Low Income and Its Impact on Psychosocial Child Development by Duncan and Magnuson - Article Example

The paper "Low Income and Its Impact on Psychosocial Child Development by Duncan and Magnuson" is a delightful example of an article on psychology.
1. The main idea of the article is that children on mothers with low overall family incomes tend to display more behavioral problems. This article sought to determine whether or not postnatal family income affects children’s psychological outcomes and if this is the case that causes these effects. The article/study determined there are substantial causal linkages between low incomes and psychological development and provided some implications for policy and services.
2. What theoretical perspective discussed in class is evident in the article? Summarize the theoretical perspective and then relate this information to the article.
It is the case that this article focused on school-aged children and therefore any findings would not be able to answer whether or not poverty had any effect on infants or toddlers. Nevertheless, as we learned in class the ages between four and eleven will cover both the Purpose (Initiative vs. Guilt) and Competence (Industry vs. Inferiority elements of Erikson’s Stages of Psychological Development. This means that if children simply are unfortunate enough to have this family environment will likely have better outcomes in terms of prototypes/roles as well as their sense of self-worth.
3. Why is this information important to child development?
This information is pertinent to child development because of the implications that this article has on the policy as well as services provided by the government. The findings concluded that simply increasing the amount of money that low-income families would have would not (All by itself) improve a child’s psychological development. Moreover, this study determined that income transfers may improve a child’s cognitive development but there may not be any effect on social adjustment and as such psychological treatments may prove to be a better alternative.