John Singleton, the groundbreaking director who died last month at age 51 after suffering a stroke, grew up in South Central Los Angeles. In 1991, at first-night screenings in South Central for his debut film Boyz n the Hood, violence broke out. At least one man was killed. The then-23-year-old Singleton remarked about the stress of it: “I think I lost about five years of my life.”
He was channeling a bit of conventional wisdom, that extreme stress has lasting effects on health and well-being. A new report affirms that connection, finding that threatening childhood experiences can change the way children grasp math and learn the alphabet, and can even affect their ability to read a simple story. Those experiences can also permanently alter children’s physiology, creating “toxic stress.”
The study’s authors also point to a connection to neighborhood conditions, as chronic issues of “excessive litter, vandalism, deteriorated and overcrowded housing, graffiti, noise, public drug and alcohol use” can exacerbate toxic stress in children.
In the report for the Economic Policy Institute, Leila Morsy and Richard Rothstein synthesize research to zoom in on the effects of stressful childhoods on low-income children, and black and white children. They find that children with low family income—children with a family income of $20,000 or less—are more likely to encounter threatening experiences and the “toxic stress” that accompanies it. They also find black children generally have more exposure to these experiences than white children.
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