Children and Youth in Neighborhood Contexts: Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

Children and Youth in Neighborhood Contexts

Children are influenced by a wide variety of things whether it may be the media that teaches children how to behave or their peers who shape them to be socially acceptable, or maybe even their parents who raised them to discover their own identity. But while there are many obvious influences in a child’s life, there is one that is subtle than the rest: the surrounding environment that the children grew up in, more specifically the neighborhood’s socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status (SES) is a measure or position of a person’s economic and sociological work experience on a hierarchical social structure in relation to others based on income, education, and occupation (The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition, n.d.). It is hard to believe that a neighborhood’s SES has an influence to children but according to Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, both of whom are experts in neighborhood context, adolescent context, and individual and community socioeconomic status, concluded that a neighborhood’s socioeconomic status does affect a child’s academic achievement and cognitive abilities.

In Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn’s article characteristics of neighborhood is depicted by its SES and show how each neighborhood is measured differently. For example, previous non-experimental research of how neighborhoods affect children and adolescent development revealed that high SES correlates with income, percentage professionals, and percentage of residents who are college educated; low SES correlated with poverty measures that are connected to percentage of households headed by females, percentage on public assistance, and percentage unemploye...

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...h….arrests for violent crime were lower among male youth who moved to less poor neighborhoods compared with peers who stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods” (p. 3). This supports the Congressperson’s argument possibly because of the culture of poverty, refers to a social theory that explains the cycle of poverty based on the concept that the poor remain in poverty because of their adaptations to the burdens of poverty.

It is unfair for wealthy neighborhoods with high SES to be able to have better education, opportunities, and achievements while the poor neighborhoods, affected by the low SES, have very low standards of education, opportunities, and achievements but we must consider that these neighborhoods are changing through gentrification, immigration, and through programs that help and support low income families to break out of the culture of poverty.