ABSTRACT
Poverty is a major factor influencing the development of children. An academic interest is centered on understanding the processes by which disadvantaged environments place children at risk for poor intellectual and emotional development and the processes that act as protective factors against these risks. A social interest is centered on using this information to change conditions so that more children can grow in conditions of lower environmental risk or conditions where protective factors are more powerful. A political interest is to identify the factors in our society that prevent or permit beneficial changes in the life of children. The typical statistic reported in longitudinal research is the correlation between early and later performance of the children. The thrust of a contextual analysis of developmental regulation is not that individual factors in the child are nonexistent or irrelevant but that they must be studied in a context larger than the single child.
