Rich Kid Poor Kid
It is widely accepted in America that youth in poverty are a population at risk for being troubled. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that low family income is a major determinant of protracted and social, emotional, and behavioral problems. Experiencing poverty before age 5 is especially associated with negative outcomes. But increasingly, significant problems are occurring at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, among youth en route to the most prestigious universities and well-paying, high-status careers in America. These are young people from communities dominated by white-collar, well-educated.
Poor Children In America
They attend schools distinguished by rich academic curricula, high standardized test scores, and diverse extracurricular opportunities. The parents' annual income, at $150,000 and more, is well over twice the national average. And yet they show serious levels of maladjustment as teens, displaying problems that tend to get worse as they approach college. My first glimpse of this phenomenon was entirely serendipitous. In the mid-1990s, I was recruiting youth in a prosperous suburban community in the Northeast as a comparison sample for a study of inner-city teens. Mody do ls 2011 chomikuj. Much to my surprise, the affluent teens turned out to fare significantly more poorly than their counterparts of low socioeconomic status on all indicators of substance use, including hard. I later replicated those findings among 10th-graders in a different Northeast suburb.