Gary W. Evans, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Pamela Kato Klebanov develop a new "chain model" that focuses on the chaotic environment that childhood poverty creates, how that chaos generates stress and cognitive dysfunction, and how such dysfunction in turn leads to academic underachievement.

Are we experiencing a "health recession"? While many think the impacts of the Great Recession are mostly confined to the labor and housing markets, the recession may also have taken a toll on health and wellbeing. In assessing such health impacts, it's important to distinguish between direct and indirect effects, the former pertaining to the health of those who are directly impacted by recession-induced negative events, such as unemployment, and the latter pertaining to the more diffuse behavioral changes that a recession may bring about among the general population.

Jack Shonkoff describes how poverty really does get under the skin, how it harms the cognitive development of children exposed to it, and what we can do to break this entrenched cycle.

On April 13, 2010, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings and the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University sponsored an event that focused on the science of early brain development and the role that chronic stress early in life plays in the arrested development of children raised in risky situations. The policy implications of these and similar findings were discussed.