How Poverty Shapes Children’s Home, Neighborhood, and School Environments: An Integrative Conceptual Framework and Review

Abstract

Poverty is a notable feature of societies around the world. Poverty constrains children’s development and life opportunities, largely through its impacts on environmental forces. As such, it is essential to understand the contexts of poverty. This integrative review presents a conceptual framework of the contextual forces imposed by poverty in children’s key proximal environments – their homes, neighborhoods, and schools – delineating both structural and social features in each environment. This framework is illustrated by exemplar empirical findings, highlighting poverty-related disparities in home structural contexts (e.g., physical disorder, air quality, affordability, reliability, enrichment); home social contexts (e.g., stimulation and support, parental mental health, stress, corporal punishment, parenting values); neighborhood structural contexts (e.g., pollution, crowding, physical disorder, resources, green space); neighborhood social contexts (e.g., concentrated disadvantage, crime, child maltreatment, collective efficacy); school structural contexts (e.g., access, space and materials, teacher qualifications, disadvantaged peers); and school social contexts (e.g., instructional quality, parent-school connections, school climate, school discipline). Within this literature, we identify important gaps, suggest future directions, and delineate implications for practice and policy. This review emphasizes the multifaceted and complex nature of poverty and underscores cultural and regional variation in the environments of poverty. Beyond this variability and ongoing questions concerning underlying causal processes, evidence richly documents how young children in poverty experience, on average, fewer supportive structural and social resources and greater structural and social barriers to healthy development than their advantaged peers. Together this evidence helps scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to understand the breadth and complexity of disparities associated with poverty.

Public Significance

This integrative conceptual framework and empirical review provides evidence for distinct structural and social features within children’s home, neighborhood, and school environments that are associated with poverty. These environmental inequities in turn drive disparities in children’s development. As such, explicating their unique roles supports policy and intervention efforts to improve the opportunities and wellbeing of children living in poverty.

Introduction

Economic inequalities are growing around the world, with recent international estimates finding that the top 10% of earners make 52% of global income, while the bottom half make less than 9% (Chancel et al., 2022). The U.S. has consistently experienced elevated rates of child poverty in comparison to other advanced economies; one out of every six American children currently lives below the poverty line (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2023). Moreover, poverty and wealth are becoming more spatially concentrated in the U.S., leading to increasingly economically segregated neighborhoods and schools, exacerbating the environmental forces of poverty (Owens & Candipan, 2019). These disparities are amplified within communities of color due to racial disparities stemming from historic and continuing racist practices and policies (Heard-Garris et al., 2021). Indeed, most children of color in the U.S. experience poverty rates that are double or triple those of White children (NCES, nd): Black and Native/Indigenous children are most likely to live in poverty (34%), followed by Hispanic (28%), Pacific Islander (23%), and then White and Asian children (11%).

The prevalence of poverty is important due to its impacts on children’s opportunities and outcomes. A robust literature base finds that poverty constrains children’s emotional, behavioral, physical, and cognitive development (NASEM, 2019). Despite myriad sources of resilience within low-income families and communities, poverty-driven developmental challenges emerge early in childhood – seen in higher rates of infant mortality, lower cognitive and language skills, more limited emotional and behavioral regulation, and higher levels of mental and physical health disorders – and translate into continued disparities into adulthood in educational attainment, earnings, psychosocial functioning, and health (NASEM, 2019). Importantly, the detrimental impacts of poverty are transmitted largely through environmental forces (NASEM, 2019).

The focus of this integrative review (Oermann & Knafl, 2021) is to spotlight the environmental forces through which poverty may impede children’s development. Numerous studies have delineated poverty’s effects on children’s development, and both theoretical models and empirical evidence have suggested environmental pathways through which these effects occur (see NASEM, 2019 for an extensive review). Yet, the field lacks an integrative overview of the key contexts to which children in poverty are more likely to be exposed on a day-to-day basis. The goals of this analysis are to develop an integrative conceptual framework of the contextual forces imposed by poverty in the most proximal environments in which child development unfolds – homes, neighborhoods, and schools – and provide exemplar empirical findings in each subdomain. In each of these three environments, we follow prior theory and research by highlighting the distinct roles of the structural (e.g., physical) and social (e.g., interpersonal) dimensions of home, neighborhood, and school contexts (e.g., Coley et al., 2021; Leventhal et al., 2015; Phillipsen et al., 1997). Through this review, we also identify important gaps in the literature, suggest future directions, and highlight implications for practice and policy.

The first step of the integrative review process, problem identification, relied on our collective expertise and a search of the literature, focused specifically on theories of poverty’s effects on children through environmental contexts and forces, recent review articles, and empirical literature to delineate the need for an integrative review on this topic. Through this initial step we established the scope of the review and delineated several parameters. One parameter was how we define poverty, as an experience of economic deprivation and limited resources (Box 1). A second was our level of analysis. We focus on structural and social contextual forces operating within children’s primary proximal environments: their homes, neighborhoods, and schools. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that broader macrosystemic forces play key roles in both shaping these proximal contexts and perpetuating cycles of poverty and inequality. A third parameter was our heavy focus on research conducted within the U.S., while also incorporating evidence from other high-income and low- and middle-income countries. Finally, due to cascading effects of exposure to poverty and greater environmental responsivity early in life, we chose to focus primarily on children’s environmental exposures during early childhood, generally defined as birth through age 8 years (American Academy of Pediatrics, nd).

Integrative Review Methodology.

We addressed these goals using an integrative review process, as delineated by Oermann and Knafl (2021). Integrative reviews seek to critically assess and incorporate theories, concepts, and empirical evidence from diverse fields and research designs in order to broaden understanding of complex phenomena (Oermann & Knafl, 2021). In conducting this assessment, we reviewed and incorporated evidence from an array of social science theories as well as empirical evidence incorporating multiple methods. Due to the multi-contextual focus and the depth and breadth of the literature in our six sub-environments (structural and social dimensions within home, neighborhood, and school environments), we designed our information gathering and critical assessment in a purposeful, rather than exhaustive manner, using the five steps outlined by Oermann and Knafl (2021) and generally following the PRISMA standards. Box 1. Defining Poverty

Poverty is defined in multiple ways between and within academic disciplines (Long & Renberger, 2023). Fundamentally, poverty is a label for the experience of economic deprivation – having inadequate economic resources to meet basic needs. In the U.S., poverty is typically defined using an absolute measure focused exclusively on cash income in relation to a set standard, determined using a formula developed in 1963 based on the cost of an adequate diet and adjusted annually for inflation. In 2025, the U.S. poverty line is $15,650 annually for a single person and $32,150 for a family of four. Newer conceptualizations argue for a more comprehensive assessment of economic resources, with the U.S. Supplemental Poverty Measure including non-cash subsidies (i.e., food and housing benefits and tax credits), expenses (i.e., taxes, childcare and health care costs), and regional cost of living variation (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022). There are international definitions of absolute poverty as well. The World Bank (2024), for example, defines extreme poverty internationally as living on less than $2.15 per person per day. Such measures of absolute poverty can be viewed as binary (being below or above the poverty line) or as a ratio, termed the income-to-needs ratio, delineating where the household’s economic resources fall in relation to the poverty line.

Other conceptualizations of poverty focus on access to basic needs such as food and shelter, or on an individual’s inclusion or exclusion in core societal structures and opportunities. Researchers also use broader measures of socioeconomic status (SES), often operationalized as an aggregate of income, education level, and occupational prestige (Long & Renberger, 2023), or proxy poverty through eligibility for social services such as TANF or SNAP. Yet another common method of defining poverty is in a relative rather than absolute fashion. The OECD (2024), for example, presents international comparisons using a definition of being below 50% of a country’s household median income. Such distinctions are important in relation to inequality, as relative assessments of poverty shift in relation to income inequality, whereas absolute assessments of poverty may not.

Defining poverty is perhaps even more complex within broader systems or environments. Neighborhood researchers, for example, often use the term “neighborhood disadvantage” to describe community-level economic deprivation, but define this term variably, assessing the proportion of households within a neighborhood (e.g., census tract) living below the poverty line or using multidimensional indices of disadvantage reflecting residents’ income, educational attainment, welfare receipt, employment, and household structure (e.g., Coley et al., 2021). Similarly, school poverty may be measured based on students’ aggregate household income levels, assessing the proportion of students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch (e.g., Coley et al., 2019), or using more comprehensive measures of economic deprivation (e.g., Hwang & Coley, 2024).

For this paper, we have chosen an inclusive and broad conceptualization of poverty which incorporates various definitions and measurements, acknowledging that inconsistency in measurement across studies makes comparisons challenging (Pollak & Wolfe, 2020). To account for this, we highlight different definitions and measures, acknowledge where evidence is lacking, and delineate opportunities for additional research and clarity.

The second and third steps of the integrative review process, literature search and data evaluation, incorporated a more systematic search within our target domains and populations. We searched numerous databases, including PsycInfo, SocINDEX, PubMed, EconLit, and Google Scholar, to identify literature across numerous fields (e.g., developmental psychology, economics, public health and medicine, sociology, etc.), as well as government, NGO, and research firm reports and other grey literature. We also contacted leading experts in the field to identify unpublished and other grey literature in targeted arenas. Due to the extensive breadth of our topical coverage (e.g., three environments, each with two dimensions, each with approximately five to ten specific subdomains), we did not pre-develop a specific set of search terms, nor did we seek to identify and incorporate all literature on each environment, dimension, and subdomain. Rather, we used search and evaluation strategies to delineate the subdomains and identify key exemplar findings in each subdomain. To do so, we used an iterative process of conducting first-stage searches (e.g., “poverty and home;” “poverty and housing”), gathering articles using various methodologies and sampling strategies to gain field-specific terminology that we used for more refined searches (e.g., “poverty and household mold”). Across our literature search and data evaluation steps, we incorporated a set of data quality and relevance priorities, which included a focus on 1) methodological rigor, with an emphasis on external validity (e.g., research using representative national and regional samples, research from a wide range of geographical and cultural contexts), 2) impact, with an emphasis on literature which has had a notable effect on the field (assessed through the number of citations and incorporation into later reviews or theoretical frameworks), 3) relevance, with an emphasis on our primary developmental stage of interest and across numerous populations and countries, and 4) innovation, with an emphasis on new arenas that are conceptually relevant but previously received limited empirical attention. Given our primary goal to richly describe the environments of children in poverty, we included research using a variety of methodologies and, while we address issues of internal validity throughout our review, we did not exclusively prioritize internal validity or randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Reflecting our priorities and literature search and data evaluation strategies, the fourth stage of our integrative review development, data analysis, also incorporated a purposive and targeted strategy. Rather than using a standardized template to code study information and extract effect sizes – an approach that is particularly relevant for systematic reviews and meta-analyses – we used constant comparison to identify categories and patterns across the reviewed literature, draw conclusions, create a conceptual model, and identify inconsistencies and omissions in the literature.

Finally, the fifth stage, presentation of findings, was conducted by framing our research problem within leading theoretical frameworks across diverse fields, by organizing our conceptual framework in pictorial format, and by presenting exemplar findings across the multiple subdomains within structural and social dimensions embedded within three proximal environments of homes, neighborhoods, and schools. We further highlight consistencies and inconsistencies across study types and geographic locales, identify gaps in the literature, and discuss implications for policy and practice.

Theoretical Frameworks

In developing our conceptual framework of the contexts of poverty, we drew on core theoretical models which delineate the mechanisms through which poverty affects children’s development, including investment theory, stress and adversity theories, socialization theories, and resilience theories. These extant theories, derived from numerous disciplinary perspectives, highlight a multitude of mechanisms through which poverty’s effects are transmitted.

Investment theory (Becker, 1981) argues that financial assets afford parents the money and time to invest in developmentally promotive environments for their children. These may include investments within the home, such as parental time and attention, adequate food and shelter, and stimulating materials. Financial assets also allow parents to access neighborhood and school contexts with greater resources and services, such as grocery stores, recreational spaces, and highly trained teachers and quality learning materials. In contrast, poverty limits resources allowing parents to make such positive investments in children’s environmental opportunities.

Stress and adversity theories, in contrast, highlight the challenges and psychological strains produced by poverty, limited resources, or economic loss. These models, originating in human development fields (Elder, 1974; Conger et al., 1994), are now being expanded to incorporate genetic, evolutionary, neurobiology, and behavioral economics perspectives (e.g., Ellis, 2021; Gennetian et al., 2016), and to extend beyond the family context to include structural and social stressors in schools and neighborhoods, such as pollution, violence, and instability (Coley et al., 2021; Shonkoff et al., 2012).

A third theoretical framing that has received less attention in recent literature focuses on cultural and social forces, arguing that poverty imposes social isolation, opportunity constraints, and marginalization that lead to norms and behaviors less promotive of “mainstream” developmental outcomes (Lewis, 1969). Newer derivations of cultural perspectives have taken more strengths-based lenses, arguing that harsh and unpredictable environments such as those driven by poverty may lead to the development of “hidden talents” (Ellis et al., 2023) or cultural wealth (Acevedo & Solorzano, 2023). Although such perspectives primarily focus on person-based factors rather than contextual forces, they highlight the importance of intersecting social identities.

Our conceptual model (Figure 1) combines insights gained from investment, stress, and cultural theories to delineate how poverty drives resources, stressors, and cultural contexts within children’s three key proximal environments: homes, neighborhoods, and schools. Within this tripartite, the model includes both structural (i.e., physical characteristics) as well as social (i.e., relational processes) dimensions associated with poverty (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Conceptual Model of Poverty’s Influence on Children’s Proximal Environments

Home Environments

The most proximal environment enveloping child development – especially for young children – is that of the home environment, encompassing both structural features such as pollutants, crowding, and noise, as well as social features such as stimulation, support, discipline, and consistency. Extensive evidence documents how children in poverty experience, on average, poorer structural and social home environments than their economically-advantaged peers.

Home Structural Environments

Quality of Home Environments

A growing base of evidence from methodologically rigorous studies highlights associations between poor quality home environments and children’s physical, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes (Coley et al., 2013; Coulton et al., 2016). Evidence from numerous countries has found that children in poor or economically disadvantaged families are more likely to experience structurally deficient housing and to be exposed to environmental risks such as mold, insect and rodent infestations, insufficient heat or cooling, lead, maintenance deficiencies, and poor air quality, which are often operationalized using measures assessing multiple housing features (Coley et at., 2013; Coulton et al., 2016). Other research hones in on specific aspects of housing deficiencies. For example, U.S. national data from 2011–2016 found that economically disadvantaged children were nearly 2.5 times as likely as their peers to have elevated lead exposure and elevated blood lead levels (Egan et al., 2021). A recent review of studies across high-income countries found that lower-income households experienced heightened levels of numerous types of indoor air pollution harmful to children’s health (Ferguson et al., 2020).

Crowding, Instability, and Unaffordability

Children in poverty are also more likely to live in crowded housing or in rental and public housing (also termed social or council housing), and are more likely to experience higher levels of residential mobility than their more advantaged peers (Coulton et al., 2016; O’Donnell & Kinsley, 2020). Heightened residential instability is particularly pronounced when children are young, increasing instability in peer and school contexts and disrupting family processes (Anderson et al., 2014). Residential instability can also tax parents’ and children’s wellbeing (Coley et al., 2015). An analysis of a nationally representative sample of U.S. children using rigorous individual fixed effects models, for example, found that greater residential instability was predictive of lower cognitive, social, and behavioral skills in early childhood (Coley & Kull, 2016). It is important to highlight interconnections between housing and neighborhood contexts. For example, an analysis of nationally representative U.S. data using instrumental variables found that home ownership may support children’s cognitive skills primarily through increasing residential stability and improved neighborhood contexts (Mohanty & Rout, 2009).

Housing unaffordability is another pressing challenge for families facing poverty. The lack of affordable housing has grown exponentially in the U.S. in recent decades, with data indicating that approximately 80% of low-income renter households live in “unaffordable” housing, spending more than 30% of their income on housing (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2020), imposing financial strain and risks of eviction and homelessness. U.S. national data from 2007 to 2016 found that poverty more than doubles the risk of eviction among families with children, a risk exacerbated for Black families: 13.1% of poor Black families with children experienced eviction compared to 5.8% of poor White families with children, with the highest rates among families with children under 5 (Graetz et al., 2023). The rate of homelessness among U.S. children increased 4% per year over the past 15 years, with over one million school children experiencing homelessness in 2020–21 (National Center for Homeless Education, 2022).

Parents’ Monetary Investments

Poverty also limits children’s access to material resources in their homes (Becker, 1981). Families experiencing poverty spend proportionately far more of their income on basic necessities such as food and housing, leaving limited resources to direct toward child enrichment. U.S. national expenditure data from 2016, for example, found that high-income families spent proportionately one-third more than poor families on child enrichment costs – 8% vs. 6% of their total budget – but this translated into far greater dollar disparities – $4,550 among high-income families vs. $1,756 among poor families (Coley, et al., 2016a). Data from low and middle-income countries (LMICs) also find large disparities in children’s access to books and toys across household wealth (McCoy et al., 2022b).

Home Social Environments

Provision of Stimulation and Support

Numerous studies have documented that higher-income and more educated parents spend more time in direct parenting activities than their less advantaged counterparts and better adjust their parental inputs – including their parenting behaviors, expectations, and resources – to their children’s developmental needs (Kalil et al., 2023), and that these gaps have grown over recent decades (Altintas, 2016). For example, national data found that parents in poverty in the U.S. (below the 10th percentile) were approximately half as likely to read to their children daily than wealthy parents (above the 90th percentile); were less likely to engage in activities such as teaching and storytelling (Kalil et al., 2016); and showed lower supportive parenting in direct observational assessments (Coley et al., 2021; Votruba-Drzal et al., 2021). Similar disparities have been found in parental reports of out-of-home stimulation, such as taking children to museums, libraries, or concerts (Coley et al., 2020). Importantly, these gaps were even larger during the summer months, when schools are not able to compensate for the lower access to enriching activities and materials experienced by children in poverty, helping to explain growing income gaps in learning (Coley et al., 2020).

Even larger economic disparities in parental stimulation and support to children have been found in LMICs. A recent assessment of 3- and 4-year-olds across 104 LMICs found that children in low-income countries were about 25% as likely to receive adequate maternal stimulation and 13% as likely to have access to developmentally-appropriate learning materials such as a book or toy in their home compared to children in upper middle-income countries (McCoy et al., 2022b). Similar disparities appeared in relation to individual household poverty, with LMIC-based children in the poorest 20% of households about 25% as likely to receive adequate nurturance compared to their peers in the wealthiest households (McCoy et al., 2022b).

Although much of the work in this arena is descriptive, causal evidence also delineates the impact of poverty on parental inputs. Numerous evaluations of programs that provide poor families with cash transfers, both unconditional (with no behavioral requirements or restrictions on spending) and conditional, have found positive causal effects on parents’ provision of out-of-home enrichment (Huston et al., 2001), enrichment spending (Gennetian et al., 2024; Schild, 2023), parent-child activities (Gennetian et al., 2024), and parental supervision (Akee et al., 2010). Randomized trials in LMICs have also shown causal evidence for income gains increasing parental investments, ranging from improved vaccination uptake to greater school enrollment (Robertson et al., 2013).

The Role of Parental Constraints and Values

Another means by which poverty may alter children’s home environments is via parental beliefs and preferences. Some have argued that investment gaps are related to constraints on poor parents’ time and financial resources, limiting their ability to outsource housework and other responsibilities (Harvey & Mukhopadhyay, 2007), though evidence supporting this theory is mixed (Kalil et al., 2023). Other work suggests the importance of barriers such as limitations in social resources and knowledge, experiences of social exclusion, and resultant links with parental self-efficacy (Wang et al., 2016).

A more culturally-based view suggests that differences in parental inputs may be due to cultural norms, such as the “concerted cultivation” view of supporting optimal child development that is common among more advantaged parents (Lareau, 2011) versus different parenting values by which poorer parents transmit distinct social and cultural capital to their children, preparing them for different economic futures (Jukes et al., 2021). Further research is required to disentangle the mechanisms through which poverty may affect parental inputs, some of which is ongoing through randomized cash transfer studies that are assessing how the additional financial resources affect parents’ and children’s wellbeing in both the U.S. and in numerous LMICs (Gennetian et al., 2024).

Exposure to Stress and Harsh Parenting

Poverty also may limit parents’ provision of stimulation and support by way of constraints which sap their emotional and cognitive resources and planning abilities, increasing psychological distress, harsh and inconsistent parenting, and focus on short-term needs over longer-term benefits (Conger et al., 1994; Gennetian et al., 2016). Extensive research supports these arguments, albeit much of it descriptive and conducted with small and often homogeneous samples of convenience (Masarik & Conger, 2017). Yet more generalizable and causal evidence supports such claims as well. For example, notwithstanding extensive efforts to decrease the use of corporal punishment, nationally representative research continues to indicate that parents living in poverty are more likely than their wealthier peers to engage in corporal punishment in both the U.S. (Coley et al., 2021; Votruba-Drzal et al., 2021) and in LMICs (McCoy et al., 2022b). McCoy’s (2022b) study of 104 LMICs, for example, found that children in low-income countries were 33% more likely to experience corporal punishment and even more likely to experience neglect in comparison to their peers in upper-middle income countries. Extensive U.S. evidence finds similar patterns (Kim et al., 2023). Experimental and quasi-experimental work also suggests causal effects, finding that income increases lead to more positive parent-child interactions and lower rates of child maltreatment (Fortson et al., 2016).

Extensive evidence across numerous countries also finds higher levels of mental health challenges among poor adults and those raised in lower-income families (Laaksonen et al., 2007), with rigorous policy evaluations indicating that these links are at least partially causal. Evaluations of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and expanded Child Tax Credit in the U.S., for example, found that increased income decreased rates of anxiety and depression among low-income parents (Gangopadhayaya et al., 2000; Nam, 2024). Research in South Africa found that cash transfer programs for low-income families can disrupt intergenerational transmission of mental health challenges (Eyal & Burns, 2019). Yet other research highlights bidirectional links between poverty and mental health, showing how parental depression impedes economic stability and increases the likelihood of future slides into poverty (McGovern, 2022).

Together, these results highlight the limited resources and increased stressors that children in poor households are exposed to in their home and family environments. This work also identifies limitations and remaining questions from the literature. These include the need to further delineate the causal chains by which poverty impacts home environments, as well as the bidirectional links between poverty and parents’ behaviors and well-being, such as how parental mental health disorders may increase the likelihood of poverty while poverty may also exacerbate mental health problems.

Neighborhood Environments

The resource constraints and stressors experienced by children in poverty in their home contexts extends to their neighborhood contexts as well. Extensive research documents the barriers faced by poor families in accessing safe and highly resourced neighborhoods, which are exacerbated by the growing levels of economic segregation that have caused poor families to increasingly be surrounded by families of similar economic status. Data on U.S. metropolitan areas found that neighborhood economic segregation rose 20% among families with children from 1990 to 2010 (Owens, 2016), driven in part by school boundaries and by historical and ongoing racial biases ranging from public policy to interpersonal levers which have made neighborhood economic segregation particularly acute for Black families (Jargowsky, 2018). In the U.S., as in many other countries, poor families are also more likely to live in rural areas, which on average have fewer high-income and highly educated families and fewer resources to support children (Coley et al., 2016a; Miller et al., 2019).

Neighborhood Structural Resources

Institutional Resources

One key difference in the neighborhoods of children from poor versus advantaged backgrounds is their access to institutional resources. Institutional resources include community entities that support child and family wellbeing, such as educational, cultural, and health services, healthy food options, and community gathering spaces, as well as entities that reduce children’s exposure to dangerous or otherwise limiting physical environments. Recent work assessing a nationally representative sample of U.S. children followed from infancy through kindergarten found that children in lower-income families lived in communities with significantly fewer cultural (e.g., museums and recreational facilities) and educational (e.g., early childhood and tutoring programs) services (Coley et al., 2021; see also Votruba-Drzal et al., 2021). Limited access to these services, in turn, was associated with lower cognitive skills among children, both directly and through diminished parental inputs (Coley et al., 2021; Miller et al., 2024). These disparities are exacerbated for rural children as well as children of color (Miller et al., 2019; Reardon et al., 2015). A recent analysis with a nationally representative sample of U.S. kindergarteners, for example, found that lower-income Asian, Black, and Hispanic children lived in communities with lower educational resources than similarly disadvantaged White children (Coley et al., 2024).

Green Spaces

Poor children are also less likely to have access to neighborhood green spaces, such as parks or other recreation areas. A study of Atlanta, Georgia found 60% lower access to green space in the most disadvantaged versus most advantaged neighborhoods (Dai, 2011). Such disparities have been replicated for poor and racially minoritized children across multiple U.S. cities (Williams et al., 2020), as well as across LMICs (Sugar, n.d.). These inequities are important in light of the links between green space and young children’s physical, mental, and behavioral health (Islam et al., 2020), as well as parental wellbeing and parenting behaviors (Lanteri et al., 2024; Miller et al., 2019). Although much of this research is correlational, experimental evidence also identifies causal benefits of children’s exposure to green spaces (Schutte et al., 2017).

Pollution

Another key structural risk factor heightened in the neighborhoods of poor families is air pollution. Expansive data find that children from poor households are more likely to be exposed to air pollution in their communities, such as fine particulate matter PM_2.5, a known contributor to respiratory and cardiovascular disease and mortality (Jbaily et al., 2022; Votruba-Drzal et al., 2021). In the U.S., exposure to air pollution is particularly heightened among poor children living in small urban and suburban communities (Miller et al., 2019). Internationally, a World Bank report found the highest air pollution in lower-middle income countries experiencing rapidly industrializing economies (e.g., China, India), although the health effects may be most acute for individuals in extreme poverty (Rentschler, 2022). Climate change is also exacerbating children’s exposure to air pollution, with low-income populations likely to bear disproportionate burdens (Cuartas et al., 2024).

Crowding

Along with crowding within households, discussed above, poor families, particularly those in urban areas, also are more likely to experience geographic concentration of crowded residences. Crowded neighborhoods are associated with higher risk of exposure to elevated noise levels or overwhelmed municipal services (Evans & Saegert, 2000). Neighborhood crowding can also impact health: for example, neighborhoods in Mexico with increased levels of crowding and poverty had heightened mortality rates from COVID-19 (Ríos et al., 2022).

Physical Disorder

Neighborhood poverty is also positively linked with community physical disorder (e.g., graffiti, garbage, broken windows, abandoned cars), operationalized in various ways (Ndjila et al., 2019). For example, in Saint Louis, U.S., Kelly and colleagues (2007) found that neighborhoods with the highest poverty rates were 21 times more likely to show signals of disorder than more advantaged communities. Another study across nine U.S. cities showed that both urbanicity and poverty were independently linked to signals of physical disorder in the neighborhoods surrounding preschools (McCoy et al., 2022a). Physical disorder is thought to constrain poor children’s health and development through its interplay with social processes. For example, adults living in neighborhoods with high levels of physical disorder are less likely to perceive their communities as safe (Kelly et al., 2007) and less likely to encourage children to use local playgrounds and greenspace (Miles, 2008).

Neighborhood Social Environments

Exposure to Crime and Violence

Beyond physical characteristics, poverty also shapes the social dynamics of neighborhoods. One key social feature of neighborhoods associated with poverty is crime (van Dijk et al., 2021; Wenger, 2023). A nationally representative sample of young children in the U.S., for example, found significant variability in exposure to community violent crime across income strata (Coley et al., 2021), with particularly high exposure among children in poverty in large urban communities (Miller et al., 2019). Cross-national studies have shown similar patterns. For example, a study of 315 Latin American cities showed that crime rates were highest amongst cities characterized by low gross domestic product (GDP), high inequality, and high density (de Lima Friche et al., 2023). A large body of both correlational and quasi-experimental research has demonstrated negative outcomes for crime-exposed children (Coley et al., 2021; McCoy et al., 2015b; McCoy et al., 2024; Votruba-Drzal et al., 2021), effects which may function through parents’ harsh discipline (Coley et al., 2021; Cuartas, 2018) and less safe and supportive school climates (McCoy et al., 2013). Children living in high poverty neighborhoods are also more likely to experience child maltreatment, both in the U.S. and other countries, another pathway to poorer developmental outcomes (Coulton et al., 2007; Gracia et al., 2017).

Collective Efficacy and Social Integration

Another key social characteristic of neighborhoods associated with poverty is collective efficacy, or the levels of social cohesion and social trust between community members to take collective action (Sampson et al., 1997). Descriptive research has found lower levels of collective efficacy and expectations regarding controlling children in lower-income neighborhoods (Pabayo et al., 2020; Sampson et al., 1997). A nationally representative study in the U.S. found that even when controlling for household-level poverty, individuals in high-poverty neighborhoods report more frequent contact with neighbors but less social integration in ways such as volunteering, contact with family, or religious attendance (Marcus et al., 2015). Due to methodological challenges in directly observing collective efficacy and its theoretical overlap with other social dynamics within neighborhoods, more research is needed to delineate the mechanisms by which neighborhood collective efficacy relates to poverty and children’s environments (Hipp & Wo, 2015).

(Pre)School Environments

Schools represent another core proximal context through which poverty may influence children. Research has documented substantial disparities in the availability and quality of educational environments for children across income strata. Importantly, the priorities for understanding how poverty shapes children’s schooling experiences – in terms of access, structural features, and social processes – vary across both country and developmental period.

School Structural Environments

Access to Schooling

In contexts lacking universal schooling, there are meaningful socioeconomic disparities in school access, with poverty perhaps the most consequential predictor of being out of school (Adelman & Székely, 2017; Momo et al., 2019). Globally, approximately 87% of children attend primary school, but this rate drops to 74% among children from poor households (UNICEF, 2024). In terms of persistence, global data indicate that 90% of children from the wealthiest households complete primary education, compared to only 61% from the poorest households, and a rate less than 40% in poor families in central and southern Africa (UNICEF, 2024).

Gaps in access are particularly prevalent in the early childhood years prior to compulsory formal education (typically starting at age 5 or 6). Globally, only 14% of three- and four-year old children in low-income countries attend early childhood education, compared to 66% of children from high-income countries (McCoy et al., 2018). These gaps are exacerbated by family level poverty: UNICEF (2019) reports that children in the poorest households are 8 times less likely than peers in the wealthiest households to attend early childhood education in low-income countries; this gap is half as large in middle- and high-income countries. Sizable gaps are seen in the U.S. as well: national data indicated that 47% of low-income children were attending early education programs in 2019, compared to 62% of children in middle- to high-income households, proportions which dropped precipitously during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for low-income children (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2022).

One key driver of these disparities in children’s access to schooling is the generally lower supply (availability) of affordable, high-quality educational programming in low-income communities (Coley et al., 2014). Nationally representative data in the U.S. show that low-income children live in neighborhoods with lower rates of attendance in formal early childhood programs than their advantaged peers, a pattern particularly pronounced among Hispanic children (Coley et al., 2024). Costs can also be a barrier to access for families. Whereas higher-earning U.S. households on average spend 7% of their income on childcare costs, low-income families spend 22% (Herbst, 2023) and report greater difficulties finding nearby, affordable care (Torquati et al., 2011). Similar patterns hold in LMICs, where school fees or opportunity costs of children not working often prevent low-income families from enrolling their children in school (Putnick & Bornstein, 2015; Morgan et al., 2014). Other demand-side factors – including parental employment, scheduling needs, and preferences - also affect low-income families’ choices in terms of whether and where to enroll their children (Coley et al., 2014).

Overall School Quality

There is ample evidence that attending a high-quality early childhood or elementary school can provide sustained impacts on children’s development and learning outcomes, with especially strong benefits for children from low-income families (Bustamante et al., 2022). As such, disparities in children’s exposure to high-quality schooling are important. For example, national data in the U.S. show that children from low-income families live in neighborhoods with elementary and secondary schools with lower levels of student achievement and fewer social, financial, and instructional resources than their advantaged peers (Owens & Candipan, 2019), patterns which are exacerbated for Asian and Hispanic children (Coley et al., 2024). Similarly, children from poor households attend early education programs with lower observed quality (Chaudry et al., 2017), and low-income neighborhoods have programs of lower overall quality than those in higher-income neighborhoods (Biersteker et al., 2016).

School Financing & Resources

One mechanism driving lower educational quality is financing. Historically, large elementary and secondary school funding disparities were apparent in the U.S. due to reliance on local property tax funding systems combined with economic and racial segregation (Owens, 2016). However, policy shifts have dramatically increased state and federal funding directed at decreasing funding disparities, with recent evidence finding more equitable school funding in the U.S. between districts serving poorer and more advantaged students (Bischoff & Owens, 2019). Nevertheless, concerns remain regarding whether policy goals of directing greater resources to schools with more high-needs students are being consistently met (Heise, 2019) and will be sustained. Interestingly, patterns of public investment tend to favor poor children in the early childhood years. Indeed, although U.S. public expenditures remain far lower for early versus elementary and secondary schooling, per-student preschool investments tend to be largest for low-income children due to federal, state, and local policy efforts to fund public pre-K and Head Start programs and family subsidies and tax breaks (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2022).

Yet beyond these patterns of enhanced financial investment, additional resource-related barriers to quality education for poor children remain. In the U.S., the types of informal early childhood programs that often serve children from lower-income households (e.g., family child care programs) tend to lack public supports that are particularly important for these children, such as reimbursements for meals (Coley et al., 2016b). Informal preschool programs also tend to be less closely regulated, have fewer safety-related resources, less structure, and fewer developmentally appropriate learning materials and activities than the center-based programs attended by children from many higher-income households (Bassok et al., 2016; Li-Grining & Coley, 2006). Resource disparities also exist within education systems for older children. For example, elementary schools serving higher concentrations of wealthy children are far more likely to have well-resourced and staffed libraries, gyms, and special education services when compared to those serving low-income students (Bettini et al., 2022; Fernandes & Sturm, 2010; Lance et al., 2023).

Recreational Space

In addition to gaps in the resources available within schools, emerging research also suggests economic disparities in the quality of recreational space surrounding school buildings. Virtual systematic social observations across nine U.S. cities rated the grounds surrounding early childhood education programs in low-income communities to be lower in safety, care, and order relative to those in more affluent neighborhoods (McCoy et al., 2022a), differences which may affect both learning behaviors and injuries (Macpherson et al., 2010). A national U.S. analysis identified similar socioeconomic disparities in elementary school playground availability (Fernandes & Strum, 2010).

Teacher Characteristics

Economic disparities have also been found in teacher characteristics. Although U.S. elementary school class sizes are generally stable across student income levels (Taie & Lewis, 2022), within early childhood, Head Start programs – which predominantly serve low-income preschoolers – tend to have significantly higher student-teacher ratios than private center-based programs (Bassok et al., 2016). Disparities in student-teacher ratios also exist across countries: early childhood and elementary school classrooms in low-income countries include an average of 34 and 40 students per teacher, respectively, compared to 14 for both classroom types across high-income nations (UNESCO, 2020; UNICEF, 2019).

These ratios also mirror trends in teacher training, experience, and retention. In the U.S., educators working in early childhood education programs that serve low-income children (e.g., informal programs, Head Start) tend to have substantially fewer years of education, formal early childhood degrees and certifications, and years of experience, as well as higher turnover than their counterparts serving higher-income students (Bellows et al., 2022; Coley et al., 2016b). Although similar patterns have been observed across elementary schools (Clotfelter et al., 2006), socioeconomic gaps in teacher qualifications appear to be shrinking, with positive implications for student learning outcomes (Bettini et al., 2022; Boyd et al., 2008). A recent randomized trial found that investing in teacher pay – which also shows disparities across schools serving low- versus high-income children – can help retain more experienced teachers (Bassok et al., 2021).

Classroom Composition and Peer Effects

Due to growing economic segregation, children from poor households are increasingly likely to attend schools containing high proportions of economically disadvantaged peers. In the U.S., economic segregation of children across school districts increased more than 15% between 1990 and 2010, while economic segregation within districts increased even faster (Owens, 2016; Bischoff & Owens, 2019). These patterns are exacerbated by racial inequities. In a national sample of elementary school children, Hwang and Coley (2024) found that the link between family income and the socioeconomic advantage of school peers was about twice as strong for White children as for Asian, Black, or Hispanic children, suggesting that economic resources are not enough to provide access to more highly resourced school environments for children of color. These disparities in exposure to high-income peers are important, as peer effects research has found that individual children may learn less when their classrooms include a larger proportion of low-income students (Coley et al., 2019; Reid & Ready, 2013). Other research similarly finds greater achievement gaps between students from poor versus affluent backgrounds in more economically-segregated school contexts (Owens, 2018).

School Social Environments

Teacher Instructional Quality

Evidence also points to disparities in the social characteristics of educational settings serving children from low- versus high-income backgrounds. A large body of research on early childhood education has focused on “process quality,” or the quality of interactions and exchanges occurring between teachers and students in the classroom. This literature finds that children from low-income neighborhoods attend early education programs with lower levels of teacher warmth, responsiveness, and instructional rigor than their more advantaged peers (Bassok & Galdo, 2016). Similarly, classrooms with more poor children tend to have lower instructional quality, where children spend less time engaged in learning-related activities and free choice play than classrooms with greater concentrations of children from high-income backgrounds (Coley et al., 2019; Early et al., 2010). Although evidence is somewhat mixed (von Suchodoletz et al., 2023), research suggests that exposure to lower process quality may partially explain income-related disparities in children’s academic and social-emotional development, even within low-income populations (McCoy et al., 2015a).

These patterns mirror evidence from the elementary school “value added” literature, which suggests that teachers in lower-income schools tend to be less effective in improving students’ learning outcomes (Goldhaber et al., 2015; Sass et al., 2012). Importantly, most literature on educational quality disparities has focused on students in the U.S. and other high-income countries. Very little research has explored income disparities in specific drivers of student learning in more culturally diverse settings, raising questions about generalizability.

School Climate and Discipline

Research has also documented economic disparities in the broader ways that students engage with their teachers and peers within school settings. Low-income children report lower feelings of safety, support, and connection in school than their more advantaged peers (Bear et al., 2017; Jain et al., 2015). Children from poor households (as well as Black children) also are far more likely to experience school discipline (e.g., suspensions and expulsions) and more extensive punishments than their better-off (and non-Black) counterparts, even when comparing across similar behavioral infractions (Anderson & Ritter, 2017). Although such disparities appear to peak in middle school (Barrett et al., 2021), they may arise as early as preschool. A recent U.S. study found that preschoolers from poor families were more likely than their advantaged peers to receive teacher complaints about their behavior or be asked to leave their preschool, even though no discernable differences in children’s problematic behaviors were documented through rigorous observational measures (Sabol et al., 2021).

Parent-School Connections

A smaller body of research has documented income-based differences in how teachers interact with their students’ parents, highlighting intersections between home and school environments. One U.S. study, for example, found that poor parents reported formal preschool centers (which were, on average, higher quality) to be less accessible and easy to communicate with than informal programs (Li-Grining & Coley, 2006). Within a nationally representative U.S. sample, low-income parents had less contact with teachers than high-income parents (Vinopal, 2018). Lower school involvement also has been found among lower-income Ghanaian parents, in turn predicting lower levels of child learning and development outcomes (Wolf & McCoy, 2019).

Conclusions, Future Directions, and Implications for Policy and Practice

The primary goal of this integrative review was to develop and provide theoretical and empirical evidence for a conceptual framing of the unique environmental contexts experienced by children in poverty. Extant empirical evidence highlights a broad array of structural and social disparities in the home, neighborhood, and school contexts inhabited by children from poor families in comparison to their more affluent counterparts. Such disparities are pervasive and often glaring and large, underscoring children in poverty’s limited access to not only basic needs but also enriching and supporting environments, and their heightened exposure to dangerous, stressful, and under-resourced environments. At the same time, it is essential to note that poverty and associated environments highlighted in this review are not deterministic for children’s development, which is heterogeneous and multiply determined. Indeed, many children, families, and communities display enormous strengths in the face of adverse environments, and it is essential to identify mechanisms to amplify the hidden talents, cultural wealth, and resilience and ingenuity which can emerge within disadvantaged contexts (Acevedo & Solorzano, 2023; Ellis et al., 2023). Ellis and colleagues (2023), for example, find cognitive strengths including attention shifting and working memory updating, as well as social strengths including enhanced emotion recognition and attunement to social situations in children exposed to adverse conditions such as poverty. Still, exemplars of resilience and strength do not justify acceptance of poverty’s consequences overwhelmingly detrimental effects on children’s contexts or life chances.

In considering the impact of this body of work, it is essential to acknowledge numerous challenges, controversies, and opportunities that have emerged from this review, including the diversity and cultural variation across families in poverty; incomplete evidence regarding causal processes; and the need for enhanced specificity and rigor in building the evidence to inform prevention and intervention efforts to maximize children’s opportunities. Prior to addressing these issues, we reiterate the complexity, multi-disciplinarity, and breadth and depth of the theoretical framings and empirical literature that were covered in this integrative review. Due to these complexities, a systematic or meta-analytic review of the evidence with a pre-registered methodology was not feasible. Future efforts can build on the evidence presented here through more targeted systematic approaches to examine associations between poverty and specific environmental contexts of child development.

Diversity and Variation in Poverty-Associated Contexts

One key challenge in summarizing evidence on the environments associated with poverty concerns diversity and variability. Such variability can be found across macro-contexts, such as when comparing high-income versus low- or middle-income countries or across the urban-rural divides within a country. Disparities associated with poverty also often intersect with, and are exacerbated among, groups facing other types of discrimination or barriers, such as racially minoritized children. Variation also may be found at the individual level. Our review has provided exemplars of such variation in the environments experienced by children in poverty, highlighting the multifaceted and complex nature of poverty and how historical, cultural, and policy forces may alter how it is experienced by individual children and families. Importantly, however, above and beyond such variation, this review emphasizes the robust array of evidence showing that children in poverty experience, on average, fewer supportive structural and social resources and greater structural and social barriers to healthy development than their advantaged peers. These stressors and barriers also may be replicated across contexts. Air pollution, for example, has been found to be heightened in both the home and community environments of children in poverty (Ferguson et al., 2020; Votruba-Drzal et al., 2021), with more research attention needed to the potential for amplified consequences from cross-context exposures. Together evidence presented in this review helps scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to understand the breadth and complexity of disparities associated with poverty.

Challenges in Determining Causal Processes

The issue of causation is endemically challenging in social science research. On the whole, the goal of this review was to conceptualize and provide evidence supporting disparities in the home, neighborhood, and school environments inhabited by children in poverty versus advantaged children. In some arenas, there is experimental or quasi-experimental evidence that poverty causes differences in such environments and that identified environmental variation, in turn, causes disparities in children’s development. In other arenas, the evidence is predominantly or wholly descriptive and correlational. Importantly, however, whether family poverty causes, for example, a greater likelihood of children’s suspension or expulsion from school; whether a third factor, such as racial segregation, leads to greater levels of both poverty and school discipline; or whether school suspensions and expulsions inhibit school success and hence lead to a greater likelihood of poverty in the next generation (or, a complex intersection of all three processes) does not negate the basic pattern that children in poverty experience a notably higher likelihood of school discipline than their advantaged peers (Anderson & Ritter, 2017; Barrett et al., 2021; Sabol et al., 2021). Descriptive evidence such as this is important not only for theory building, but also for policy and practice interventions that seek to improve educational equity and children’s life chances. For example, given evidence of the detrimental links between school discipline and educational success and criminal justice contact, evidence of higher school discipline among poor children – regardless of causality – can help to direct resources and intervention efforts to children most at risk of school discipline and poor outcomes. In turn, evidence from intervention or policy actions can both serve equity goals and also help to further delineate causal processes (McIntosh et al., 2021).

Implications for Research, Practice, and Policy

Our model (Figure 1) illuminates poverty-associated disparities in structural and social qualities of home, neighborhood, and school environments. The simplified form of this model was chosen to organize the continually expanding, interdisciplinary body of research which increasingly demonstrates poverty-associated disparities in children’s proximal environments and, in turn, in their development. This integrative review and development of our conceptual framework sought to consolidate this work and to highlight implications for future efforts. One set of implications regards areas with less robust evidence in need of future research attention; a second addresses implications of extant evidence.

Future Research Directions

In the prior sections reviewing empirical evidence above, we identified and proposed numerous specific areas deserving of greater research attention. Here we highlight more overarching issues in the field. One such ongoing need remains greater attention to the causal processes underlying poverty’s effects on home, neighborhood, and school environments, and in turn the causal effects of those environments on children’s development. Such evidence may derive from randomized experiments such as cash transfer programs (e.g., Gennetian et al., 2024), natural experiments evaluating policy rollouts such as emergency rental assistance (e.g., Fusaro et al., 2025), and econometric evaluations of policies and programs targeting children in poverty such as Head Start (e.g., Ludwig & Miller, 2007). Further research is needed to identify the most impactful causal chains for distinct arenas of developmental outcomes at distinct developmental stages. Rigorous causal evidence can help to further theory building; drive greater policy attention and optimize targeting of inventions to the most affected populations, contexts, and developmental periods; and, in turn, enhance children’s development.

In addition to such issues of internal validity, the field has made progress, but has much more to make, in relation to external validity and the need to assess which environments of poverty are generalizable across cultural and national contexts versus which may be distinct. In many of the topical subdomains covered above (particularly neighborhood research), the majority of evidence derives from the U.S. and other wealthy countries, with far too little attention to LMICs.

More conceptually, prior literature is rather limited in attention to what Bronfenbrenner named the mesosystem (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006) – intersections among proximal processes and environments driving children’s development, such as interacting processes between homes and neighborhoods (Lanteri et al., 2024). Although our review has identified examples of ways in which these mesosystemic processes may be relevant (e.g., teacher-parent interactions), additional work is needed to fully understand the intersections between home, neighborhood, and school environments and how forces in one environment may amplify or counteract those in another.

Finally, there has been an overwhelming focus on the risks of poverty, with far less on potential strengths and sources of resilience. As noted above, contexts of poverty are not monoliths of disadvantage. More research incorporating strengths-based lenses and the lived experiences of low-income populations is needed to create a fuller view on families’ assets and strengths within contexts of poverty. Recent research using a cultural wealth framework, for example, highlights how parents in a concentrated poverty community draw on familial, cultural, social, navigational, aspirational, and resistant capital to support their children’s wellbeing, seeking to build on community strengths and counteract community stressors (Wang et al., In press).

Implications for Action

A second key set of implications relates to lessons for policy and practice. Given growing evidence of detrimental impacts of poverty on children’s development and on the proximal contexts in which children’s development occurs, one essential goal is to raise attention to these disparities and promote enhanced scientific inquiry, evidence-based practice, and policy initiatives to address these disparities. The U.S.-based American Psychological Association (APA, 2019; 2022) and American Medical Association (AMA, 2022), as just two examples, have clear professional statements of these priorities, while the American Academy of Pediatrics developed a U.S. child poverty curriculum on the determinants of poverty and actions to ameliorate both poverty and its negative health effects (AAP, 2021). Poverty alleviation has also been prioritized globally by multi-lateral organizations such as the United Nations, whose Sustainable Development Goal 1 aims to “eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere” by 2030 (United Nations, n.d.).

In terms of policy and practice, two key sets of opportunities exist for improving equity and opportunity for children in poverty. The first aims to eliminate poverty itself, through policies that remove structural drivers of poverty or that increase cash or noncash income. A growing number of countries, for example, use cash transfers to decrease poverty and increase resources for families with children (Bastagli et al., 2019). In the U.S., a 2019 National Academy of Sciences report reviewing evidence of poverty-alleviation policies estimated that an expanded child allowance (i.e., fully refundable child tax credit) would be the most effective single approach for lowering child poverty (NASEM, 2019). Indeed, the U.S. briefly enacted this policy: in 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit (which provided families with $3600 for each child under 6 and $3000 for those 6–17) lifted 2.9 million American children out of poverty, and was particularly effective for the highest poverty groups including Black and Hispanic children (Creamer et al., 2022). The NASEM report (2019) concluded that a combination of enhanced policies – including an expanded EITC, Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, housing vouchers, and SNAP – would lower child poverty by over 50%, while also presenting the added benefit of increasing employment rates.

A second set of policies and programs aim to improve the characteristics of the home, neighborhood, and school environments within which children in poverty reside (NASEM, 2019). Although to our knowledge no comprehensive review of these approaches’ relative impacts has been conducted, there is ample small- and large-scale evidence to suggest their promise. For example, brief parenting interventions have been successful in increasing low-income parents’ time reading with their preschool-age children (Mayer et al., 2019). The HOPE VI policy, which redeveloped public housing in high poverty neighborhoods across the U.S., lowered community poverty rates and decreased vacancy rates (Coley et al., 2023; Teixeira et al., 2024). High quality public pre-K programs, such as that in Boston, have increased high school graduation and college attendance among the predominantly poor attendees (Gray-Lobe et al., 2023).

In summary, our conceptual model and empirical review highlights broad and pernicious deficits in the home, neighborhood, and school environments that children in poverty inhabit, across a broad array of both structural and social dimensions. As these environmental conditions have been found on average to inhibit children’s development and wellbeing, efforts to decrease poverty and improve home, neighborhood, and school contexts for children in poverty are paramount.