Cognitive Aspects of Young Children's Experience of Economic Disadvantage

Psychological Bulletin

Cognitive Aspects of Young Children’s Experience ofEconomic DisadvantageAmy E. Heberle and Alice S. CarterOnline First Publication, March 30, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000010

CITATIONHeberle, A. E., & Carter, A. S. (2015, March 30). Cognitive Aspects of Young Children’sExperience of Economic Disadvantage. Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000010

Cognitive Aspects of Young Children’s Experience ofEconomic Disadvantage

Amy E. Heberle and Alice S. CarterUniversity of Massachusetts, Boston

Economic disadvantage is a well-studied risk factor for poorer behavioral and academic functioning inyoung children. Although the mechanisms by which disadvantage impacts children have long been ofinterest to researchers, studies to date have predominantly focused on mechanisms that are external to thechild (e.g., parental depression, marital conflict). Very few studies have examined the internal, cognitiveaspects of the experience of economic disadvantage, and almost none have considered how the effectsof disadvantage on children’s functioning might be mediated through cognitive processes. This articleprovides a framework for research into cognitive and social–cognitive mediators of economic disadvan-tage operating in early-to-middle childhood. The initial section of the article briefly reviews andsummarizes the extant literature on childhood poverty and its effects. The second section reviews theevidence that preschool-aged children have the requisite cognitive abilities to recognize social inequalityin their environments, to be aware of stereotypes related to social class, and to connect these socialconcepts to their own experience. The third section reviews and evaluates the small literature onchildren’s appraisals, attributions, stereotypes, and perceptions of or about poverty and inequality. Thefourth section defines and evaluates the literature on 2 social–cognitive processes—stereotype threat andstatus anxiety—that are hypothesized to mediate the effects of economic disadvantage on children’sfunctioning. The article concludes with a series of proposed questions and hypotheses for future research,and elaborates on the potential implications of the proposed area of research.

Keywords: poverty, economic disadvantage, social-cognitive processes, early childhood

Childhood poverty in the United States has become increasinglycommon in the past decade (Chau, Thampi, & Wight, 2010). As ofthe 2010 U.S. Census, 22% of all children in the United Stateswere living below the federal poverty line—a measure of “abso-lute” poverty, defined conceptually as having too few financialresources to meet one’s basic needs (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, &Smith, 2011). The 2010 Census further showed that approximatelyhalf of all poor children were living in extreme poverty, defined asfamily income less than one half of the poverty line for the numberof adults and children that comprise the family (DeNavas-Waltet al., 2011). Poverty is a particularly rampant problem forracial and ethnic minority children. In 2009, for example, 31%of poor children were non-Hispanic White (12% of all non-Hispanic White children) while 24% of poor children wereBlack (36% of all Black children) and 39% were Hispanic (33%of all Hispanic children; Chau et al., 2010). This inequality inthe distribution of poverty across racial and ethnic groupsappears to be the result of longstanding structural oppression andindividual and institutional racism as well as of the same factors—

including poorer quality schooling and parents’ inability to pass onmaterial wealth to their children (Bowles, Gintis, & Groves,2009)—responsible for the intergenerational transmission of pov-erty in all racial and ethnic groups.

Economic disadvantage (i.e., poverty and/or low socioeconomicstatus [SES]) confers a substantial and lasting risk of poorer thanaverage social�emotional and academic functioning in youngchildren; these risks begin to manifest very early in life and persistacross the life span, even for individuals who do not remaineconomically disadvantaged (e.g., Poulton et al., 2002). Econom-ically disadvantaged children exhibit higher than average rates ofexternalizing behavior problems—including aggression, inatten-tion, and hyperactivity—and higher than average rates of internal-izing symptoms—including anxiety and depressive symptoms—asearly as toddlerhood (Briggs-Gowan, Carter, Skuban, & Horwitz,2001), and these associations persist across middle childhood andadolescence (see McLoyd, 1998, for a review). In addition, chil-dren’s cognitive and academic performance is negatively impactedby economic disadvantage; for example, by age 3, the income-to-needs ratio of a child’s family predicts his or her verbal abilities aswell as overall cognitive functioning (Duncan, Brooks-Gunn, &Klebanov, 1994). In the academic domain, it has recently becomeclear that the gap between the economically privileged and thepoor is growing: In the United States, the academic achievementgap between poor students and their more privileged peers—already present in kindergarten— has been increasing over atleast the last four decades and now is twice as large as theBlack�White achievement gap (Reardon, 2011). The literaturehas not yet addressed whether the social�emotional gaps be-

Amy E. Heberle and Alice S. Carter, Department of Psychology, Uni-versity of Massachusetts, Boston.

Supported in part by the National Science Foundation Graduate Re-search Fellowship (Grant DGE-1356104).

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Amy E.Heberle, Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Boston,MA 02125. E-mail: [email protected]

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Psychological Bulletin © 2015 American Psychological Association2015, Vol. 141, No. 2, 000 0033-2909/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000010

1

tween economically disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged chil-dren are also increasing.

Given the high prevalence of poverty among children in theUnited States and the strong evidence that poverty has negativeeffects on multiple aspects of children’s functioning, it is unsur-prising that researchers have already demonstrated a strong interestin childhood poverty and the mechanisms responsible for its ef-fects. However, the majority of research on poverty has focused onaspects of the experience of living in poverty that are external tothe individual; the internal, psychological aspects of this experi-ence have been understudied. This is particularly true for children.Recent research has begun to unpack some cognitive aspects ofliving in poverty for adults, demonstrating that the material strainof poverty creates a high level of cognitive load and detracts fromdecision-making abilities (Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, & Zhao,2013). In addition, a small body of literature has recently emergedfocusing on cognitive coping and appraisal processes as mediatorsof the link between economic disadvantage and emotional andbehavioral outcomes, primarily in older children and adolescents(e.g., Finkelstein, Kubzansky, Capitman, & Goodman, 2007;Fröjd, Marttunen, Pelkonen, von der Pahlen, & Kaltiala-Heino,2006; Shek et al., 2003; Wadsworth & Compas, 2002). This set ofarticles has highlighted the importance of cognitive appraisals forchildren’s well-being in the context of poverty; however, in con-trast to the model that will be described in this article, the appraisalprocesses that are the focus of this area of the literature are notspecifically linked to beliefs about poverty, but are, rather, moregeneralized beliefs and attitudes (e.g., endorsement of traditionalcultural values). For example, one study from this area of literaturefound that optimism mediates the link between family SES (mea-sured via parental education) and adolescent stress (Finkelstein etal., 2007). In this study, lower SES was associated with lowerlevels of optimism, which were associated with higher levels ofstress. A separate area of the literature on poverty in families hasfocused on cognitive processes in low-income parents; a samplefinding from this literature is that low-income parents with lowself-efficacy beliefs experience greater stress than those with highself-efficacy beliefs (Raikes & Thompson, 2005). With few ex-ceptions (see, e.g., Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli,2001), this literature does not attend to the cognitive responses ofchildren to the beliefs, values, and other cognitions hypothesizedto have importance for their parents’ and families’ functioning;rather, consistent with the dominant model of child poverty de-scribed in the next section, children in this literature are treated aspassive recipients of external input, not as individuals who areactively engaged in processing their experiences of poverty.

The lack of attention to cognitive aspects of the experience ofliving in poverty for children is particularly unfortunate given that,as argued by Crick and Dodge (1994), young children’s processingpatterns (e.g., schemas, heuristics) are likely to become increas-ingly rigid and resistant to change as they grow older. For disad-vantaged children, thoughts about the implications of poverty fortheir own lives, if experienced repeatedly at a young age, maybecome reflexive and automatic, and therefore unlikely to beconsciously reexamined or challenged (in the absence of targetedintervention) later in life. Thus, for example, a young child whoforms the belief—through direct inference about observed events,observation of parents’ conversation, direct teaching by parents orother children, or other means—that he belongs to a group of

people that is less socially desirable than other groups may incor-porate this belief into lasting schemas that impact his social be-havior, sense of self-worth, and so forth throughout his life. Incontrast, an older adolescent or adult exposed to similar beliefs (orexperiences of social rejection that appear to be related to socialclass) may be somewhat protected in the effects of these beliefs onher functioning if she developed positive schemas related to herown social functioning and the social desirability of other mem-bers of her social class group as a young child.

Many of the hypotheses put forth in this article relate directly orindirectly to the large and diverse literature on identity develop-ment (both personal identity development writ large as well asdevelopment specific to particular aspects of identity, such asethnicity). The literature on identity development has largely fol-lowed an Eriksonian tradition and focused on identity developmentas a key task of adolescence (see, e.g., Bosma & Kunnen, 2001;Meeus, Iedema, Helsen, & Vollebergh, 1999; Phinney, 1989;Waterman, 1982). There are exceptions, however; the genderidentity literature, for example, acknowledges that key compo-nents of gender identity develop during the toddler years, whilealso acknowledging that gender identity may become more com-plex and preoccupying during the adolescent years (Martin, Ruble,& Szkrybalo, 2002). Others, including researchers in the area ofracial identity development (Brunsma, 2005) and personal narra-tive development (Reese, Yan, Jack, & Hayne, 2010) have alsoargued for viewing identity development as a process originatingin cognitive phenomena that emerge in early childhood. This latterperspective is consistent with the approach taken in this article,within which children’s beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives onpoverty and inequality are hypothesized to impact early schemas,self-efficacy beliefs, group identification, and other aspects ofidentity, setting the stage for the more complex, self-reflectiveprocess of identity formation expected to take place in adolescenceand early adulthood, the specifics of which are beyond the scopeof this review.

Our model for the development of beliefs, attitudes, and stereo-types about poverty and inequality and our hypotheses regardingsusceptibility to social–cognitive processes such as stereotypethreat from early through middle childhood are closely informedby empirical findings from the basic cognitive developmentalliterature—particularly by findings related to gender and raceawareness and identification—as well as by a set of influentialdevelopmental theories that drive much of this body of literature.For example, our model is influenced by key themes in Kohlberg’scognitive�developmental model of gender development, whichemphasizes the ways in which the child’s thoughts organize his orher learning about gender roles, gender-typed behavior, and theinfluence of gender on his or her own identity. Our model is alsoinfluenced by Kohlberg’s argument for an “interactionist” perspec-tive on social learning, wherein the child is influenced by his or herenvironment (including social influences) but also acts on his orher environment to structure his or her own learning (Kohlberg,1966). Following a Piagetian tradition, Kohlberg has emphasizedthat the child will selectively incorporate new information as he orshe develops the basic cognitive skills required to do so and insofaras he or she can accommodate this new information within existingschemas (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 2002; Piaget, 1970). Thesefundamental ideas regarding cognitive development underlie manyof the hypotheses presented in this article.

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2 HEBERLE AND CARTER

The purpose of this review is to provide an entry point foraddressing the question of how children’s behavioral and academicfunctioning in the context of poverty or economic disadvantage isimpacted by their own beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes, and by theirperceptions of others’ beliefs, thoughts, and attitudes. We begin bydescribing the dominant model for how poverty impacts childrenand by discussing some of the limitations of this model. Next, thesmall literature on children’s beliefs, stereotypes, and attribu-tions about poverty and poor people is reviewed. The thirdsection of this article explains and evaluates two social–cognitive processes—stereotype threat and status anxiety—thatmay be responsible for some of the risk associated with living inpoverty for young children. Finally, the article concludes withseveral hypotheses about (a) the developmental course of youngchildren’s beliefs, attributions, and stereotypes about poverty andinequality and (b) the developmental timeframe during which theeffects of stereotype threat and status anxiety will come online andhow the effects of these processes may change over time. We focusin this article on the early-to-middle childhood period. There areseveral reasons for focusing on this developmental period, includ-ing: (a) that the development of a sense of self-efficacy—a taskthat we hypothesize may be particularly vulnerable to perturbationin the face of negative self-relevant beliefs and stereotypes—is akey task of this period (Bjorklund, 2011; Lopez, Little, Oettingen,& Baltes, 1998; Shin, Bjorklund, & Beck, 2007); (b) our view thatkey aspects of identity development are present early in life andare understudied in this period (Brunsma, 2005; Martin, Ruble, &Szkrybalo, 2002; Reese, Yan, Jack, & Hayne, 2010); and (c) thatyoung children’s processing patterns appear to be particularlymalleable (Crick & Dodge, 1994), making them both ideal candi-dates for interventions aimed at attenuating the effects of nega-tive beliefs and stereotypes and, unfortunately, uniquely sensi-tive targets for these same effects in the absence of intervention.In addition, though we consider it likely that many of theprocesses described in this article extend into adolescence andadulthood, we would argue that the relevant developmentalchanges occurring in these periods are substantial enough torender discussion of them beyond the scope of this article.

Throughout this article, the term poverty is used interchangeablywith economic disadvantage to refer to a state of having inade-quate resources relative to the standard of living in one’s society;thus, our use of these terms encompasses circumstances in whicha family’s basic needs are not met as well as circumstances inwhich basic needs are met but there is a lack of resources relativeto others. Some of the hypotheses put forth in the article are tiedto the experience of absolute deprivation, while others are tied tothe experience of having fewer or worse resources than others. Wealso refer to low socioeconomic status when describing empiricalresearch that was reported using this term; however, our extrapo-lations from studies in which SES was the variable of interest mayapply to either the absolute deprivation or the relative lack encom-passed by the terms poverty and economic disadvantage as theyare used in this article. We attempt to clarify the precise circum-stances under which we would expect our hypotheses to applythrough the use of examples and elaboration throughout the article.

This review has five parts. First, we briefly review findings fromthe extant literature on the effects of poverty/economic disadvan-tage on children’s academic and behavioral functioning. We nextintroduce a novel theoretical model that posits social–cognitivefactors mediate the relation between poverty and child outcomes.In the third section, we systematically review the literature onchildren’s beliefs about poverty and social inequality; we alsoreviewed the literature for studies of social–cognitive processessuch as those described in this article and found none. In the fourthsection of the article, we discuss two specific social–cognitiveprocesses—stereotype threat and status anxiety—that we hypoth-esize may mediate the effects of poverty on children’s functioning.We conclude with recommendations for future research.

The Dominant Model for the Experience and Effectsof Childhood Poverty

The majority of research on the effects of poverty on children’sacademic and behavioral functioning has focused on one of twotypes of mechanisms: (a) material and social resource deprivationand (b) exposure to interpersonal and personal stressors. Figure 1

Figure 1. Traditional model for effects of poverty on child outcomes.

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3COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF ECONOMIC DISADVANTAGE

illustrates this dominant model (see Bradley & Corwyn, 2002;Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997; Duncan et al., 1994; Evans, 2004;Yoshikawa, Aber, & Beardslee, 2012, for reviews). Researchbased on this model has identified numerous resource- and stress-related risk factors among economically disadvantaged families,including overcrowded homes (Evans & Saegert, 2000; Liaw &Brooks-Gunn, 1994), lack of access to cognitively stimulating toysand books (Bradley, Corwyn, McAdoo, & García Coll, 2001;Klebanov, Brooks-Gunn, & Duncan, 1994), neighborhoods lack-ing park space or safe playgrounds (Cradock et al., 2005; Sherman,1994; Suecoff, Avner, Chou, & Crain, 1999), weak social ties tocommunity members (Sampson, Morenoff, & Gannon-Rowley,2002; Thompson, Flood, & Goodvin, 2006), poor quality childcare(Phillips, Voran, Kisker, Howes, & Whitebook, 1994), and highrates of exposure to violence (Briggs-Gowan, Ford, Fraleigh, Mc-Carthy, & Carter, 2010; Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1994), and otherstressful life events (Dodge et al., 1994). In addition, economicallydisadvantaged adults experience high rates of psychological dis-tress (McLoyd, 1990), marital conflict (Conger, Schofield, Conger,& Neppl, 2010), and relationship instability (McLanahan, 2009).

Each of these risk factors is thought to mediate the effects ofpoverty on children’s cognitive and behavioral functioning eitherdirectly—for example, through the direct impact of violence ex-posure on children’s ability to feel safe in their environments andto regulate their level of arousal (Margolin & Gordis, 2000)—orindirectly—for example, through the impact of stress on parents’child rearing (Ayoub, Vallotton, & Mastergeorge, 2011; Crnic,Gaze, & Hoffman, 2005). Indeed, economically disadvantagedparents are more likely than more privileged families to usesuboptimal parenting strategies such as harsh discipline (Dodge etal., 1994; McLoyd, 1990; Wissow, 2001) and are less likely toexhibit high levels of positive engagement with their children(Dodge et al., 1994; Raviv, Kessenich, & Morrison, 2004). Inaddition to increasing the likelihood that parents will be exposed torisk factors that increase their stress and diminish the resourcesavailable to them to support their parenting, living in povertyappears to increase parents’ vulnerability to developing problem-atic parenting behaviors in response to exposure to additional riskfactors (e.g., Hashima & Amato, 1994; Lovejoy, Graczyk, O’Hare,& Neuman, 2000).

To summarize, there is a rich body of evidence to support thehypothesis that economic disadvantage exposes children and theirparents to multiple resource- and stress-related risks that impactchildren both directly and through their effect on parenting behav-ior. However, many studies involving a range of cognitive, social,and behavioral outcome measures have found a residual effect ofeconomic disadvantage even after accounting for the effect ofvarious mediators on the outcome of interest, suggesting that otherfactors are also involved (see, e.g., Crosnoe & Cooper, 2010;Dodge et al., 1994; Duncan et al., 1994; Raviv et al., 2004).Internally focused models that might be drawn on explain theeffects of poverty on children’s behavioral and academic function-ing have been similarly limited in their explanatory capacity (orhave received inadequate study to facilitate drawing conclusionsabout their explanatory capacity), and these models, like the dom-inant model described here, have generally given little attention tocognitions. As an example, Barker’s fetal origins hypothesis positsthat the origins of several adult diseases may be found in variousinsults experienced in utero (e.g., malnutrition); this hypothesis has

received some limited evaluation as an explanatory mechanism forthe link between poverty and physical health outcomes such asbody mass index and could, in theory, be applicable to nonphysicalhealth outcomes, though such outcomes have received very limitedstudy (Almond & Currie, 2011; Duncan, Ziol-Guest, & Kalil,2010).

We argue that poverty is likely a profound social and psycho-logical experience for children and their parents, and that thereforeresearch into children’s beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes aboutpoverty as well as the processes that may link children’s percep-tions to their behavioral and academic functioning is likely toenhance our understanding of the ways in which children areimpacted by disadvantage.

Social�Cognitive Processes in the Transmission ofPoverty-Related Risk in Young Children

As noted, an outstanding question in the literature on poverty-related risk in childhood is whether children’s appraisals, attribu-tions, and stereotypes related to their own SES, others’ SES, andsocial inequality are in part responsible for the risk associated withliving in poverty. As shown in Figure 2, we hypothesize thatchildren’s cognitions form a mediating pathway between theresource- and stress-related risk factors described above and chil-dren’s own functioning; thus, for example, a child whose parentexperiences and expresses high levels of distress about the unpre-dictability and inflexibility of her low-wage part-time job maydevelop the belief that work is unrewarding for people like himand his family, and may therefore develop a lower sense ofself-efficacy than a more privileged child. Later, as this same childdevelops a greater interest in and capacity for peer comparison inmiddle childhood (Flavell et al., 2002), his sense of self-efficacymay further decrease, as he becomes increasingly attuned to theways in which his own efforts may yield a lesser return than moreprivileged children (e.g., being unable, despite time spent practic-ing his skills at home, to participate in formal athletic program-ming at school due to financial barriers). Similarly, a child who isexposed to a stereotype that poor children are not as good atreading as wealthier children, or to the perception that her familycannot afford the same quality of books and learning materials asother families, may feel frustrated and discouraged at school andmay act out these feelings through disruptive classroom behavior(which may, in turn, impede her academic progress, reinforcingher beliefs about her own decreased potential). More generally, thestress that results from a child’s awareness of the relatively lowposition he and his family occupy on the socioeconomic hierarchyin his society may be expected to have behavioral, academic, aswell as physiological sequelae; this final example finds partialsupport in the recent work of Boyce et al. (2012), who found thatchildren who occupy subordinate social positions in their kinder-garten classrooms show increased depressive symptoms, morefrequent episodes of inattention, fewer positive peer relationships,and less evidence of prosocial behavior than more dominant chil-dren. Beyond enhancing our understanding of the causal processesby which poverty impacts children’s functioning, research address-ing the hypotheses described here and elaborated later in thisreview will provide insight into the phenomenology of living inpoverty—a practically unstudied topic in children and adults—andmay have implications for social justice�oriented intervention and

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education. Figure 3 shows several of the hypotheses put forward inthis article and places these hypotheses in developmental context.

Why have the psychological experiences of children living inpoverty received little attention in the academic literature onchildhood poverty? First, as argued by Lott (2002), the dominantresponse of economically privileged people to poverty is distanc-ing: “separation, exclusion, devaluation, discounting, and designa-tion as ‘other’” (p. 100). This distancing occurs psychologically aswell as physically, in the segregation of poor and nonpoor indi-viduals in separate neighborhoods (T. Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn,2000; Massey, 1990), where they shop at separate stores and attendseparate schools. It is also clear in the psychology literature, inwhich only limited attention has been paid to the problem ofpoverty and in which extremely little attention has been paid to thelived psychological experience of life in poverty—for children or,for that matter, for adults.

Another factor that has likely contributed to the lack of attentionto very young children’s cognitive experiences in relation to eco-nomic disadvantage is the belief that they lack the cognitive abilities torecognize social inequality in their environments, to be aware ofstereotypes related to social class, and to connect these socialconcepts to their own experiences. The extant literature holdsample evidence demonstrating that this belief is likely unfounded.For example, in order for children to be able to recognize socialinequality in their environments, they presumably must attend tothe way that goods are distributed and notice whether goods aredistributed equally or unequally. Alternatively, some children maybe told of these issues, in which case they need only have theability to comprehend the notion of goods being distributed un-equally. The literature on children’s moral development has shownthat the cognitive abilities requisite for either scenario are welldeveloped by age 3 (Baumard, Mascaro, & Chevallier, 2012; Fehr,Bernhard, & Rockenbach, 2008). For example, children as youngas 3 years of age demonstrate complexity in their thinking aboutthe distribution of goods, preferring an equal distributions of goodswhen possible, but also showing the capacity to distribute goodsequitably (with an individual who has contributed more receivinggreater compensation) in a situation that had been experimentally

manipulated to make equal distribution impossible (Baumard etal., 2012). Children as young as 3.5 years old appear to justifyunequal distributions for which they themselves were not respon-sible as merit-based distributions, and they then favor a previouslyprivileged group when given control over the distribution of a newset of goods; that is, very young children recognize the status quoand act to perpetuate it (Olson, Dweck, Spelke, & Banaji, 2011).From these experimental findings, it is clear that children attend tothe way in which goods are distributed and notice whether they aredistributed equally; thus, they may be capable of recognizinginequality in the distribution of resources in their natural environ-ment. However, children also appear to explain unequal distribu-tions as being merit-based. It is not clear, then, whether childrenwill consider uneven distributions of goods in their societies asexamples of inequality or of equity, nor is it known whetherchildren who are aware of having less than others will considertheir own merit as the reason for the discrepancy.

For children to be aware of stereotypes related to social class,they would need to be capable of noting social class groupings andknow that other people may have beliefs about groups that impacttheir thinking about individuals. Little is known about whethervery young children are aware of socioeconomic groupings, eitheras a general concept or as they relate to the child’s own SES.However, the literature has clearly shown that children are awareof other social categories very early in life—by age 2 for gender(Martin & Ruble, 2010; Weinraub et al., 1984), and only slightlylater for race (Stevenson & Stewart, 1958). In this same period,children begin to develop basic knowledge of stereotypes; forexample, preschool-age children associate gender-typed posses-sions, characteristics, and roles with adult men and women (Martin& Ruble, 2010). In addition, there is a small literature that hasshown children associate groups of which they are known to beaware with differing levels of wealth, indicating that relativewealth is a salient feature to young children. For example, 3- to10-year-old South African children predict that high-value objectswill belong to individuals with racial privilege—Whites—and thatlower-value objects will belong to individuals belonging to astigmatized and oppressed racial group—Blacks; furthermore, in

Figure 2. Proposed model for effects of poverty on child outcomes.

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the study from which these findings were drawn, there were noage-related changes in the degree to which children associated racewith wealth (Olson, Shutts, Kinzler, & Weisman, 2012). Takingthese findings together, it is plausible to expect that children willbecome aware of social class as a grouping variable prior to orearly in the preschool years and will become aware of at least somebasic stereotypes at approximately the same time. Regarding thedevelopment of stereotype awareness beyond this very early pe-riod, studies have shown that children’s ability to infer others’stereotypes (in a novel situation) and to identify broadly heldstereotypes (based on previously acquired real-world knowledge)increases across the early school age to middle childhood period(McKown & Strambler, 2009); thus, while some degree of stereo-type awareness appears to come online during the preschool years,children appear to become more attuned to others’ stereotypes asthey grow older. This shift may reflect increasing sophistication inchildren’s basic theory of mind and social perspective takingabilities (McKown & Strambler, 2009; McKown & Weinstein,2003). However, it may also reflect children’s increasing contactwith their larger social worlds—some have estimated that childrenin the middle childhood period spend 20% more time with peersthan do children in the early childhood period, potentially allowing

for exposure to a greater diversity of ideas and beliefs (Rubin,Bukowski, & Parker, 1998)—or, perhaps, that their increasinglywell-developed schemas make new information about others’ ste-reotypes increasingly accessible for children.

Finally, to be able to connect their observations of social in-equality and class-based stereotypes to themselves, children mustbe aware of themselves as members of a social class group.Further, they must know that others may see them as members ofa stigmatized social group. The literature on gender and racialgroup status development has shown that children begin to classifythemselves as social group members at a young age; for example,children as young as 2.5 years old demonstrate greater than chanceabilities to identify themselves as members of a gender group(Martin & Ruble, 2010; Weinraub et al., 1984). Researchers haveargued that these types of findings—combined with the fact thatchildren appear to develop group consciousness with or withoutdirect parental socialization—indicate an innate tendency to noticeand be interested in social groups (Quintana, 2008). At the sametime, it has been argued that children’s early understanding ofsocial grouping categories is typically based on external appear-ance (e.g., skin color for race) and that children label themselveswithin these grouping categories before they develop a sense that

Figure 3. Theoretical model for the impact of social�cognitive processes on poor children, highlightingstage-salient developmental competencies. Note. Statements listed in plain text are supported in the literature;those listed in bold/italics text represent untested hypotheses.

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these grouping categories are a salient aspect of their identity(Quintana, 2008). If the same is true for social class, then chil-dren’s early understanding of social class as a category may ormay not be sufficient to lead them to see social class stereotypes asrelevant to their own lives. In any case, it is likely that the degreeto which children are impacted by these perceptions will increaseas their degree of identification with an economically disadvan-taged social group increases.

Children’s Perspectives on Poverty and Inequality:What We Know

In this section, we present a systematic review of the literatureassessing children’s beliefs, stereotypes, and attitudes about pov-erty, social class, SES, or social inequality as well as literatureassessing the role of cognitive phenomena in linking the experi-ence of poverty to suboptimal academic and behavioral function-ing in children. The following databases were used for this review:Web of Science, PsycINFO, Applied Social Sciences Index andAbstracts, and the International Bibliography of the Social Sci-ences. The search terminology was as follows:

(� indicates truncation): (belief� or thought� or stereotype� or attitude�

or cognit� or understand� or awareness or know� or think or idea� ordisadvantage or concept or view) and (child� or youth or young) and(poverty or poor or inequality or economic or class or socioeconomicor income or SES].

In addition, we reviewed reference lists for publications thatwere not identified by our database search. Our search was con-ducted primarily in June 2013 and we checked for new referencesin December 2014.

Because our initial review of the literature had suggested thatthe literature on our topic would be quite small, a minimal list ofinclusion criteria was applied during our search. Criteria for in-clusion in our review were: (a) the study must have been publishedin a peer-reviewed journal article or book chapter; (b) the studymust have been published between January 1980 and December2014; (c) the study must directly address concepts of poverty orinequality; studies addressing children’s general economic con-cepts (e.g., understanding of supply and demand, understanding ofinflation) were excluded; (d) the publication must describe originalqualitative or quantitative research; (e) the study population mustinclude children between the ages of 3 and 10 years; and (f) thestudy population must reside in North America or in WesternEurope. Studies focused on populations outside this geographicarea were excluded because our initial review suggested that mostof these studies focused on developing countries, where the expe-rience of poverty is quite different—bringing challenges such aschild labor and lack of access to safe drinking water (e.g., Cam-field, 2010)—from the experience of poverty in the wealthy na-tions that form the context for our review and theories.

Our initial search yielded 460 results. We evaluated all titles/abstracts for inclusion in our review; following this, 34 publica-tions that appeared potentially eligible on the basis of their titles/abstracts were read in full text. Twelve studies (described in Table1) were ultimately included in the review; the remainder wasexcluded based on one or more of the criteria listed above. Nota-bly, of these 12 studies, only one (Désert, Préaux, & Jund, 2009)addressed a process related to children’s beliefs; the remainder

were descriptive studies of children’s beliefs, attitudes, and ste-reotypes about poverty, social inequality, social class, and peoplewho are poor.

Our review demonstrates that the extant literature on the contentof children’s appraisals, attributions, stereotypes, and perceptionsof or about poverty and inequality is sparse, and data for childrenyounger than 5 years of age is practically nonexistent. Despitethese limitations, the literature does provide a starting point fordeveloping hypotheses about young children’s perspectives onpoverty and social inequality, about how poor children might beimpacted by their beliefs, and about how adults could promote thedevelopment of healthier and more social justice�oriented atti-tudes in all children. See Table 1 for the methodological charac-teristics of the studies reviewed in this section.

Children’s Understanding of Poverty as aPhenomenon and General Characteristicsof Poor People

First, it is clear that children at least as young as 5 years of ageare aware of poverty as a phenomenon and that children from allsocial class groups recognize both the material and the nonmaterialfactors that are part of living in poverty. For example, in a sampleof lower-and-higher SES 8-year-olds (with SES measured usingthe occupation and education level of each child’s mother andfather as well as family income), 39% of children spontaneouslyspoke about internal, psychological aspects of living in poverty(e.g., “they feel sad because they don’t have any homes . . .”) inresponse to the question, “Tell me about poor people. What arethey like?” (Chafel & Neitzel, 2005). Children in this study alsoresponded to this question by discussing the material neediness ofthe poor (59%), concrete manifestations of poverty (33%), solu-tions to poverty (35%), and the multidimensional, complex natureof poverty (17%). Children’s descriptions of poverty change asthey grow older; for example, Leahy (1981) found in a cross-sectional sample of 6- to17-year-olds that children’s use of periph-eral descriptions (e.g., referencing external qualities or surround-ings) to describe poor people decreased with age, while use ofdescriptions of internal states and sociocentric descriptions (i.e.,descriptions reflecting awareness of social consequences due toclass membership) increased with age. More specifically, therewas a decrease in the use of peripheral descriptions from age11–14 years and an increase in the use of internal and sociocentricdescriptions between ages 6 and 11. These trends are consistentwith basic developmental research that has shown children’s use ofpsychological descriptors of others (e.g., “he is a helpful person”)in contrast to external descriptors (e.g., “he has brown hair”)increases with age (Flavell et al., 2002). Research has shown thatlow- and middle-income children as young as 5 years of ageassociate poor quality residences with the occupants being poor(Weinger, 1998, 2000a, 2000b; Harju & Thorød, 2011), thoughother research has shown that spontaneous references to behaviorsand residence as factors that distinguish the rich from the poorincrease between ages 6 and 11 (Leahy, 1981). Leahy’s study,however, relied on open-ended interview questions, and the age-based differences found may therefore reflect age-based differ-ences in the ability to verbalize complex ideas or to spontaneouslyrecall such ideas without scaffolding rather than actual differencesin children’s perceptions.

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Table 1Methodological Characteristics of Studies Summarized in the Review of Children’s Beliefs About Poverty and Inequality

Study N Sample characteristics Age Method of data collection

Chafel & Neitzel(2005)

64 Socioeconomically diversesample that included bothurban and rural participants.The sample waspredominantly (67%) white.

8 years The interviewer read a commercially produced book,Uncle Willie and the Soup Kitchen, by DyAnneDiSalvo-Ryan, to each child. Each child was thenasked the following open-ended questions: (a) “Tellme about poor people. What are they like?” (b)“Why are some people poor?” (c) “Do you think itis fair that some people are poor?” “Why?”/“Whynot?” (d) “What would have to happen so therewould be no poor people?” (e) “Who should takecare of poor people?”

Leahy (1981) 720 Socioeconomically diversesample recruited from one ofseveral major U.S. cities.The sample was 25% Black.

Four age groups: 5–7,9–11, 13–15, and16–18 years

The interviewer asked the following four questions: (a)Describe rich people. What are they like? (b)Describe poor people. What are they like? (c) Howare rich people different from poor people? (d) Howare poor people different from rich people? Eachquestion was followed up with: “Can you tell memore about that?”

Leahy (1983) 720 Same as Leahy (1981). Same as Leahy (1981) Following the questions listed for Leahy (1981), thesequestions were asked: (a) Why are some people rich,while others are poor? (b) Why are some peoplepoor, while others are rich? (c) Should some peoplebe rich, while others are poor? (d) Should somepeople be poor, while others are rich? (e) How coulda poor person get rich someday? (f) What wouldhave to happen so that there would be no poorpeople? and (f) How could you get rich someday?

Weinger (1998) 24 All children in the study livedin a low-incomeneighborhood in a smallMidwestern city; all wereidentified as poor. Half ofthe sample was Black andthe other half was White.

Evenly balanced acrossages 5–13 years

Children were first shown two pictures: one showed arun-down house and the other showed a nicer,suburban-style house. They were then asked 18questions, 10 of which referred to the houses. Thequestions fit into the following three categories: (a)awareness and perceptions of socioeconomic status,(b) conception of societal messages concerning beingpoor, and (c) personal feelings about people who arepoor.

Weinger (2000a) 48 Half of the urban sample wasidentified as poor and theother half was identified asmiddle class. Half of thechildren identified as poorwere Black and the otherhalf was White; however,among the middle-classchildren, 92% were White.

Evenly balanced acrossages 5–14 years

Followed the same procedures listed for Weinger(1998); however, this study focused on the followingquestions: (a) Tell me about the people who live inthis house. (b) What are the grown-ups like who livein this house? (c) What are the children like? and (d)Which child would you choose as your friend?

Weinger (2000b) 48 Same as Weinger (2000a) Same as Weinger(2000a)

Followed the same procedures listed for Weinger(1998); however, this study focused on the followingquestions: (a) What do you think a child who livesin this house wants to be when s/he grows up? (b)Do you really think that he/she will grow up to be a(career proposed by respondent) and (c) How come?Participants were also asked the same questionsabout their own goals.

Désert, Préaux, & Jund(2009)

153 Participants were French firstand third graders. Additionaldemographic data were notprovided.

6–9 years After completing a test involving visual patterncompletion, children were asked three questions: (a)In general, how well do you do in school? (b) Ingeneral, how well do children whose parents do nothave much money do in school? and (c) In general,how do children whose parents have a lot of moneydo in school? Children were asked to give theirresponses on a 5-point scale.

(table continues)

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Racial group differences in children’s understanding of povertyappear by age 6, with Black 6-year-olds being less likely thanWhite 6-year-olds to explain poverty simply by defining it (bystating that poverty is when a person does not have enough money;Leahy, 1983). This difference may be due to the fact that Blackchildren are statistically more likely than White children to havepersonal experience with poverty. An alternative hypothesis is thatBlack parents—the majority of whom in a large national samplereported acting or speaking to racially socialize their children andsome of whom reported talking specifically about racism andracial inequality (Thornton, Chatters, Taylor, & Allen, 1990)—may also talk to their children about economic inequality and that,therefore, Black children are more knowledgeable about povertythan White children, regardless of their personal SES.

Class-based differences have also been found in children’s descrip-tions of poverty and poor people: lower SES children emphasizethoughts more than more privileged children and upper-middle SESchildren emphasize traits more than lower SES children (Leahy,1981). In this study, SES was measured on a four-category scale—lower, working, middle, and upper-middle—based on the father’soccupation. This finding is consistent with the finding that low-income children (with low-income status determined on the basis ofbenefit receipt) demonstrate greater empathy toward and more com-plex views of the poor than middle-income children (with middle-income status determined on the basis of residing in a census tractwith moderate average household income; Weinger, 2000a). Thisdifference suggests that poor children will develop a sense of socialclass as a salient status earlier than nonpoor children do, because

Table 1 (continued)

Study N Sample characteristics Age Method of data collection

Woods, Kurtz-Costes,& Rowley (2005)

483 Participants weresocioeconomically diverseboys and girls from rural andurban areas in NorthCarolina. Just over half ofparticipants were Black andthe rest were White.

Fourth (M � 9.6 years),sixth (M � 11.5years), and eighthgraders (M � 13.5years)

Students were asked about the sports, academic, andmusic competence of “rich” versus “poor” people.For each prompt, children were asked to mark theperceived competence of the group on a 100-mmline. Six separate questions were averaged for theacademic score and the music and sports scores werebased on single items.

Fortier (2006) 14 Participants were aconvenience sample of low-income boys and girlsrecruited through a serviceagency. More than half ofthe participants identified asAfrican American.

7–12 years Participants were interviewed in “focus groups.” Eachfocus group completed three activities: (a) a“message in a bottle” activity in which children wereasked to write “the best and worst things aboutschool for a child whose parents to not have enoughmoney”; (b) an activity in which the children wereasked to answer several questions about an imaginedperfect experience at the doctor’s office for a low-income child; and (c) an activity in which childrenwere asked to create a skit addressing several topicsrelated to not having enough money.

Harju & Thorød (2011) 14 Participants were boys andgirls from seven low-incomefamilies living in Sweden. Inthree of seven families, theparents were born outside ofEurope. In the other fourfamilies, the parents wereborn in Sweden.

7–19 years Children were interviewed five times over 14 months.Most of the interviews were conducted in thechildren’s homes. The study used the life-modeinterview, in which the interviewer discusses eachpart of the day with the child, as well as a follow-upinterview focused on the experience of havinglimited financial resources.

Emler & Dickinson(1985)

123 All participants attended schoolin the same city in the U.K.;however, half of theparticipants were recruitedfrom a private school andhalf were recruited from apublic school in a lower-working-class neighborhood.The sample was distributedapproximately evenly acrossthe third to seventh gradelevels. No additionaldemographic data wereprovided.

7–12 years Children were interviewed individually at their schools.In the interviews, each child was shown pictures ofpeople representing four occupations: doctor,teacher, road sweeper, and bus driver. The formertwo occupations represented higher statusoccupations and the latter two represented lowerstatus occupations. Children were then asked toshow using Monopoly money how much eachperson would be paid each week, and then to answerquestions about the fairness and goodness of the paydistribution they had described as well as otherquestions about the people represented in the images.

Ramsey (1991) 100 All participants were Whiteand from the same smalltown in New England. Halfwere recruited through aHead Start program and halfwere recruited through aprivate preschool. Half wereboys and half were girls.

3–5 years Participants were shown 12 photographs representingrich and poor adults and children. They were askedto sort the photographs into rich and poor piles andto answer a series of questions about rich and poorpeople.

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nonpoor children may follow the general trend of focusing on externalmanifestations of group membership for longer than poor children do.The budding class differences in perceptions of poverty also appear toreflect the internalization of values and beliefs held by many adults inthe United States—for example, that the poor are lazy (Cozzarelli,Wilkinson, & Tagler, 2001), that they are likely to lie or cheat thesystem (Bullock, 1999), that their poverty is the result of lack of effort(Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 2014), that povertyis perpetuated by “too much welfare that prevents initiative” (NBCNews/Wall Street Journal, 2013), and, more generally, that they aredistinctly different from nonpoor people (Lott, 2002). These valueslikely contribute to the perpetuation of social structures that keeppeople in poverty. Accordingly, middle-income children betweenages 5 and 14 endorse more negative stereotypes about the poorthan do low-income children in the same age group, expressing thebelief that middle-class people are “normal” whereas poor peopleare “dirty” and “mean” (Weinger, 2000a). Relatedly, middle-class/middle-income children endorse the belief that personal deficien-cies maintain poverty at higher rates than lower-class/lower-income children (Leahy, 1983; Weinger, 2000b). These negative,distancing, person-blaming beliefs appear to increase as childrenget older, with, for example, references to low intelligence as thereason some people are poor increasing between ages 6 and 11(Leahy, 1983).

Overall, the literature has suggested that children becomeaware of external indicators of economic disadvantage rela-tively early and develop a more complex, socially, and psycho-logically minded understanding of poverty as they grow olderand their cognitive capabilities increase. However, even veryyoung children appear to have some level of understanding of povertyas an experience with psychological effects (and it is possible thattheir understanding has been underestimated by past studies). Thereis reason to believe that children who are poor or who aremembers of stigmatized racial minority groups develop morecomplex and multifaceted conceptualizations of poverty and ofpoor people earlier in development than more privileged chil-dren; children in these groups also appear to demonstrate morecompassionate and more complex views about poverty at everyage than do their peers. Given this, it is likely that youngchildren who are poor will become susceptible to stereotypethreat and other processes related to stereotypes and stigmaearlier than might otherwise be expected. It is also likely thatpoor children will come to recognize social class as a salientaspect of their own identities earlier than their nonpoor peers.Developmentally appropriate studies are needed to assess justhow early children first become aware of external, internal,social, and other aspects of economic disadvantage and tounderstand in greater detail how children’s perceptions changeover the course of development as well as in relation to theirown sociodemographic backgrounds and other factors.

Stereotypes About Poverty and Social Functioning

Beliefs about the low social desirability of children living inpoverty are endorsed across ages, sexes, social class groups,and geographic areas (see Attree, 2006, for a review). Bothlow-income and middle-income children (ages 6�13) believe—based solely on information about the children’s SES—that apoor child is more likely to experience social rejection than a

nonpoor child (Weinger, 2000a; Fortier, 2006). However, de-spite being aware of the likelihood that a poor child wouldexperience social rejection, nonpoor children appear to be un-able to, unwilling to, or uninterested in imagining what socialrejection feels like for poor children, because only economicallydisadvantaged children expressed empathy for the imaginedpoor child. For example, one low-income child was quoted asstating: “if they’re not rich . . . some people laugh about them.I try to be their friend . . .� they feel like dying because they’repoor” (Weinger, 2000a, p. 139). Children’s expressed beliefsabout an imagined poor child are consistent with the reality ofmany poor children’s lived experiences of social isolation,exclusion, and bullying (Harju & Thorød, 2011).

It is unclear from the literature whether poor and nonpoorchildren make the same attributions regarding the social desirabil-ity of poor children. It appears plausible given the numerousnegative stereotypes that children hold about poor people to hy-pothesize that children—perhaps nonpoor children especially—may think that poor children deserve to be excluded due to theirpersonality flaws.

Stereotypes About Poverty and Academic Competence

Academic stereotypes about poor children are also endorsed;however, children appear less likely to spontaneously endorseacademic and intellectual stereotypes than to endorse socialstereotypes in response to open-ended questions. This mayindicate that other children’s social functioning is more salientto young children than their academic performance. Regardless,academic stereotypes are clearly endorsed in implicit assess-ments. For example, a socioeconomically diverse sample ofFrench first and third graders gave lower ratings on a 5-pointscale in response to the question: “How do children whoseparents don’t have a lot of money do in school?” than they gavein response to the question: “How do children whose parentshave a lot of money do in school?” (Désert, Préaux, & Jund,2009). Similarly, a socioeconomically diverse group of fourth,sixth, and eighth graders living in the United States endorsedthe belief that “poor” students would be less academicallycompetent than “rich” students when asked to mark the per-ceived competence of each group on a 100-mm line (Woods,Kurtz-Costes, & Rowley, 2005).

The literature is silent on the question of whether poor childrenbelieve themselves to be less academically competent than others.In addition, children’s attributions for their belief that poor chil-dren perform worse academically than nonpoor children are notaddressed in the literature. It may be the case that academicstereotypes about poor children reflect negative beliefs about theintelligence of the poor, which have been identified elsewhere(Leahy, 1983). It is also possible that children expect lower aca-demic performance from poor children due to their perception thatteachers dislike poor children or that they discriminate againstthem. Again, identifying the specific attributions that childrenendorse for their beliefs will be important in future research, as arethe more basic questions of what children believe at differentdevelopmental stages and what children believe about their ownacademic competence in relation to their social class.

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Beliefs About Future OpportunitiesAvailable to Poor People

In addition to expressing the belief that poor people are lesssocially and academically competent than nonpoor people, chil-dren also express negative expectations for the future career suc-cess of children living in poverty. When asked about what a childliving in a run-down house would like to be when he or she growsup, both low- and middle-income 5- to 14-year-olds endorsed arange of occupations, including high-paying professional careers(Weinger, 2000b). However, when asked whether the imaginedchild would actually obtain his or her career goal, only 21% oflow-income children and 13% of middle-class children stated thebelief that the child would be able to obtain his or her goal. Incontrast, the majority of both low-income (83%) and middle-income (79%) children believed that an imagined middle-classchild would achieve his or her career goal (Weinger, 2000b).

Children cited several reasons why the poor child would notsucceed in accomplishing his or her goal, including financial andresource barriers, discrimination, lack of experience, and lack ofexposure to the imagined work environment. In addition, middle-income children emphasized perceived personal deficiencies ofpoor people as reasons that the imagined poor child would notsucceed (e.g., laziness; Weinger, 2000b). Interestingly, whenasked about their own aspirations, 88% of children—from bothmiddle- and low-income backgrounds—said that they expected toreach their goals, though middle-income children were more likelythan poor children to choose professional career tracks (Weinger,2000b). Though these findings represent a single study and shouldtherefore be interpreted cautiously, they do suggest that futureresearch on children’s career expectations for children in povertyversus not is warranted.

Beliefs About the Causes of Poverty and Inequality

Children recognize poverty as a social phenomenon, with astriking proportion of 8-year-old children (28%) in a socioeconom-ically diverse sample identifying the source of poverty in socialand systemic forces apart from the individual (Chafel & Neitzel,2005). Ninety percent of 8-year-old children believed that povertyis unfair (Chafel & Neitzel, 2005), a finding that appears consistentwith the fact that young (3- and 4-year-old) children have a moralpreference for equality in the distribution of resources (Baumard etal., 2012), and that may indicate that young children’s predispo-sition to attribute unequal distributions of goods to the merit ofrecipients is challenged by their perceptions of socioeconomicinequality in their own worlds.

However, the idea that poverty is unfair appears to wane duringadolescence and into adulthood, with fatalistic attitudes (i.e., theattitude that inequality simply is and will always be) increasing atthe same time (specifically, from ages 14–17; Leahy, 1983). Thisshift co-occurs with an increase in person-blaming attributions forpoverty; that is, as children grow older, they appear increasinglylikely to endorse the belief that socioeconomic inequality reflectsan equitable distribution of resources based on individual meritand effort—an attitude also endorsed by approximately half of allU.S. adults (Gallup, 1998). In addition, Leahy (1983) found thatexplicitly equity-based explanations for poverty were more com-mon among wealthier subjects, and Emler and Dickinson (1985)

similarly found that middle-class children (with social class mea-sured based on the father’s occupation) were more likely thanworking-class children to reject the idea that it would be fair forpeople with different occupations (e.g., bus driver, street sweeper,doctor, teacher) to make the same amount of money. Overall, thispattern of findings indicates that children’s level of buy-in todominant cultural fables about equality of opportunity increases asthey get older and that children with greater economic privilege areless likely to question these beliefs than poorer children. Race alsopredicts children’s attitudes, with White children being more likelythan Black children to attribute poverty to bad luck and Blackchildren being more likely than White children to claim that wealthcomes from inheritance or violations of the law (Leahy, 1983). Inaddition, Black children are more likely than White children tosuggest that changes to the social structure are necessary to endpoverty (Leahy, 1983). Of note, however, Leahy’s study on thistopic was conducted several decades ago and may reflect socialvalues that have shifted in the intervening years; thus, newerresearch on this topic is needed.

Self-Referential Versus Other-Referential Beliefs

In the one study we reviewed in which poor children’s beliefsabout themselves versus their beliefs about others who are poorwere systematically examined, low-income children endorsedmore positive expectations and attitudes about themselves thanthey endorsed about other people living in poverty (Weinger,2000b). This is consistent with the finding that adults who are poorappear to distance themselves from other poor people, seeingnegative stereotypes about the poor as apt when applied to othersbut not to themselves (Bullock, 1999). It is also possible thatyoung children do not apply stereotypes about poverty to them-selves because they do not realize that they themselves are poor.Fortier (2006), for example, found that children in her study of 7-to 12-year-olds living in low-income families tended to externalizethe experience of living in poverty to others, describing what it islike for other children to live without enough money. Although itis clear from the qualitative literature that poor children recognizetheir families’ economic challenges at some point prior to adult-hood (e.g., Attree, 2006), the age at which this recognition devel-ops has not been studied. A third hypothesis is that children do notendorse negative poverty-related beliefs as applying to themselvesbecause doing so is too painful or shameful for them. This hy-pothesis is consistent with the finding that children as young as age5 will fail to endorse stereotypes that apply to themselves whenexplicitly asked about them (e.g., “Are girls better at math, boysbetter at math, or are they the same?”) while demonstrating pat-terns of performance that are consistent with knowledge of broadlyheld stereotypes about gender and mathematical competence (Am-bady, Shih, Kim, & Pittinsky, 2001). Studies using more subtlemeasurement of internalized negative beliefs are therefore neces-sary to test this hypothesis.

Summary of Developmental Changesin Children’s Beliefs

There is agreement in the literature that children’s beliefs be-come steadily more complex as well as more consistent with thebeliefs of the average adult (e.g., Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, & Tagler,

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2001) over time. However, given the methods used in the literaturecited here—particularly the use of open-ended interview ques-tions—our understanding of the developmental course of chil-dren’s beliefs requires substantial elaboration, particularly foryoung children. Methods that capitalize on children’s nonverbalcommunication skills will be important in clarifying the nature anddevelopmental course of children’s beliefs (Clark, 2005). As anexample of a simple but effective nonverbal method for assessingchildren’s knowledge, a study by Ramsey (1991) showed thatpreschoolers (ages 3�6 years) were able to classify photographs ofadults and children as poor or rich with greater-than-chance accu-racy. The study used photographs that had previously been reliablycategorized by SES by a group of 7- to 27-year-olds (Naimark,1981), and accuracy was defined as matching the classificationsidentified in this previous study. These results suggest, at the veryleast, that preschoolers pick up on some or all of the same physicalcharacteristics that older children and adults use to classify peopleas rich or poor. Given these findings, inquiry into the nature anddevelopmental course of preschool-age children’s beliefs and at-titudes about poverty and inequality is clearly warranted. In addi-tion, most developmental findings from the literature on children’sbeliefs, stereotypes, and attributions about poverty and inequalityuse cross-sectional designs and test for developmental trends byassessing the correlation between age and the outcome of interest;more targeted and nuanced assessments of developmental changeswould strengthen the literature.

Future Directions

As noted, there are several major gaps in this literature, the firstof which is a need to replicate these findings—most of which arederived from a series of unrelated single studies—using methodsthat are tailored to young children’s verbal and cognitive abilities.Many of the studies cited here used open-ended interview ques-tions, which may be appropriate for some young children but aretoo taxing for many (Irwin & Johnson, 2005). Methods that allowchildren to participate nonverbally (i.e., with props) and that in-volve interactions that are familiar for the child (e.g., play-basedinterviews) may better capture their experiences. The second majorgap is in the lack of attention paid to children younger than age 5.In addition, there is a lack of information on how poor children ofall ages integrate their beliefs about other people who are poor into

their own self-concept and whether they expect to be impacted byothers’ stereotypes about poor people. Next, the research that hasbeen done to date does not address how children explain theirbeliefs, nor do we know if there are additional areas in whichchildren hold negative or positive stereotypes about people whoare poor (e.g., stereotypes about family structure, weight, foodpreferences).

Finally, the extant literature has little to offer in terms ofexplaining where children’s beliefs come from—whether they aretaught by parents, observed in parents or other adults, learnedthrough television and other media, or developed through othermeans. Research on this final question in particular may revealavenues for education-based intervention with young children tochallenge these potentially harmful beliefs as they develop, andresearch on all of the questions listed here is likely to yieldimportant information for all adults who interact with youngeconomically disadvantaged children as well as for those with aninterest in social justice and social policy.

Specific Social�Cognitive Processes That May ImpactChildren in Poverty

Although the extant literature is informative, it is clear thatmuch remains to be learned about the content of children’s beliefs,attitudes, and stereotypes about poverty and inequality. An addi-tional area of inquiry is the study of the processes that linkchildren’s beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes to their behavioral andacademic functioning. Status anxiety and stereotype threat are twoexamples of social–cognitive processes that may be relevant to thestudy of the psychological experience of poverty for children andof how this experience impacts functioning. To date, however,these processes have been studied primarily in young adult andadult populations, and only status anxiety has received more thanminimal attention in the literature on poverty and inequality (seeTable 2 for an explanation and hypothetical example of eachconstruct). However, based on the small body of relevant literatureand theoretical understanding of how these processes operate, itappears that they may well be active in young children, at least byearly elementary school age, and that therefore they warrant fur-ther study in young children who are experiencing poverty.

Table 2Hypothetical Examples of Three Social�Cognitive Processes: Stereotype Threat, Stigma Consciousness, and Status Anxiety

Construct Explanation of construct Hypothetical example

Stereotype threat Occurs when an individual underperforms due to theanxiety he/she experiences when reminded ofstereotypes about a social group in which he/she is amember that are relevant to the performance area.Exposure to these stereotypes triggers anxiety aboutconfirming them, which leads to poorer performance.

A kindergarten teacher asks each child in her class to draw apicture of one of his/her parents at work. A poor child inthe class is reminded that he was made fun of by olderchildren because of the low-status work his mother does. Ona subsequent assessment of the child’s letter-writingabilities, he underperforms relative to his actual ability level.

Status anxiety Occurs when an individual becomes aware of the distancebetween his/her own social status (and accompanyingaccess to resources, power, and opportunities) and thesocial status of others.

A first grade class is planning a field trip to a nearby museum.A note goes home with each child in the class asking for$10 to cover the cost of lunch and the museum’ admissionfee. One child’s family is unable to afford the cost and thechild must stay at school for the day. The child isembarrassed at his family’s inability to pay and frets aboutthe other things his peers have that he does not.

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Perceptions of Inequality and Associated StatusAnxiety

The growing literature on large-scale inequality—roughly de-fined as the gap between the wealthiest members of a society andthe poorest members—has shown that societies with high levels ofinequality have higher rates of negative behavioral and physicalhealth outcomes than more equal societies (Kahn, Wise, Kennedy,& Kawachi, 2000; Layte, 2012; Lochner, Pamuk, Makuc, Ken-nedy, & Kawachi, 2001; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009; Wilkinson,2006); these effects appear to be particularly robust for outcomesthat are known to have high social class gradients (e.g., all-causemortality) and to be less robust for outcomes like prostate cancer,which have smaller class gradients (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009).However, although there is ample evidence to support the hypoth-esis that inequality is associated with negative behavioral andphysical health outcomes in adults (Kahn et al., 2000; Subrama-nian & Kawachi, 2006; Zhao, 2012), other researchers have notfound support for this hypothesis (Judge, Mulligan, & Benzeval,1998; Leigh & Jencks, 2009; Sturm & Gresenz, 2002). Additionalresearch is needed to clarify the outcomes for which inequality hasthe strongest effects, the causal pathways by which inequalityoperates, and the groups for which inequality has the greatesteffects. Nevertheless, the extant literature on inequality is compel-ling and raises hypothetical individual-level psychological mech-anisms that may be relevant for all people living in poverty.

A hypothesis advanced by several economists and other re-searchers, most notably by Wilkinson, is that the associationbetween inequality and the behavioral and physical health out-comes for which inequality appears to confer risk is not explainedby absolute differences in material resources (Layte, 2012; Pickett& Wilkinson, 2007), nor is it explained by the deleterious effect ofinequality on family functioning and other contextual variables(Pickett & Wilkinson, 2007). Instead, this group of researchers hashypothesized (and provided some evidence for the hypothesis)that, in wealthy countries with high levels of inequality, statusanxiety—stress associated with perceiving oneself to be at thebottom of a social hierarchy—and reductions in social capital helpto explain the association between inequality and poorer health(Layte, 2012; Pickett & Wilkinson, 2007). Status anxiety mayaffect individuals—including children—living in absolute incomepoverty as well as individuals whose income is above the povertythreshold but is low with respect to the overall level of wealth inthe individual’s social environment; thus, status anxiety is trig-gered by unequal circumstances rather than by absolute resourcedeprivation. This makes status anxiety a particularly importanttopic of study in countries like the United States, in which there arehigh levels of income inequality that result in vast numbers ofchildren experiencing relative poverty. The mediating effects ofstatus anxiety have not, to our knowledge, been studied in children.Is it possible that children in the United States—a society withmoderately high (World Bank Development Data Group, 2012)and growing (The Conference Board of Canada, 2013) levels ofinequality—experience and are impacted by appraisals of theirown status on the social hierarchy?

At least one large-scale analysis has shown that the trends foundin adults hold for children and adolescents and are, in fact, “re-markably similar to those [trends] found in adult populations”(Pickett & Wilkinson, 2007, p. 6). Cross-national data collected by

UNICEF has shown that overall well-being (a composite measurebased on several individual measures of wellness) among 0- to17-year-olds is correlated both with inequality (the ratio of totalhousehold income received by the richest 20% over that receivedby the poorest 20%) and with the proportion of children living inrelative poverty, but not with gross national income (Pickett &Wilkinson, 2007). Across the U.S. states, states with high levels ofinequality had poorer educational performance and higher levels ofmental health problems compared with states with a more equalincome distribution (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2007). Based on thesefindings, inequality appears to confer similar risks for children asit does for adults; as such, it appears reasonable to consider thatstatus anxiety—a process that appears to mediate the effects ofinequality in adults—may also do so for children.

Importantly, Wilkinson’s hypotheses and findings are contro-versial, and many alternative arguments have been put forward toexplain the link between inequalities in health (broadly speaking)and income inequality in societies (see Mackenbach, 2012, for areview of the prominent arguments). As an example, Deaton(2011, 2013) has argued for the importance of examining thepolitical effects of inequality, in that the very rich possess morepolitical power than the rest of society and may be unmotivated tosupport policies that would benefit those at lower levels of thesocioeconomic hierarchy (e.g., improvements to public education)as well as to support policies that lead to increasing inequality(e.g., a less progressive tax code). Others have suggested that thepotential for increased intergenerational mobility may in turn leadto greater homogeneity of health-related lifestyle choices or ofpersonal characteristics associated with health outcomes amongthose who remain at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy(Mackenbach, 2012; West, 1991). These competing hypothesesare, as noted above, in need of additional study; however, as noted,for the purpose of this article, the status anxiety hypothesis isconceptualized as an intriguing psychological mechanisms thatmay be relevant for all people living in poverty and, for thatmatter, that may be especially relevant for children, who may bemore actively engaged in the process of forming a sense of self inrelation to others than is the typical adult and who may be morevulnerable to perturbations in this process than an older individualwould be.

To determine whether the status anxiety hypothesis is a plausi-ble one for children, two conditions must be met. First, for poorchildren to be impacted by their perceptions of low status in ahighly stratified society, they must be aware of their own SES(though they need not necessarily use adult SES labels, nor mustthey be aware of subtle SES distinctions such as upper-middleversus middle class). Second, because the source of harm impliedin this hypothesis is the stress that comes with awareness of lowstatus, poor children should demonstrate higher levels of stressthan nonpoor children in the same society.

The first assumption, that poor children must be aware of theirstatus, is supported for children from middle childhood throughadolescence (van der Hoek, 2005), but it is not yet clear whetheryounger children are also able to identify their own SES. Thefinding that poor 5- to 14-year-old low-income children are muchmore likely (50% vs. 13%) than middle-income children to choosean imagined poor child as their friend indicates that poor childrenfeels some sense of affinity or belonging with other poor people(Weinger, 2000a); however, the large age range in the study

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referenced here and the lack of reporting on age-related differencesacross the sample make it impossible to know when this affinitydevelops. The literature on in-group preference and intergroup biashas shown that these phenomena are exhibited across a range ofstatuses—including gender, ethnicity, body type, and preferredsports team—by age 5, suggesting that the general ability toperceive oneself as a member of a group develops relatively earlyin life (Abrams, Rutland, & Cameron, 2003; Powlishta, Serbin,Doyle, & White, 1994). Applying these findings to the concept ofSES, it is reasonable to hypothesize that children will demonstrateawareness of their own SES measured as a simple groupingvariable (e.g., “I am poor” vs. “I am not poor”) by early school age,but may not develop awareness of their own SES as a linear,continuous variable (e.g., “I have higher status than Tim but lowerstatus than Amelia”) until later in development.

The second condition is that poor children should experiencehigher levels of stress than nonpoor children in the same society.As noted previously in this review, economically disadvantagedchildren clearly experience disproportionate levels of exposure toa variety of stressors (Wadsworth et al., 2013). There is amplepsychophysiological evidence to support the assumption that chil-dren experience these exposures as stressful, because economicallydisadvantaged children have been found to have elevated levels ofcortisol (Evans & English, 2002; Lupien, King, Meaney, & McE-wen, 2000, 2001) and resting blood pressure (Evans & English,2002). Quasi-experimental evidence has demonstrated that youngchildren whose families participated in a poverty-alleviation pro-gram that used cash transfers had lower cortisol levels postinter-vention than demographically similar children who did not receivethe intervention (Fernald & Gunnar, 2009). Though additionalevidence on economically disadvantaged young children’s per-ceived levels of stress is needed, there appears to be little reason todoubt the assumption that poor children’s stress levels are higher,on average, than those of nonpoor children.

Research on the status anxiety hypothesis should aim to deter-mine when young children become attuned to status indicators andwhether this attunement leads to the experience of stress in chil-dren with low SES. The first half of this question could beaddressed through developmentally appropriate interview-basedstudies. Experimental studies in which children are exposed toimages, stories, or questions meant to elicit status consciousnessand in which physiological measures of the child’s stress responseare measured could be used to address the latter half of thisquestion. In addition, research on mechanisms beyond stress itselfthrough which status anxiety impacts children’s functioning wouldbe informative. For example, how does the budding awareness ofone’s relatively low SES impact motivation? If young childrenperceive inequality as unfair, how does this impact their expecta-tions for the relation between effort and success? And if not—ifchildren perceive inequality as a manifestation of equity, and theirown low status as the result of their own or their parents’ defi-ciencies—how does this impact their developing sense of self, andtheir relationships with their parents and communities? Like thequestions previously proposed in relation to children’s specificbeliefs and stereotypes, research on these questions may yieldimportant and currently unavailable information for adults inter-acting with and attempting to improve the life chances of econom-ically disadvantaged children.

Stereotype Threat

Stereotype threat has been studied primarily in relation to raceand gender (as statuses in which some individuals are marginal-ized) and academic performance (as an outcome), and the extantliterature has focused primarily on older adolescents and adults(see, e.g., Aronson, Quinn, & Spencer, 1998; Croizet & Claire,1998; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999; Steele & Aronson, 1995).Stereotype threat effects occur when negative stereotypes about astigmatized group of which a person is a member become acti-vated. These activated stereotypes cause anxiety for the individual,stemming from the fear that his or her performance will confirmthe accuracy of the stereotype; this anxiety, in turn, leads theindividual to underperform on the task around which the stereo-type was activated. Stereotype threat may occur either (a) when arelevant status variable is activated (e.g., when children are askedto report their ethnicity) or (b) when stereotype components otherthan status are activated (e.g., when children are told that a testassesses IQ; McKown & Weinstein, 2003). In addition, an emerg-ing body of literature has suggested that efforts to cope with thestress associated with stereotype threat lead to a depleted volitionalstate that has detrimental effects on functioning in areas outside thestereotyped domain (Inzlicht & Kang, 2010). Though understud-ied, the hypothesis that the academic performance of economicallydisadvantaged children is hindered by stereotype threat is directlyconsistent with the extant literature. Further, we argue that stereo-type threat may also have a direct effect on behavior outside theacademic domain, such as aggressive or disruptive behavior. Chil-dren routinely experience explicit evaluation of their behavior(e.g., in color-coded classroom behavior charts, on report cards forwhich behavior is rated and described, in less formal experiencesof being disciplined at home and school); in this way, children mayperceive their behavior as being monitored and evaluated to adegree that is similar to the monitoring and evaluation they expe-rience in academic work. In addition, children approaching thelater elementary years are likely to become increasingly aware ofpeers’ impressions of their behavior and of differences betweentheir behavior and that of their peers (Flavell et al., 2002); theseolder children may then self-evaluate based on their impressions.Further, it is possible that children are attuned to stereotypes aboutthe laziness, violence, or criminality of people who are poor—endorsed by adults (see, e.g., Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, & Tagler,2001)—much as they appear to be attuned to academic, social, andpersonality stereotypes. Thus, the requisite criteria for children’sbehavior to be impacted by stereotype threat appears to be in place,and, for this reason, it is reasonable to posit that some of thebehavior problems seen in disadvantaged children are attributableto the direct effects of stereotype threat or to the effects of chronicexposure to stereotype threat on self-regulatory processes.

The experience of stereotype threat may be uniquely damagingfor children in the preschool to early school age period. It is duringthis developmental stage that children appear to develop a sense ofself-efficacy—a sense of themselves as individuals with the ca-pacity to act effectively in the world (Flavell et al., 2002). Self-efficacy appears to be an important predictor of children’s func-tioning; for example, children with a high sense of self-efficacy inthe academic and social domains demonstrate superior functioningin these areas compared with children who demonstrate a lowsense of self-efficacy (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pas-

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torelli, 1996). For young children, the development of a healthy,high sense of self-efficacy appears to be facilitated by overestima-tion of their own abilities. Overestimation also predicts perfor-mance; across domains, the more young children overestimatetheir abilities, the better they actually perform (Bjorklund, 2011;Lopez, Little, Oettingen, & Baltes, 1998; Shin et al., 2007). Forpoor children, exposure to others’ stereotypes about their abilitiesand the experience of stereotype threat may interfere with thenormative process by which excessive optimism about one’s abil-ities leads to high performance, which facilitates the developmentof a healthy, positive sense of self-efficacy; thus, exposure toothers’ stereotypes and to the experience of stereotype threat at ayoung age may derail an important developmental process withlifelong implications.

The hypothesis that stereotype threat impacts the functioning ofpoor children is predicated on four assumptions: (a) that childrenare aware of self-relevant stereotypes about poor people, (b) thatchildren are aware they may be identified by others as belongingto a stigmatized socioeconomic group, (c) that children are awarethat others hold the same stereotypes of which they themselves areaware, and (d) that young children have the cognitive capacity andsocial motivation to be impacted by stereotype threat at all.

The extant literature, previously summarized in this review,clearly supports the first assumption in children ages 6 and up(e.g., Leahy, 1981; Weinger, 2000a); additional research is neededto learn at what age children first become aware of stereotypesabout poor people and to elaborate what is already known aboutchildren’s stereotypes. There is little evidence to support or refutethe second assumption, that children are aware that others may seethem as members of a stigmatized group. However, the reasonslow-income 5- to 13-year-olds give for preferring poor friends towealthier friends—for example, “. . . because I don’t really want arich friend that thinks he’s better than me” or “the poor kid they[sic] wouldn’t judge you on how you look, you talk, and the wayyou were”—suggests that, by early elementary school, if notbefore, children do worry about being stigmatized due to their ownSES (Weinger, 1998, pp. 111–112).

Regarding the third assumption, that children are aware ofothers’ stereotypes, some have argued that the decreasing correla-tion between children’s self-reported stereotypical beliefs and theirreports of others’ beliefs between ages 5 and 11 indicates thatchildren do not truly understand that others hold the same stereo-types as themselves until middle childhood (McKown & Stram-bler, 2009). However, it seems equally plausible that the decreas-ing correlation between children’s self-reported beliefs and thebeliefs of others stems from their increasing awareness of what issocially desirable. In contrast to the supposition that children donot have knowledge of other’s stereotypes until middle childhood,McKown and Weinstein (2003) found that some percentage ofchildren as young as age 6 (the youngest children in their sample)do demonstrate awareness of broadly held real-world stereotypesabout race as well as an ability to infer others’ stereotypes in aspecific context (an imaginary world in which one type of peo-ple—the “Blues”—hold negative beliefs about the academic com-petence of another type of people—the “Greens”). The findingsshowed that 18% of 6-year-olds were able to infer the stereotypesof an imagined “Green” who was asked to pick a partner for anacademic task (McKown & Weinstein, 2003). Further, 7% of6-year-old children from groups that were not academically stig-

matized and 15% of 6-year-old children from stigmatized groupsreferenced broad stereotypes about race or ethnicity when askedhow the imaginary world was like the real world (McKown &Weinstein, 2003). As with other studies using open-ended probes,the percentages reported here may underestimate the actual per-centage of children who are aware of broad stereotypes about raceand ethnicity.

Finally, the fourth assumption—that children have the cognitivecapacity and social motivation to be impacted by stereotype threat—issupported by the literature for children as young as age 5. Asian-American 5- to 7-year-old girls, for example, demonstrate higherperformance on a quantitative skills assessment when their ethnicidentity is activated and lower performance when their genderidentity is activated (compared in both cases with the same child’sperformance in a control condition; Ambady et al., 2001). Further,the one study that looked at poverty-related stereotype threat inchildren found that French 6- to 9-year-olds from low-SES fami-lies (with SES defined based on the occupation of whichever of thechild’s parents had higher occupational status) demonstrated sig-nificantly worse performance on a visual pattern completion taskwhen it was presented as an evaluative assessment compared withwhen it was presented as nonevaluative; in contrast, high-SESchildren showed no differences across conditions (Désert et al.,2009). Notably, there were no differences in the magnitude of theeffect for the youngest children in the sample versus the oldest,implying that the competencies needed for a measurable andimmediate impact of stereotype threat to be found are as welldeveloped at age 6 as they are by age 9 (Désert et al., 2009). Basedon these and the other findings cited here, the hypothesis thatchildren as young as 5�6 years old will experience the effect ofstereotype threat in the academic/cognitive domain and possibly inother domains appears well-founded; additional research will de-termine whether even younger children are impacted by stereotypethreat related to SES, but the extant literature certainly does notrule out this possibility.

If, in fact, it is the case that 5- to 6-year-olds are susceptible tostereotype threat, it follows that children will continue to besusceptible to stereotype threat through the middle childhood years(and beyond), a supposition that is consistent with findings ofstereotype threat effects in older children (e.g., Désert et al., 2009;McKown & Strambler, 2009). A more challenging question, how-ever, is how children are affected by the cumulative effect of yearsof exposure to stereotype threat (e.g., 4�5 years of exposure for a10-year-old child, if our hypothesis is correct). Spillover effectssuch as those described by Inzlicht and Kang (2010) seem a likelyoutcome of this long-term exposure, as does a generalized andinsidious process by which children’s experiences of stress andunderperformance strengthen early developing schemas related tolow self-efficacy, a sense of lacking competence across domains,and so forth. One more optimistic hypothesis is that children mayenter a period of social class “chauvinism” such as that describedfor gender by Ambady et al. (2001). Ambady et al. found that,although 5- to 7-year-old and 11- to 14-year-old girls demonstratedsusceptibility to gender stereotypes about their academic perfor-mance, 8- to 10-year-old girls demonstrated the opposite pattern,showing heightened performance when their gender status wasactivated. The authors hypothesized that this reflects a positiveown-gender bias found for this age group in the basic develop-mental literature. If this “gender chauvinism” reflects a more

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generalized own-group bias that emerges during the late elemen-tary years, then low-income children might similarly experience aperiod of increased social class pride and decreased stereotypethreat susceptibility. On the other hand, it is possible that such apositive own-group bias would not develop among low-incomechildren (with respect to social class), even if the process describedhere does generalize to other aspects of identity, because childrenmay lack exposure to positive portrayals of the poor in the mediaand elsewhere (Bullock, Fraser Wyche, & Williams, 2001).

Recommendations for Future Research

The findings of this review raise the following questions asimportant targets for future research:

1. When do children develop an awareness of SES as a wayof categorizing people? Research on this question couldborrow methods from the literature on early developmentof gender and racial awareness, though a unique chal-lenge for researchers interested in this topic will beidentifying visual markers of SES, because they are typ-ically used in studies of early status awareness. Oneapproach might be to modify the methods used by Olsonet al. (2012) for children in late infancy and toddlerhoodto determine whether and when associations betweenrace and wealth are found in this very young group ofchildren—if associations were found before age 3 (theage at which they appeared in the Olson et al. study), thiswould suggest that some awareness of SES develops bythe toddler period.

2. When do children develop an awareness of socioeco-nomic inequality? Similar to the first research question,research on this topic will be challenging given the dif-ficulty in identifying universal visual markers of SES;however, visual sorting tasks for infants and toddlersusing the previously identified association between raceand wealth would be a step forward in addressing thisquestion.

3. When do economically disadvantaged children developan understanding of themselves as poor, and when doesthis understanding shift from the ability to label oneselfto the sense that being poor is a salient aspect of one’sidentity? For children ages 4 and up, play-based inter-view techniques such as the Berkeley Puppet Interview(Ablow & Measelle, 1993) might be used to assessawareness of one’s own poverty, and items related to theimpact of poverty in one’s own life (e.g., items regardingchildren’s beliefs about their own future employmentopportunities, responses to which could be compared forpoor versus nonpoor children) could be used to assesswhether this status is seen as salience. The use of novelplay-based interview methods requiring fewer attentionalresources and/or less-developed receptive language abil-ities might allow for similar interview-based testing ofeven younger children, perhaps as young as 3 years ofage. Naturalistic observational studies of language use—likely with parents as reporters, given the intensive timecommitment required for such an assessment—might be

used to determine whether references to oneself as “rich”or “poor” appear in language-using children who are tooearly in their development to participate in an interviewstudy. Research into this question, or other questionsspecifically focused on economically disadvantaged chil-dren, will need to involve careful consideration of themost appropriate measurement of SES/poverty status, aquestion that will likely be informed by both theoreticalconsiderations and convenience. As can be seen through-out this review, the extant literature is very diverse interms of the measures used to assess SES/poverty status,and future researchers should be alert to this diversityboth as they design their own work and as they review theliterature relevant to their own work.

4. When do children first endorse stereotypes about peoplein poverty? What are these stereotypes, and how do theychange over time? When do differences based on per-sonal sociodemographic characteristics emerge? Like theprevious research question, this set of questions might beaddressed through interview-based studies using play anda flexible (verbal/nonverbal) response format to assesswhether children endorse stereotypes about people inpoverty at different ages. Alternatively or in addition tomore straightforward interview techniques, story-basedtechniques could be used to create characters who arepoor or not poor, and then to ask children questions aboutthe characteristics of these characters. For older children,similar methods with more age-relevant tools (e.g., asimple computer game rather than a story told by aninterviewer) could be used to assess stereotypes whileminimizing the desirability bias that might come fromasking directly about stereotypes that children might en-dorse.

5. What do parents and children discuss with regard to SESand disparities? Studies of this question might use meth-ods similar to the MacArthur Story Stem narrative(Bretherton & Oppenheim, 2003), providing parent–child pairs with a set of dolls and an introduction to astory meant to elicit themes related to SES (e.g., money,purchasing, work), and then observing themes thatemerge from the parent–child play that follows such anintroduction. For older children, the play-based methodmight be replaced with the explicit introduction of a topic(e.g., “we would like you to talk about why some peopleare poor”) or with separate or joint interviews with parentand child about conversations they have had on thesetopics.

6. Are economically disadvantaged young children suscep-tible to the effects of stereotype threat related to theirpoverty? When and in what domains? What factors pre-dict greater or lesser susceptibility? Assessment of thisresearch question could use a standard stereotype threatexperiment, in which one group of economically disad-vantaged children is introduced to a task in a way thatreminds the children of their disadvantaged status or thatframes the task to come as involving skills/abilities for

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which the children may be expected to believe theirsocioeconomic group is deficient compared with others,and the second group of economically disadvantagedchildren is introduced to the same task with a moreneutral prompt, and the performance of the two groups isthen compared. In the academic domain, standardizedtests of children’s mathematical, verbal, or reading abil-ities might be used in the experiment. In the behavioraldomain, additional creativity would be needed; however,as one example, procedures such as Mischel’s famous“marshmallow task” (Mischel & Baker, 1975; Mischel,Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989) could be used to assesswhether disadvantaged children experience stereotypethreat effects related to their impulse control.

7. Are economically disadvantaged young children suscep-tible to the effects of status anxiety? When and in whatcontexts? Research on this question will necessarily bemore complex than research on Questions 1–6, becausethe concept of status anxiety implies both that childrenare aware of their SES and that their perceptions of theirrelatively lower status compared with others (whetherpeers or anonymous others) causes stress for them. Meth-ods such as those described for Question 3 could be usedto address the first component of this research question.To address the latter part of this question, methods sim-ilar to those used in large-scale studies of the “inequalityeffect” might be adapted and used. For example, re-searchers might examine whether disadvantaged childrenattending public schools with high levels of economicdiversity report or show physiological evidence of higherlevels of stress compared with disadvantaged childrenattending less economically diverse schools. Anotheruseful comparison might be to examine the stress levelsof disadvantaged children who live in communities inwhich exposure to individuals with higher SES is likely(e.g., those living in mixed-income neighborhoods) withthose who live in communities in which exposure toindividuals with higher SES is less likely (e.g., thoseliving in large impoverished neighborhoods). Unfortu-nately, controlling for differences in neighborhood/school quality and for other differences in the experi-ences of the groups of children described here will bechallenging, if not impossible.

Research on this basic set of questions will lead to greaterknowledge of the psychological experience of living in poverty foryoung children. In addition, this research will lay the groundworkfor understanding how social–cognitive processes contribute to the trans-mission of poverty-related risk in young children. Beyond the spe-cific techniques proposed in these examples, research into thequestions could draw on the diverse literatures in the cognitive anddevelopmental sciences referenced throughout this article formethodological guidance. For example, this review pulls from theliteratures on moral development, social–cognitive development,numeracy, and gender identity, among others, in our discussion ofcognitive competencies relevant to our proposed model; theseliteratures contain numerous creative and clever techniques for therigorous study of young children’s cognitive processes.

In addition to the focused research questions proposed above,several questions from the larger literature on childhood economicdisadvantage could also guide research into our proposed model.For example, a timely question as of this writing is how the scopeof the effects of economic disadvantage (in terms of who isaffected, which outcomes are effected, and how long the effectendures) may have shifted over the course of the recent global“Great Recession,” which began in the late 2000s and continues tohave large-scale economic effects as of 2014. Past research byElder (1999) has shown cohort effects of the Great Depression onU.S. residents who were children in the 1930s, and Aber andChaudry (2010) have proposed that similar effects of the GreatRecession are likely to be seen. For researchers interested inexamining the beliefs, attitudes, and related social–cognitivemechanisms described in this article, questions regarding the im-pact of the Great Recession may be very relevant, though many ofthese questions will necessarily be theoretical until a cohort ofchildren whose experiences have not been directly affected by therecession has been born. For example, one question is whether thenational rhetoric reflecting anxiety around financial matters (andSES) during the recession might exacerbate the stress that disad-vantaged children experience related to their SES, or, alternatively,whether this rhetoric might ameliorate some of the stress associ-ated with economic disadvantage by normalizing the experience offinancial neediness and reducing stigma. Another question is howthe beliefs, attitudes, and susceptibility to social–cognitive pro-cesses of children whose families are newly disadvantaged as aresult of job losses, foreclosures, and so forth experienced duringa period of international recession might differ from childrenwhose families have been experiencing disadvantage for a longerperiod of time.

Another potentially interesting subtopic for future research isthe degree to which children’s perceptions of what poverty is andwhat it means for their own lives overlaps with various definitionsof poverty used in the research literature as well as in legal andpolicy documents. For example, an ongoing debate in the fields ofeconomics, psychology, and others for which poverty is a majortopic is whether measures of poverty should be absolute, reflectingthe amount of resources needed to meet basic needs, and unchang-ing with the standard of living in a society, or relative, designed toreflect the changing standards of living in a society. A related topicis the issue of which indicator(s) should be used to measurepoverty; while annual income relative to household size is used inthe vast majority of U.S. poverty research (and for policy and legalpurposes in the United States), alternative indicators such as an-nual consumption, capability to secure adequate resources (mea-sured based on education and other predictors of employability),assets, and subjective perceptions have been proposed and havereceived some attention in the literature outside the United States;relative merits and disadvantages of each approach are beyond thescope of this article but are aptly reviewed elsewhere (e.g., Have-man, 2009). Future research could aim to determine whether theperceptions of children whose families meet an absolute income-based criterion for poverty differ substantively from those whosefamilies do not meet an absolute criterion but do meet a relativecriterion, adjusted for standard of living. For example, it might beexpected that the former group would demonstrate a greater focuson basic material needs (e.g., food, secure shelter), while the lattergroup might be more attuned to social or academic consequences

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of poverty. Similarly, studies of the intersection of different indi-cators of poverty might be expected to yield unique and interestingfindings; for example, one might hypothesize that a child whosefamily is below an income threshold for poverty but above acapability threshold for poverty might differ in his or her self-efficacy beliefs and perceptions of the consequences of poverty inhis or her life compared with a child whose family is below boththresholds. Particularly interesting in relation to the model de-scribed in this article is the relation between parents’ subjectiveappraisals of their own poverty and children’s perceptions ofpoverty and its impact in their lives. Adults’ subjective appraisalsof their own poverty have received little attention in the literature,though the few studies of this construct have shown that theoverlap between subjective appraisals of poverty and income-based poverty measures is modest (Bradshaw & Finch, 2003). Forexample, approximately 60% of those who identified themselvesas “poor” in one Australian sample had annual incomes above thepoverty threshold used in the study (income � 50% of medianequivalized disposal household income; Marks, 2007). Althoughsome researchers may have seen this lack of overlap as a deterrentto more intensive study of subjective poverty, we argue thatsubjective poverty may simply be its own construct, unique fromincome-based measures of poverty; further, within our model, wewould expect that subjective poverty (measured from parents’perspectives) might moderate the relation between income povertyand children’s beliefs, as well as perhaps influencing children’ssusceptibility to processes such as stereotype threat and statusanxiety. More generally, we argue that research such as that wehave described could be used to inform the conversation in theliterature on the measurement of poverty by defining aspects ofpoverty that are meaningful to our youngest citizens and by ex-amining differences and similarities between groups of childrenwho meet criteria for different indicators of poverty.

Acknowledging the limitations in the extant literature, there isenough data to justify forming preliminary hypotheses for some ofthe questions listed here. First, based on the literature on children’sdevelopment of basic personal stereotypes (primarily studied forrace and gender) and awareness of social grouping categories(Martin & Ruble, 2010; Quintana, 2008; Stevenson & Stewart,1958; Weinraub et al., 1984), it appears reasonable to hypothesizethat children become aware of social class as a category and ofprimitive stereotypes about SES by age 3. An additional predic-tion, based on children’s ability to label themselves in terms ofgender and race at approximately the same time they developgeneral knowledge of these categories (Martin & Ruble, 2010;Quintana, 2008), is that children will be able to label themselves aspoor or not poor at approximately the same time that they becomeaware of SES as a social category. A possible exception would bechildren who live in very economically homogeneous communi-ties with limited access to television or other media; however, themajority of children will likely have adequate exposure to socio-economic diversity to stimulate the emergence of these under-standings.

From this point, it is likely that the developmental pathways ofpoor and more privileged children will diverge. The literature hasshown that racial minority children’s levels of racial awarenessdevelop in tandem with their basic social perspective taking abil-ities, and are independent of parental socialization and accultura-tion (Quintana, Ybarra, Gonzalez-Doupe, & De Baessa, 2000);

thus, the experience of being a racial minority along with thecognitive capacity to develop a more complex understanding ofrace appears to be sufficient for the development of advancedlevels of racial awareness among racial minority children. This isnot the case, however, for White (racial majority) children, forwhom social perspective taking abilities do not appear to providean adequate basis for the development of racial perspective takingabilities, presumably because their daily life experiences rarelydraw their attention to their own race. Based on this literature, onewould expect economically disadvantaged children—who may bemore likely than wealthier children to have experiences that drawtheir attention to income and other socioeconomic factors as in-fluences on their lives—to develop a sense of SES as a salientaspect of their identities earlier than do more privileged children;a possible exception is very privileged children, for whom beingrich may be as salient as being poor is for disadvantaged children.In addition, given that the literature has demonstrated stereotypethreat effects related to other domains by age 5, it is likely that thecognitive capacities necessary to experience stereotype threat mustcome online sometime before that age. Thus, it appears reasonableto predict that economically disadvantaged children will developbetween ages 4 and 5 both a more complex, multifaceted perspec-tive on poverty and a sense of identification with other people whoare poor, and that more privileged children of the same age willcontinue to endorse a simplistic understanding of poverty, whichwill eventually—in the absence of teaching from parents or otheradults—become a dismissive, distancing, and negative attitudetoward the poor.

Children’s understanding of poverty and other requisite cogni-tive skills is likely to converge during this same period such that byage 5, economically disadvantaged children will demonstrate sus-ceptibility to stereotype threat (even as they and their economicallyprivileged peers build a growing repertoire of negative stereotypesabout the poor). In parallel to these developments, children’snatural interest in equality, equity, and inequality (Baumard et al.,2012; Fehr et al., 2008; G. S. Leventhal, Popp, & Sawyer, 1973;Olson et al., 2011), along with their increasingly complex andpersonal understanding of social class and, specifically, of poverty,will likely lead economically disadvantaged children to becomeaware of status and to experience status anxiety by age 5. After age5, each of these processes is likely to become increasingly pow-erful influences as children become more aware of the importanceof SES in their own lives and of the prevalence of negativestereotypes about their socioeconomic group. In addition, as chil-dren become explicitly aware of the concept of discrimination andof personal experiences with discrimination in middle childhood(Spears Brown & Bigler, 2005), this too may increase the stressassociated with status anxiety. At the same time, the increasingsusceptibility of poor children to stereotype threat and statusanxiety will likely lead to a self-protective response of distancingthemselves from others who are poor, moving toward the positionsendorsed by poor adults, who endorse negative stereotypes aboutothers who are poor but label themselves as exceptions to thesestereotypes (Bullock, 1999).

Several factors may influence the pathways described here. Forexample, parents’ own attitudes about poverty and inequality mayinfluence how early children develop their own understanding ofthese concepts as well as the content of this understanding. Par-ents’ attitudes and direct socialization efforts may be particularly

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important influences on the beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes ofchildren who are not poor, because poverty may not be a mean-ingful enough concept in nonpoor children’s lives for them todevelop complex, empathic attitudes about poverty on their own.For children who are poor, differing parental behavior may lead tovariance in the age at and degree to which children are exposed tomanifestations of their own poverty, which may influence thedevelopmental pathway described here. Further, parents’ attitudesmay impact the degree to which children’s motivation, effort, andso forth is impacted by their awareness of poverty and inequality.

Similarly, neighborhood context may influence the times atwhich the processes described here take root; both poor andnonpoor children living in economically diverse neighborhoods,for example, may become aware of SES earlier than children inmore homogeneous neighborhoods. Chronicity of exposure topoverty is also likely to be important, both in terms of the age atwhich children come to think of themselves as poor and in termsof the attributions they make for why some people are poor.

Finally, children who are members of stigmatized racial/ethnicgroups may demonstrate different patterns in their developingawareness of poverty and inequality than do racial/ethnic majoritychildren, because racial/ ethnic minority children may have greateroverall exposure to the experience of disadvantage, of being ste-reotyped, or of being taught directly about social inequality com-pared with racial/ethnic majority children. Relatedly, the highcorrelation between poverty status and racial/ethnic minority statusis likely to complicate efforts to understand the phenomena de-scribed in this review. Careful attention to and manipulation of theracial and/or ethnic markers of any study stimuli may be helpful inseparating children’s beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes about racefrom those about poverty. Similarly, research addressing the ques-tion of whether, to what extent, and in which contexts childrenconflate racial/ethnic minority status with poverty and/or racial/ethnic majority status with economic privilege will elucidate chil-dren’s understanding of the relation between race and poverty.Finally, as in all areas of social science, research involving specificcultural groups that is tailored to the culture of those groups islikely to be more effective in understanding in detail the phenom-ena of interest as it is experienced by group members than isresearch involving culturally diverse samples. In studies involvingculturally diverse samples, efforts should be made to ensure thatthe methods used fit with the cultural norms of minority groupmembers included in the sample, that minority group members’perspectives are sought in the design of the research, that minoritygroup members are recruited in large enough numbers that theirexperiences are not outweighed (statistically) by majority groupmembers, and that differences in the overall experiences of stigma,discrimination, and disadvantage as well as differences in theimmigration experiences, educational attainment, and family struc-ture of study participants from different racial/ethnic groups areconsidered in the interpretation of the study findings.

Broader Implications of the Proposed Research

Beyond the implications of the proposed research for our un-derstanding of basic social–cognitive development, of the phe-nomenological experience of being poor for economically disad-vantaged children, and of potential psychological mediators of thedetrimental effects of poverty on various aspects of children’s

behavioral, academic, and social functioning—all discussedthroughout this review—the proposed program of research islikely to have implications for educators, clinicians, and policy-makers who work with economically disadvantaged children orwho have an interest in promoting social justice. For example,knowledge of the age at which broadly held negative stereotypesabout people living in poverty emerge may indicate a period inwhich these emerging beliefs are most amenable to change, high-lighting an ideal opportunity for educational interventions that mayhave long-term effects on reducing bullying and stigma. Researchinto children’s in-group and out-group preferences hints at thepossibility that children will work to rectify inequalities betweengroups when they have been taught that one group experiencesunearned privilege while the other experiences unearned disadvan-tage, but will perpetuate inequalities between groups for whomthey have no such prior knowledge (Olson et al., 2011). Thus, itappears reasonable to hope that universal educational intervention,particularly at the point at which children’s stereotypes are justforming, may lead to more positive, justice-oriented perspectivesin those children.

For those working specifically with poor children, knowledge ofthe beliefs and stereotypes they hold about themselves and othersas well as the ways in which their functioning is impacted bysocial–cognitive processes tied to these beliefs could impact theassumptions that are made about the source of a child’s misbehav-ior or low academic performance and highlight novel opportunitiesfor improving children’s self-esteem as well as their behavior. Forexample, with the knowledge that young children are likely to beaware of their own poverty, adults could discuss children’s beliefsin a developmentally appropriate fashion and could proactivelycounter negative beliefs that a child has developed about him- orherself, parents, or family members based on their economicdisadvantage. Later, as peer relationships and peer comparisonsbecome increasingly salient for children, interventions to minimizeobservable differences (e.g., funding extracurricular activitiesthrough tax revenues rather than through fees assessed to privatefamilies) may lesson the degree to which, as we hypothesize, earlydeveloping awareness of differences is heightened and reinforcedin middle childhood. Adults could also help children of all ages tofeel empowered to meet their own goals while acknowledging thereality of social inequality in the United States.

An important clarification regarding the model proposed in thisarticle—and one that we consider particularly relevant for thosewith an interest in the practical implications of the hypotheses andideas discussed—is the distinction between the processes we de-scribe and Oscar Lewis’s highly controversial concept of the“culture of poverty” (Lewis, 1966). Lewis, an anthropologist,proposed that four factors—estrangement of the “subculture” frommainstream society, dysfunctional community characteristics suchas poor housing, antimainstream family characteristics such as lowrates of marriage, and dysfunctional individual values and beliefs(e.g., present-time orientation, fatalism, dependence)—serve tomaintain poverty within and across generations. As noted by Ortizand Briggs (2003), the concept of the “culture of poverty,” as itwas interpreted by policymakers and other researchers, created ahopeless view for the prospects of children born into poverty,suggesting that this culture would be internalized early in life andwould be an immutable force, inevitably leading those unfortunateenough to be born into it to a life of “criminality, joblessness, and

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poverty.” These ideas, which have been used in many harmfulways against the poor, have been largely debunked. In contrast,then, to Lewis’s theory (and what has been made of it in the extantliterature), our model aims to describe a set of entirely mutablecognitive processes that, if intervened on through individual, af-firming work with affected children or, ideally, through large-scaleintervention with both marginalized and privileged children, coulddecrease the degree to which children’s behavior, academic func-tioning, and social functioning are impacted by their experience ofeconomic disadvantage. A further distinction between our modeland the “culture of poverty” is that, rather than viewing econom-ically disadvantaged children as participating in an isolated sub-culture of the poor, our model recognizes the influence of socialand cultural experiences that cross socioeconomic lines and as-sumes that such influences are present for the vast majority ofdisadvantaged children in wealthy countries like the United States,through exposure to television, Internet, stores, and various formsof marketing, if not through personal interactions in their commu-nities and schools. In this way, the beliefs and processes describedin our model, while maintaining some parallels with the values andbeliefs described in Lewis’s model, are inextricably linked to“mainstream” culture and stem from engagement with this culturerather than isolation and disengagement from it.

Conclusion

The extant literature on stereotypes, beliefs, and attributionsabout poverty and inequality and on stereotype threat and statusanxiety provides a starting point for several research questions aswell as consideration of the potential implications of knowledgestemming from this research. However, the literature base on thesetopics—particularly in young children—is relatively small and haslittle to say about children’s early awareness of social inequality,of stereotypes related to poverty and people who are poor, or oftheir own SES. In addition, the literature does not sufficientlyaddress processes through which each of these cognitive phenom-ena might impact children in early-to-middle childhood—espe-cially children younger than elementary school age—who areeconomically disadvantaged. The literature on children’s beliefs,attitudes, and attributions about poverty is illuminating but isprimarily focused on older children, uses methods that may beunsuitable for children younger than 8 years old, and does notappear to capture the full scope of children’s ideas about poverty.Similarly, the literatures on status anxiety and stereotype threatprovide tantalizing evidence that these processes may be relevantto the experience of children living in poverty, but concrete evi-dence for or against the simple hypothesis that these processes areactive in young economically disadvantaged children is absent.Thus, the opportunity for new research that will contribute to theliterature on childhood poverty by illuminating the psychologicalaspects of this experience is wide open.

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Received February 17, 2014Revision received December 27, 2014

Accepted January 5, 2015 �

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Cognitive Aspects of Young Children's Experience of Economic Disadvantage

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