The struggles we see in these tweets have gained the attention of researchers as well. In fact, according to a large and growing body of scientific papers, poor kids grow up to have a host of physical problems as adults.
But that's not all. A sweeping recent study, conducted by following participants over a 15-year period, discovered that childhood poverty can also cause significant psychological damage in adulthood.
Impoverished children in the study had more antisocial conduct such as aggression and bullying, and increased feeling of helplessness, than kids from middle-income backgrounds, the study concluded. Poor kids also have more chronic physiological stress and more deficits in short-term spatial memory.
"What this means is, if you're born poor, you're on a trajectory to have more of these kinds of psychological problems," said Gary Evans, the author of the study and professor of environmental and developmental psychology at Cornell University.
"With poverty, you're exposed to lots of stress. Everybody has stress, but low-income families, low-income children, have a lot more of it," Evans explained. "And the parents are also under a lot of stress. So for kids, there is a cumulative risk exposure."
Evans, a child psychologist who specializes in the effects of stress on children, thinks these findings are important because kids who grow up in poverty are likely to stay impoverished as adults—did you know that there's a 40 percent chance that a son's income will be the same as his father's income?
"People walk around with this idea in their head that if you work hard, play by the rules, you can get ahead," Evans said. "And that's just a myth. It's just not true."
In his study, Evans tracked 341 participants over a 15-year period, and tested them at ages 9, 13, 17 and 24.
Evans tested the short-term spatial memory of the adult study participants by asking them to repeat increasingly complex sequences of lights and sounds by pressing four colored pads in the correct order — similar to the 'Simon' game. The adults who grew up in poverty had a diminished ability to recall the sequences, compared to those who did not. "This is an important result because the ability to retain information in short-term memory is fundamental to a host of basic cognitive skills, including language and achievement," the study said.
Even though the participants were assessed on this measure only when they were adults, this test had the strongest association with childhood poverty of the four measures.
Helplessness was assessed by asking the participants to solve an impossible puzzle. Adults growing up in poverty gave up 8 percent quicker than those who weren't poor as kids. Previous research has shown chronic exposure to uncontrollable stressors (such as family turmoil and substandard housing) tends to induce helplessness.
