Article Recognized as Third Most Cited in Child Development 

Greg Duncan
Distinguished Professor

Distinguished Professor of Education Greg Duncan's article "Early-Childhood Poverty and Adult Attainment, Behavior, and Health," published February 4, 2010 in the journal Child Development, has been identified as the third most cited article in the field of Child Development. According to 2008 ISI rankings, Child Development increased impact factor to 3.821 and remains the most cited journal with the highest impact factor in the Educational Psychology category. It also ranks 6/55 in Developmental Psychology.

Full article

This article assesses the consequences of poverty between a child’s prenatal year and 5th birthday for several adult achievement, health, and behavior outcomes, measured as late as age 37. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1,589) and controlling for economic conditions in middle childhood and adolescence, as well as demographic conditions at the time of the birth, findings indicate statistically significant and, in some cases, quantitatively large detrimental effects of early poverty on a number of attainment-related outcomes (adult earnings and work hours). Early-childhood poverty was not associated with such behavioral measures as out-of-wedlock childbearing and arrests. Most of the adult earnings effects appear to operate through early poverty’s association with adult work hours.

Some 4.2 million infants, toddlers, and preschoolers lived in poverty in the United States in 2007. For a single mother with two children, this meant that total income was less than $16,705; many poor families had income well below that amount (U.S. Census Bureau, 2008). Poverty and its attendant stressors have the potential to shape the neurobiology of the developing child in powerful ways, which may lead directly to poorer outcomes later in life. Poverty in early childhood can also affect adult attainment, behavior, and health indirectly through parents’ material and emotional investments in children’s learning and development.

The sensitivity of early childhood to environmental influences has been demonstrated in a wide range of infant, toddler, and preschooler intervention studies. Many descriptive studies show that, relative to nonpoor children, poor children will be less successful in school and, as adults, in the labor market, have poorer health, and be more likely to commit crimes and engage in other forms of problem behavior (see Holzer, Schanzenbach, Duncan, & Ludwig, 2007, for a review of these studies). Despite these associations, it is far from clear to what extent poverty itself is the cause of these differences. Our primary goal in this study is to obtain relatively unbiased estimates of the total effects association between early-childhood poverty and adult attainment, behavior, and health. Extending the work of Duncan, Brooks-Gunn, Yeung, and Smith (1998), we use the most recent data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine the long-run (i.e., as late as age 37) impacts of low income early in life, net income later in childhood, and other correlated family factors surrounding a child’s birth.