Assets, Economic Opportunity, and Toxic Stress: A Framework for Understanding Child and Educational Outcomes

Child health, educational attainment, and family socioeconomic status are inextricably linked. We introduce a model that ties together research drawn from the fields of economics, education, psychology, sociology, medicine, epidemiology, neuroscience, public health and biostatistics. Organized around an integrated conceptual paradigm of environmental, economic, familial and psychosocial pathways, we demonstrate various ways SES alters the performance of biological systems, thereby affecting family interaction, stress, school success, and child outcomes.

This paper was presented during the Assets and Education Symposium, a March 2012 conference cosponsored by the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare and CSD. The symposium was convened to explore the role of savings and asset holding in post-secondary educational achievement. Many of the original conference papers are accessible in the center’s online collection and were subsequently developed for publication in Assets and Educational Attainment: Theory and Evidence, a special issue of Economics of Education Review.

Subsequent publication: Shanks, T. R. W., & Robinson, C. (2012). Assets, economic opportunity, and toxic stress: A framework for understanding child and educational outcomes. Economics of Education Review, 33, 154–170. doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2012.11.002

Project: College Success