Gary W. Evans, a Cornell University professor of human ecology—a field that examines the relationship between humans and their natural, built, and social environments—first became interested in how poverty affects children during his graduate studies in psychology and later as a professor at the University of California Irvine. That interest grew deeper in 1992 when he moved to Ithaca, NY, a college town surrounded by many families and children living in rural poverty.
Evans earned a bachelor’s in psychology from Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He said what drove his interest in the effects of poverty and children was the lack of documentation on the environment of childhood poverty that many of us take for granted, such as clean air, potable water, safe playgrounds, green spaces, and internet access.
Although the effects of urban poverty have been and continue to be well documented, rural poverty and its impact on children has been largely neglected, says the environmental psychologist.
So, in 1992—with the support of the W.T. Grant Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health— Evans set out to gather the data and make connections between environmental poverty and its impact on children. To do so, he undertook a large study of the White rural population in the area surrounding Ithaca by tracking 350 children over 20 years. Half of the children lived in poverty and the other half lived in middle-class families.
Evans enlisted Cornell undergraduate students to help collect data over the years. “I wanted to get Cornell kids out of their bubble,” he says. He also started a mentoring program for incoming minority students by training upper class students to help them make a smoother transition as freshmen into the college community. In addition to his undergraduate curriculum, Evans teaches a graduate seminar on poverty, environment, and children.
The ongoing study results, “The Environment of Childhood Poverty,” published in American Psychologist in 2004, found that children growing up in poverty encounter cumulative and widespread environmental inequities. Not only are they exposed to the original ACEs described in the 1998 CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, children raised in poverty also grow up in environments with multiple risks that negatively impact their development.
“ACEs,” he points out, “comes from a medical model, which doesn’t pay enough attention to environmental conditions.” Since the original ACE Study was published, other studies have expanded to include community and environmental ACEs, as depicted in the graphic below.
The largest area of research on children and poverty is on physical health, he says. His study found that “poor children reside in more polluted, unhealthy environments. They breathe air and drink water that are more polluted. Their households are more crowded, noisier, and more physically deteriorated, and they contain more safety hazards.”
“The neighborhoods where poor children live are more hazardous (e.g., greater traffic volume, more crime, less playground safety) and less like to contain elements of nature,” he adds.
Evans and his team also discovered—over the years—is that the accumulation of these multiple environmental risks—not just a single risk or two, such as air pollution and lack of daycare facilities—creates pathways from poverty to low academic achievement and limited upward mobility. This model is similar to the ACEs model, which also found that a higher score increased the risk for detrimental physical and behavioral outcomes.
The concluding results of the two-decade long study confirm the original hypothesis. For example, young adults who grew up in poverty have elevated levels of biological stress, altered brain functioning indicative of less efficient self-regulation of emotions, lower working memory capacity, and are more susceptible to feelings of helplessness and to engage in risky behaviors.
Making a Difference to Reduce Poverty
The author of many academic articles and books, Evans’s latest effort is to bring in the socioeconomic, environmental, and psychological aspects of poverty on childhood outcomes into one comprehensive book, which he is now writing during his sabbatical year at Stanford’s Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
“Putting all these environmental factors in one place has never been done before,” he says, and it’s an important factor potentially contributing to a higher ACE score.
Evans hopes his book, although intended for academics, will help future psychologists and social scientists better understand and act to reduce the impact of environmental poverty on future generations.
You can do a lot about poverty,” he says. “England cut the childhood poverty rate in half in only seven years during Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration.”
In the United States, the expanded child tax credit cut child poverty by about one-third for the six months it was in effect. Families used the money to buy food, clothing, rent, utilities and to buy school supplies.
This approach has already been taken for another age group, he says—the elderly: “In the U.S., the creation of the Social Security Administration completely transformed the poverty landscape for the elderly, who were the largest poverty group in the country.”
As for what we as citizens can do to break the cycle of poverty, Evans might write a non-academic book, one that dispels the common myth about poverty and upward mobility that has persisted in this country since it was founded almost 250 years ago. In addition, he might cover solutions that other nations and some cities in the U.S. have undertaken to reduce poverty, whether through monthly supplemental income payments, and universal, free and excellent child care.
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