Threats To Optimal Development

11	Poverty, Violence, and Child Development: Untangling Family and Community Level Effects

J. Lawrence Aber

Columbia University

The effects of poverty and violence on children’s development has long worried and commanded the attention of writers, scholars, and now scientists. But these two overwhelming influences rarely have been understood together. The tasks of teasing apart their familial and societal causes and consequences are enormously important not only scientifically but morally and practically as well. They also are among the most difficult types of tasks in the modern social, behavioral, and developmental sciences. In this chapter, I hope to make a modest contribution to untangling the effects of familial and community poverty ...