Reflective Essay: How Poverty Taxes The Brain

My understanding of poverty at the beginning of this course was that it was a problem where people just had limited economic resources. As someone who remembers being raised in poverty, I felt that my viewpoints prior to this course considered the true nuance of poverty; however, I have realized that I have be a bias towards poverty and there are certain aspects of poverty I have not always fully considered. Because my parents started from nothing and moved to a higher position in life, I have always been confused with idea of being trapped in poverty. I will admit that I had the perspective that if people in poverty go to school, then they can find better jobs and move up to a higher socioeconomic status. This class has allowed me to see that this plan of getting more education is not as easy as I believed it to be. Moreover, I gained more understanding of how the factors in a person’s life increases their outcomes in …show more content…
I understood that there is serious stress and worry that comes with living paycheck to paycheck and not knowing when the next meal will be, but I did not know that poverty has a strong correlation in suppressing an individuals’ cognitive development executive functioning, and attention. In the article “How Poverty Taxes the Brain”, a study described how “low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests…comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults” (). These results highlighted some of mental strain of being poverty. These results helped me to understand why it may be harder for people in poverty to turn away from some of poor financial decisions because any momentary relief from the burden of hustling to survive alleviates the body and mind from the constant toll of stress and

Show More

Related Documents: Reflective Essay: How Poverty Taxes The Brain

Criminology Notes Essay