Mean Streets: Kids’ verbal skills drop in bad neighborhoods
By Bruce Bower
You can take a child out of a severely disadvantaged neighborhood and move to a nicer part of town, but you can’t always take a bad neighborhood’s harmful effects on verbal development out of the child.
That’s the implication of a new, long-term study of children from various Chicago neighborhoods. Kids living in the most disadvantaged communities displayed marked declines in age-appropriate verbal ability over a 7-year span, even after moving to better areas, reports a team led by Harvard University sociologist Robert J. Sampson.