Life at the edge

For decades, scientists have tried to uncover the roots of poverty's often-toxic impact on young minds. Does the number of traumas experienced by a child, added up like points in a tragic game, later lead to posttraumatic stress disorder? Do lower-income parents speak fewer words each day to their children, and does this matter? Determining how early challenges shape life outcomes is a fiendishly complex puzzle. No single piece holds the key.

But as scientists' attention began to focus on wider systemic factors, not just income or family structure or neglect, a missing link emerged: unpredictability. Lower-income families tend to move more, largely involuntarily. Their childcare is routinely disrupted, often due to high costs. Crowded households and volatile schedules can translate to fewer routines at home. Relentlessly not-knowing where the rent money will come from or who will be home tonight or how a parent will react turns out to be a crucial, overlooked influence on the young.

In 2016, a group of scientists began videotaping mothers playing with their babies for just ten minutes. Then they studied the mothers' "sensory signals," the touch, words, and gestures offered to the child, in order to calculate her entropy rate or the level of unpredictability of her behavior. One parent, for example, consistently might speak to her child before showing him a toy, while another might provide these same types of signals but in unpredictable patterns. This fine-grained type of early chaos had not been studied before, yet it can matter more to a baby's development than the quantity or even the type of interactions, Elysia Davis, Laura Glynn, Tallie Baram, and colleagues discovered. In particular, one-year-old infants with unpredictable caregivers often show less ability to "self-regulate" years later. They tend to rush into things, fail to wait when asked to do so, and get frustrated by failure.

The findings should not inspire us to fall back on mother blame. Instead, they offer a new window into how chronic unpredictability, as developmental psychologists say, "gets under a child's skin," sculpting both behavior and the young brain. The hand of chaos at home or in relationships can have a roster of impacts, including inhibited language development or lower ability to focus. But most of all, it seems to tip the young toward reactivity or what some scorn as impatience.

In one typical study, five-year-olds whose households had been rated as unstable at age two could not resist peeking at a gift being wrapped for them despite being told not to look. They glanced over their shoulders far faster than children raised with order and quiet. Children of chaos also tend to do poorly at the Pavlovian task of seeing how long they can wait before eating a candy balanced on their tongues. When asked to sort and clean up but not play with a pile of toys, they may dawdle or just plain have fun.

Hearing such stories, we probably can't help but think of the marshmallow test and the dreaded future that reportedly befalls those who fail this challenge. Preschoolers who grab the first treat rather than patiently waiting for a larger reward tend to have lower SAT scores, less self-confidence, and a tendency to yield to temptation, according to studies by Walter Mischel and others. Mischel's famous experiment is not the oracle that it's often taken to be. Many children who fail do fine in life.

The more important question to consider is: could reactivity not always be wrong? Cognitive control is crucial to human survival. By discounting the future too steeply, people may wind up saving too little, eating too much junk food, or drinking and driving. But reining in impulse is not a panacea for life's challenges. And in times of chronic flux, the opposite can be true.

When psychology researcher Celeste Kidd first read about the marshmallow test as a student, she found its predictions depressing. At the time, she was volunteering at a crowded shelter in Santa Ana, California, where families shared a communal living space. She recalled, "When one child got a toy or treat, there was a real risk of a bigger, faster kid taking it away. I thought, 'all of these kids would eat the marshmallow right away.'" But as she got to know the children, she began to question the assumption that low self-control was an innate flaw or always irrational. Perhaps reactivity can be a cogent response to an unreliable world, she thought.

As a graduate student, Kidd set up a series of experiments to test her hunch, with dramatic results. First, she gave twenty-eight four- to six-year-olds from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds art kits that involved coloring a band of paper to be inserted into the inner rim of a cup. One at a time, the children were told they could use a shabby jar of used crayons or wait for a researcher to return with a "new exciting set of art supplies." The catch was that for half the children, the researcher came back with nothing but an apology. In a second experiment, the same kids were offered one small sticker or a better batch that never materialized.

As you can foresee, by the time these children got to a third experiment, they were in no mood to wait for promised treats. Only one in this group held out a full fifteen minutes for a second marshmallow compared to two-thirds of the kids who had been made to feel that the world was reliable. Kidd did not analyze whether children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were more reactive; her aim was to see how precarity can lead almost anybody to be opportunistic. (In grown-up versions of such challenges, adults act similarly.) When the future is less assured, says Kidd, "not waiting is the rational choice."

Mischel knew this well. In his early experiments, he showed that children whose lives are marked by an absent father or other upheavals tended to opt for immediate rewards. "Of special interest is how individual differences in relevant expectancies interact with situational variables to determine choice preferences," he wrote. Perhaps Mischel's own admittedly conflicted relationship with control – it took him years to quit smoking – can be traced to lessons he learned about the chanciness of the world while fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria at age eight.

Why do some children wiggle and sing and sit on their hands, doing all they can to wait for life's later treats? Why do others change course and cut short the chase so soon? The postscript to the marshmallow test is that context matters. The unpredictability that often marks poverty can inspire an inclination to live out the saying, "A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush." And such a response may be not just practical but also wise. Now, in an era of rising unknowns, what more can we learn from those raised in volatility? Could the chaos of poverty spur both a range of cognitive ills and unsung strengths?  

Not long ago, a young Dutch psychologist was asking himself those very questions. In his early training, Willem Frankenhuis constantly had bumped up against the deficit model, the prevalent assumption in his field that children from challenged backgrounds are cognitively damaged and in need of "fixing." (One 2013 scientific paper was titled "The Poor's Poor Mental Power.") While deficits exist, this relentlessly bleak picture didn't jibe with Frankenhuis's teenage experiences hanging out with a tough crowd in Amsterdam. During that time, he had befriended kids who were struggling in school and with the law, yet were stunningly "quick on their feet," says Frankenhuis, an earnest professor who retains a rebellious streak. "The prevailing perspective in psychology focused on which skills they were lacking. It was hard for me to imagine that was the whole story."

An equally formative aspect of his childhood gave him a further clue. From the time Frankenhuis was nine years old on through his teenage years, his biologist father was head of Artis, the venerable Royal Amsterdam Zoo. During that time, his family lived on the grounds of the twenty-five acre animal park and gardens. "You could see and hear the animals in the morning and evening, and as we walked through the zoo, my father would ask me, 'Why do you think the peacock has those feathers?' or 'Why is this animal doing this?' He would encourage me to think about survival and reproduction and costs and benefits." By the time he earned a PhD in biological anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, Frankenhuis realized that the deficit model failed to account for people's capacity to adjust to the demands of their current environment. And the brain, with its vast potential to change its structure and function in response to experience, was the ultimate organ of adaptation.

Natural selection is often thought to be a process that unfolds over generations, a slow chiseling of species-wide traits. But even a single generation or a subgroup – a flock of finches, a regional variation of a plant – can develop characteristics called phenotypes that bolster their fit to a particular ecology. Such evolved traits may have downsides, but the benefits will tend to outweigh the costs, according to evolutionary theory. In areas rife with predators, for example, baby European starlings tend to be underweight so that they can learn to take flight quickly. Young children who have been abused often have an uncanny ability to pick up on the slightest cues of anger. Inspired by these findings, Frankenhuis had a radical idea: not only were his friends supremely suited to their harsh surroundings, but it was unethical for experts to try to erase their unrecognized strengths.

At the time, many social workers, resilience researchers, and psychologists viewed impoverished children's wariness and opportunism as a kind of excusable frailty. They saw such reactivity as a mismatch with the safe, predictable world that everyone should inhabit. What mattered for people in lower-socioeconomic strata were the future skills that they would need in order to fit into the mainstream one day, or so the common thinking went. What counted as beneficial were qualities of mind such as patience or sustained focus that might emerge despite adversity, not due to it.

Frankenhuis's innovation was to see chaos as instead producing adaptive forms of intelligence that were advantageous in times of precarity. What if shortsightedness could be a kind of cunning? he asked. What if impulsivity is at times a marker of agility? He was offering a new lens on the ancient story of human struggle and casting a scientific spotlight on the lived wisdom of people raised in precarity, from runner Jesse Owens and novelist Charles Dickens to Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor.

In 2013, Frankenhuis wrote a paper summarizing the scattered evidence for his nascent theory. His call to arms shifted the course of developmental psychology and caught the eye of University of Utah psychologist Bruce Ellis, a pioneer in evolutionary theories of children's growth. Joining forces, the pair began to interview teenagers, parents, social workers, and fellow academics in Europe and in the United States. What do kids growing up in a world where threat can come without warning have to learn to do well? they asked. What do they do as well as or better than kids across town who have order, resources, and sometimes surfeits of adult attention?

Frankenhuis and Ellis were trying to create the first high-resolution map of what we might call street smarts, and the going was tough. A vast literature in the psychology of poverty offered only a few findings – sometimes accidentally discovered – of chaos-inspired skills, but more often, the research held gaps. As in many disciplines, researchers were under pressure to keep shoring up the scientific consensus, so they tended to dismiss outlier findings as flukes. Some researchers suspected they were missing an alternative perspective but were at a loss to understand how they could shed light on the strengths of people in poverty. Yet through spadework, error, and persistence, Frankenhuis, Ellis, and a widening network of collaborators began to uncover the cognitive skills that humans can develop in tough times.

By the time the young teens came to the University of Minnesota laboratory, they had been living with their adoptive families for most of their lives. But their early experiences in international orphanages, where care was often unreliable and conditions were harsh, had left their mark. In the 2016 experiment, more than four dozen adoptees and another thirty-three children raised in their biological families were told they were going to play an online trust game with an anonymous peer who, unknown to the participants, was a software program.

At the start of each round, a child received six virtual coins that he could hold onto or hand over to the other player, a gesture that would quadruple the competitor's pile. If the other player then reciprocated, the entire stash would be split equally. The child's initial kindness would pay off. But if the other defected and kept the loot, the child would be left with the consolation of a measly three coins. One group of children picked up on key trends in the play far faster than the others. One group was fluent in survival mode.

At first, the digital player seemed all kindness, reciprocating 70 percent of the time, and the adoptees, while initially a tad suspicious, became as willing to share their gains as children with more stable upbringings. But in later rounds, the tables turned, and the other player reciprocated less than one-third of the time. At this point, most non-adopted youth doggedly kept sharing their coins, slow to give up on the idea that the world was safe and predictable. In contrast, adoptees who had lived longer in overseas institutions "promptly changed their behavior" when the other player became punitive. As the scientists observed, "They learned faster."

A spate of discoveries inspired largely by the new "Hidden Talents" paradigm reveals a kind of cognitive agility born from early precarity. Youths raised in upheaval pick up on subtle changes in a fast-evolving situation, such as faint signs of anger or deceit or signals that the time is ripe to cut short their losses. They can do far more than grab the first marshmallow in view. People reared in more chaotic milieu tend to "reallocate their cognitive resources to pressing needs," observes Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, a social psychologist studying family precarity. Just as life's surprises prompt the arousal that inspires learning in us all, so the constant upheaval of precarity can lead youths to become exceptionally attuned to their environment. This is a way of life that few would readily choose, yet it is no less remarkable for being born of necessity. And it is a stance that can save lives.

In urban communities that systematic injustice has left steeped in poverty, inequality, and violence, young Black men often grow up edgy. "I'm always, like, with it," says Tony, eighteen, one of the Baltimore youths whose skill in the here and now has been studied by researcher Jocelyn Smith Lee for more than a decade. Wherever they are, Tony and his peers constantly scan their surroundings and closely read social encounters, displaying a hypervigilance that is a primary symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder, except that in their cases, as Smith Lee and others note, the trauma is ongoing, not past. In one East Baltimore study, Black men reported experiencing the murders of three close kin or peers on average by the time they turned twenty-four years old.

In such milieu, an alertness that can seem threatening to the rest of society is often a protective coping mechanism, researcher Noni Gaylord-Harden has found. To probe the connection, she measured incidents of hyperarousal, such as being jumpy, testy, or constantly checking one's surroundings, in a group of Black teen boys from low-income communities in Chicago. Those who were most highly alert wound up witnessing the least violence over the course of the following year. "Hypervigilance allows them to pick up on cues and clues about the safety of their immediate environment," Gaylord-Harden told me.

Typical youth programs strive to eradicate such reactivity as maladaptive, a process that educators and social workers liken to "getting a cat to retract its claws." But like Frankenhuis, Gaylord-Harden asks, "Are we undermining or disabling needed survival strategies through our intervention efforts?" As importantly, are we as a society ignoring a mindset that all humans may need at times in environments marked by volatility? Full-throttle attunement keeps people right where they should be in situations of high precarity: at the raw edge of change. Says Matt, a nineteen-year-old in Baltimore, "It's a lot of work to keep your life." Frankenhuis and Ellis call the hidden talents that they are bringing to light "stress-adapted skills." Young men on the streets call this kind of agile, electrifying, but often costly way of living and learning being "on point."

The brains of children raised in volatility wind up doing just what they need to do to survive. Their cognitive circuitry becomes specialized for picking up on what matters most at a vulnerable time: fleeting opportunities, subtle clues to what's coming next, and, above all, signs of impending danger. Amid high unpredictability, the developing prefrontal cortex, the epicenter of human meaning making, "takes whatever it can from the sensory world—the sights, smells, the sounds of this harsh environment – and crystalizes [this input] into a decision-making platform for threat detection," neuroscientist Takao Hensch, an expert on neural plasticity, tells me. Still, this bittersweet cognitive narrowing has its downsides.

Compared to more affluent youths, the cortexes of children from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds often thin early and rapidly, a process that curtails the protracted growth of neural connections built up from a range of experiences. There is some evidence as well of early and excess myelination in people who have suffered trauma, abuse, or poverty as children. Importantly, in boosting neuronal efficiency, myelination prevents new synaptic connections from sprouting between neurons. The sheathing process, in other words, inhibits neuroplasticity, the forging of new neural connections that occurs throughout our lives but particularly in periodic windows in childhood. The besieged young brain is becoming set in its ways.

A developing mind under chronic stress seems to take whatever shortcuts it can to hone a narrow set of survival skills, a process of accelerated development that can shortchange the mind's long-term potential. When University of Pennsylvania scientists fed images of socioeconomically diverse teens' brains into a machine learning algorithm, the program classified half of the boys from challenged backgrounds as adults based on multiple measures of brain structure and function. In comparison, fewer than one-third of their more affluent peers were labeled so. (While less dramatically, the software similarly judged teen girls.) At the same time, the teens with early brain maturation tended to do poorly on tests of cognitive reasoning.

The capacity of children raised in precarity to stay in sync with rapid change reflects our species' ability to learn in dynamic environments and exemplifies the audacity of human adaptation. Still, children of precarity may lose what developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik calls the "turbo-charged" plasticity of childhood, a "protected time to extract information from the environment through exploration." All children wonder, all are curious regardless of the harshness of their lives. But the poignant trade-off to growing up on point may be a foreshortening of critical opportunities to nurture worlds of thinking beyond reactivity. Survival mode is a short-term victory.

"There is no revolution," Willem Frankenhuis wrote in 2019. Natural selection, he emphasizes, teaches that all adaptations have trade-offs. By uncovering the strengths of people in precarity, he and his collaborators insist they are not trying to put a sunny face on poverty or distract from efforts to tackle its ills, as some accuse. On video calls with me, he visibly squirms at the thought that reporters or even his collaborators will overstate their early findings. "We only know bits and pieces," asserts Frankenhuis, who wins respect from colleagues and critics alike for his transparency and scientific caution. It may take decades to map poverty's strengths, he says, but mounting evidence shows that "something is there."

And increasingly, policymakers, scientists, foundations, and activists are heeding his calls to question the overly clean-cut story of poverty's deficits and rehumanize people whose skills have been denigrated by a society deeply fearful of unpredictability. They argue that the question "What's right with the kids?" isn't a distraction from progress but rather an overdue chance to acknowledge that no single approach to thriving in uncertainty is best. "What we need is a well-rounded approach where we understand both the pluses and minuses" to living in precarity, says Frankenhuis. The story is far from complete.

- Maggie Jackson [photo above: Karen Smul] is an award-winning author and journalist known for her pioneering writings on social trends. Her new book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, has been nominated for a National Book Award and named to three Best Books of 2023 lists. Jackson's previous book Distracted (2nd Ed., 2018) sparked a global conversation on the steep costs of fragmenting our attention and won the 2020 Dorothy Lee Award. A former columnist for the Boston Globe, Maggie has written for The New York Times and many other publications worldwide. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and is widely covered by the U.S. and international press. She lives in New York and Rhode Island.