment, where the pace is slower, allows time for reflection and inactivity, which can lead to boredom or the aforementioned depression.
Unfortunately, that article did not provide a link to the actual academic paper. If it did, we would be able to check to see how the study was designed (and the individuals sampled) so we could check to see if they controlled for such confounding factors.
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
I live in an area where there are a pretty wide range of majority African-American neighborhoods with income ranging from very very poor to middle-class. So to comment on Zixinus' post...
You're almost certainly right that bias plays a role, but I'm pretty sure the bias in question is to some extent also internal within the minority group. If you're moving from a slum into a middle-class neighborhood, and you're part of a racial minority with a reputation for crudity or criminality, there's a risk that middle-class neighbors of the same race will perceive you as "one of those" members of the minority.
Another issue is that compared to females, males in a disadvantaged minority are disproportionately likely to learn social behaviors that are... counterproductive in a middle-class environment.
Such as threatening people with bristling displays of violence to get them to back off.
Or wearing clothes, using gestures, and employing language that signal "I'm a cool customer who you want in your social group" in a low-income environment, but that look like gang signs in a high-income environment... because some of the social groups in a low-income environment are gangs.
Or such as reacting to insults as if they were a prelude to a physical assault, which results in someone who just meant to be mean-spirited being amazed when you get mad and deck them because you honestly thought they were trying to start a fight with you and decided to get in the first shot since the fight would happen anyway.
In a low-income environment, all these behaviors are in a real sense 'well-adjusted,' in that they serve a useful purpose and generally help you live your day to day life in that environment without being attacked or threatened or marginalized. But in a high income environment this stops being true...
I switched back and forth between middle class and poor neighborhoods several times during my Elementary school years and I think Simon_Jester nailed it.
The way I as a boy had to change my behavior to fit in was vastly different from my sister for whom little changed.
I think there is a hefty component of racism, but based on what I've seen with my white peers I strongly suspect it's not entirely due to race - white boys from bad/poor/otherwise disadvantaged locales are also looked down on, and the term "white trash" is far too often applied to poor white folks, including white school boys.
I'm waiting for the US to wake up to the fact it has a problem with classism as well as racism.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
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If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Broomstick wrote:I think there is a hefty component of racism, but based on what I've seen with my white peers I strongly suspect it's not entirely due to race - white boys from bad/poor/otherwise disadvantaged locales are also looked down on, and the term "white trash" is far too often applied to poor white folks, including white school boys.
I'm waiting for the US to wake up to the fact it has a problem with classism as well as racism.
My feeling is that the US is in more of a state of denial over classism than it is over racism at this point.
I see classism in action all the time, endemic amongst the left as well. Nothing more that some hip young urban lefties like to do than talk shit and denigrate large swaths of the country while pretending they're enlightened and fair.
Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who did not.
Part of it is that class conflict can create actively unpleasantness in the mind of the middle and upper classes too.
Nobody actually suffers as a direct result of being exposed to people with a different skin color as such, or as a direct result of having members of the opposite sex in your workplace, or as a direct result of gays not being in denial in public.
But if you're accustomed to the culture of a relatively prosperous environment (which in most societies is comparatively quiet, orderly, tidy, and peaceful), dealing with people accustomed to a less prosperous environment can be actively stressful, even if you're not actively stereotyping them or aren't consciously condescending to them. Because they may be loud, boisterous, clueless regarding ideas you take for granted, and otherwise unpleasant to be around, for reasons that have literally nothing to do with you personally and nothing directly to do with how you feel about them. They have entirely to do with the fact that they grew up in a different subculture within your broader national culture.
This doesn't affect all people, and I'm not saying it's fair or in any objective sense 'right.' But it's a reality that can make it difficult to fully beat class prejudice.
