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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).