For Boys, Moving to a Wealthier Neighborhood Is as Traumatic as Going to War

[n2doc]

BY SARAH SLOAT

It’s well known that living in high-poverty neighborhoods has a significant effect on the mental health of children. Now a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association offers a nuanced look at what happens after children leave these environments. It highlights a paradox: According to the study authors, led by Harvard professor Ronald Kessler, boys who move into more affluent neighborhoods report higher rates of depression and conduct disorder than their female peers.

The reason for the disparity between boys and girls isn’t exactly pinned down. Kessler points to various factors—community perception, interpersonal skills—as major points of influence: “We had an anthropologist working with us, and the anthropologist went and talked to and watched the kids in the old neighborhoods and the new neighborhoods, and their perception was that when the boys came into the new neighborhood they were coded as these juvenile delinquents,” says Kessler. “Whereas with the girls, it was exactly the opposite. They were embraced by the community—‘you poor little disadvantaged thing, let me help you.’”

Kessler’s study was conducted using data from Moving to Opportunity (MTO), a decades-spanning housing mobility experiment financed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Within this project, 4,604 volunteer families with 3,689 children were randomly divided into three groups. Two of them received different versions of rent-subsidy vouchers that enabled them to move into a better neighborhood. A control group did not move.

In follow-up interviews conducted 10 to 15 years later, boys reported higher proportions of major depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and conduct disorder than boys within the control group—rates of PTSD comparable to those of combat soldiers. The opposite occurred with girls, who reported mental health that was substantially better than the girls who stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods.

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http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116886/boys-report-ptsd-when-they-move-richer-neighborhoods

[haele]

1. It sounds right on the surface. The missing sense of "You deserve to be here" -

can lead to all sorts of additional stress and defensiveness, which doesn't help the usual teenaged angst boys go through.

But, still - a lot depends on the boy and what sort of support he might have during the upward mobility stage.
When we got the school district to send the kidlet to a special needs/gifted/prep academy, she went through a "dating up" period where she was actively pursuing the wealthier boys, but she usually ended up actually going out with "rich" boys who didn't start out with wealth, but were either adopted or their families recently came into money. (I guess we were too "poor" for the born wealthy boys to take her seriously - though those boys were usually intelligent, polite, and seemed nice enough - of course, Laz is scary big, very interested in his daughter's welfare, and I'm a retired Navy Chief, so we tended to be known as the "cool but you don't want to piss them off" parents.)
The boys who had "moved up" seemed to have a lot of issues that the boys who were born into wealth didn't have - and they were usually based on self-consciousness and insecurity. They also tended to suffer from "Affluenza" a lot more than the boys who were raised wealthy from the get-go.

Of course, YMMV. This was just a casual observation.

I'm sure if someone studied women (or men) who married up, one would find the similar self-conciousness and stress findings that manifest in more aggressive behaviours and exaggerated reactions.

Haele