Bad neighbourhoods cast bad effects on growing children: study

Study says the longer a child lives in that kind of neighbourhood,the more harmful is the impact.

A new study has claimed that growing up in a poor neighbourhood significantly reduces the chances of a child graduating from high school.

The study conducted by University of Michigan sociologists Geoffrey Wodtke and David Harding and University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Felix Elwert also states that the longer a child lives in that kind of neighbourhood,the more harmful is the impact.

Compared to growing up in affluent neighborhoods,growing up in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and unemployment reduces the chances of high school graduation from 96 per cent to 76 per cent for black children, Wodtke,a Ph.D. student who works with Harding at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR),said.

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The impact on white children is also harmful,but not as large,reducing their chances of graduating from 95 per cent to 87 per cent, he stated.

The new study uses data from the ISR Panel Study of Income Dynamics to follow 2,093 children from age one through age 17,assessing the neighbourhoods in which they lived every year with bad ones characterised by high poverty,unemployment and welfare receipt.

We found that black and white children had starkly different patterns of exposure to bad neighbourhoods over the long term.

Black children were about seven times more likely than white children to experience long-term residence in the most disadvantaged 20 per cent of neighbourhoods in the country.

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Our results indicate that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods has a much greater negative impact on the chances a child will graduate from high school than earlier research has suggested.

Harding said: The current findings demonstrate the importance of neighborhoods throughout childhood,and resonate with evidence from several other studies suggesting that residence in disadvantaged neighborhoods may have a negative effect on the cognitive development of children many years or even generations later.

And,while our study does not speak to the efficacy of specific policy interventions needed to improve communities that have suffered decades of structural neglect,it seems likely that a lasting commitment to neighborhood improvement and income desegregation would be necessary to resolve the problems identified in our study, he added.