Socioeconomics & Brain Development
Major Study Reveals Socioeconomic Factors Are Primary Influence on Children's Brains
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Key Points
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In addition to socioeconomic status, the study assessed 649 variables grouped into categories such as screen time, cognitive abilities, physical and mental health, parenting, and race and sex—allowing the researchers to directly compare hundreds of potential influences on the developing brain.
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The brain areas most associated with socioeconomic disadvantage were described as functional features in motor and sensory regions—areas the report notes are especially sensitive to day-to-day changes in sleep and stress.
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NPR reports the pattern was especially tied to neighborhoods with lower incomes and limited social support, with study first author Scott Marek saying, “Something is going on in these neighborhoods,” and adding, “We need to find out how socioeconomics is becoming biologically embedded.”
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Senior author Nico Dosenbach said the team “set out to compare hundreds of influences on the developing brain on a level playing field,” and reported that “for the first time at this scale, we showed that socioeconomic conditions leave the deepest imprint of any factor we looked at.”
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A Science analysis/editorial note emphasized that links between brain structure/function and behavior are “typically small,” and that major sources of individual variation remain incompletely understood—context for why the strong socioeconomic signal, replicated with “scale and consistency,” matters.
A landmark study has found that a child's family finances and neighborhood conditions shape the developing brain more than any other factor science has tested — more than IQ, parenting style, or medical history. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine analyzed nearly 12,000 children ages 9 to 10 and found that socioeconomic factors explained about 16% of the variability in brain measures, according to Neuroscience News.
Senior author Nico Dosenbach said the team "set out to compare hundreds of influences on the developing brain on a level playing field" and that "socioeconomic conditions leave the deepest imprint of any factor we looked at." The findings were published June 11, 2026, in the journal Science.
649 Variables Tested, Socioeconomics Won by a Landslide
The researchers did not just look at poverty in isolation. They assessed 649 distinct factors — including screen time, cognitive ability, physical health, mental health, parenting style, and race. That allowed a direct, apples-to-apples comparison. Socioeconomic factors dominated. According to Neuroscience News, 37 of the top 40 variables tied to brain network function were socioeconomic — things like household income, homeownership, neighborhood poverty, and local transportation access.
By contrast, most other factors — including IQ — accounted for less than 1 to 2% of brain variation. First author Scott Marek called it the "elephant in the brain," telling STAT News: "I thought socioeconomic opportunity would matter, but I didn't think it would matter this much. It just dwarfed everything else."
A Tired, Stressed Brain — Not a Less Smart One
The brain areas most affected by socioeconomic disadvantage were in motor and sensory regions. These areas are especially sensitive to sleep disruption and chronic stress — not raw intelligence. Dosenbach said the data showed that "the brain of a child from a low socioeconomic background looks like that of a child from a high socioeconomic environment that has been sleep-deprived and stressed," according to The Transmitter.
That framing matters. It shifts the explanation away from a child being "less smart" and toward the everyday burdens of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood. First author Marek said, "Something is going on in these neighborhoods. We need to find out how socioeconomics is becoming biologically embedded."
IQ's Link to the Brain May Be a Mirage
One of the study's sharpest findings: once researchers controlled for socioeconomic status, the statistical link between IQ and brain structure largely disappeared. The Transmitter reported that IQ may largely function as a proxy for the resources available to a child, not an independent biological signal. Stanford psychologist Russell Poldrack called the 16% variance figure "among the largest effects seen in these kinds of studies."
This raises hard questions about past research. Dr. Theodore Satterthwaite of the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored an accompanying Science perspective, told WNYC that previous studies on IQ or mental health that did not account for socioeconomic status "may require re-evaluation." Decades of smaller brain imaging studies — many with fewer than 100 participants — may have been detecting the effects of poverty, not the traits they claimed to measure.
Sleep and Stress Are the Likely Pathways — and Both Are Fixable
Because the brain differences tied to poverty show up most in areas sensitive to sleep and stress, the study's authors argue the damage is not permanent or inevitable. Sleep and stress are modifiable. That means policy changes — later school start times, neighborhood investment, expanded social support — could directly alter developmental outcomes, MedicalXpress reported.
The study drew on the NIH's Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, launched in 2015 across 21 research sites. Its scale — nearly 12,000 brain scans — gave the findings a level of consistency that smaller studies could never achieve. The accompanying Science analysis called the socioeconomic signal remarkable for its "scale and consistency," suggesting inequality may be the single largest shaper of how young brains are organized.
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