Roots and Seeds

The New South Bronx
http://www.greenbiz.com/video/how-green-bronx-machine-upends-sustainability-education

Although places like Whole Paycheck are doing their part, accepting food stamps and providing fresh produce; little focus is given to the benefits of addressing food insecurity amongst lower SES individuals.  Education and healthy eating are unavoidable expenses of proper development.  And eating healthy can be especially expensive.  The growing domain of research geared towards substantiating investments in restructuring welfare benefits is gaining support in many more public settings; offering new methodology for reorganization American welfare policy in favor of a perspective anchored in developmental neurology.  Investments, specifically ones like welfare restructuring (where its expected that current benefits be maintained in conjunction with additional ventures in developmental perspectives), are especially hard sells.  People like Stephan Ritz (2015) are pushing their findings out as far as they can into the public’s eye to show how easy it is to attack many of the root causes of developmental inequalities.  His mantra “it is easier to raise healthy children than to fix broken men” (Ritz a la Frederick Douglass) is an outstanding example of developmentally centered program ideology aimed at providing health education and additional food as a means of remedying many social issues rooted in developmental gaps.  His program offers after-school programs, community involvement, job opportunities, mentoring, and an endless supply of green thumb insight.  He even sends the kids home with enormous bags, overflowing with fresh fruits and vegetables, each week.  Programs that give bored kids a place they can feel they belong to and is more entertaining than what the Bronx streets have to offer. Not only that, Ritz took a poll on what his kids find most difficult about school.  To a majority of his students, it wasn’t teachers, or homework, or classmates, but health and well-being.  This only throws the unfortunate shortcomings of the major supplemental nutritional welfare policies (e.g. SNAP and WIC) into harsher relief.  Programs like WIC (women infants and children) are directed towards providing necessary nutrition to new mothers as means of combating any nutritional disparities that would have been experienced otherwise.  Most eligible women, however, don’t receive benefits due to the strict and limited WIC budget (about 50% of eligible women can’t receive benefits because of budget caps.)  In a broader sense, these programs offer little to no help in aligning with developmental psychology perspectives.  This is where current research (like Hackman and Thomas’s) is stepping in and filling the gap.

http://www.med.upenn.edu/ins/images/Second_Place_A040_neuroscience1dark-copy.jpg

David Thomas (2009) published a review of four psychological studies centered on explaining the relationship between psychological growth and development, and nutrition.  Results of the mentioned studies present significant evidence in support of providing adequate nutrition to all children regardless of their environment.  Links between iron deficiencies and neurocognitive development shortcomings, only further illuminating the strong relationship between psychological health and developmental nutrition.  Daniel Hackman’s (2009) research on the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on the developing brain offers valuable evidence in support of recognizing the role these effects play, and adapting welfare programs along the lines of prevention and remediation.  Hackman’s review covers many potential corroborating factors that define disadvantaged and higher SES individuals.  One study in his review found, without balancing ethnicities, that there are significant disparities in specific neural cognitive processing systems between low and high SES children.  The toxic attitude concerning the “underserving poor” does nothing to remedy self-esteem issues that also stem from issues of this nature.  Not only does this mentality permeate too many social circles, it instills a debilitating inferiority complex that does nothing to push people to succeed.  In the future, hopefully research in this domain is garnered by influential lobbyers as substantial proof for the need to delve into the psychology of varying SES.  By addressing the causal mechanisms of these SES psychological disparities, Hackman proposes that this direction of research could broaden modern understandings of the human brain and offer new methodology for updating social policies through application of these causal mechanisms.  

References

Hackman, D. A., & Farah, M. J. (2009). Socioeconomic status and the developing brain. Trends in cognitive sciences, 13(2), 65-73.

Ritz, S. (7 March 2015). Tedx Talk, Green Bronx Machine: National Health and Wellness Center at PS 55.  Retrieved from http://greenbronxmachine.org/the-new-green-bronx-machine-national-health-and-wellness-center-at-ps-55/

Thomas, D. G. (2009). Introduction: Nutrients, Toxicants, and Neurobehavioral Development. Developmental neuropsychology, 34(2), 137-138.