The Huffington Post, September 15, 2016: Why California Must End Child Poverty

“Poverty creates gaps in cognitive skills that can be seen in early childhood – and those gaps continue to grow. By age 4, high-income children have heard 30 million more words than poor children. Deep poverty can produce toxic stress that literally rewires a child’s brain and negatively impacts brain functioning for life. Children in poor families are five times as likely to be in fair or poor health as children in non-poor families. Poor children are less likely to enter school ready to learn and to graduate from high school than their peers. Children who were poor for half their childhood were nearly 90 percent more likely to not graduate high school than those who had never been poor. The longer children spend in poverty, the less likely they are to be consistently employed in their early adult years and the more likely they are to live in poverty as adults.”