Family Finances Shape Children’s Brain Development, Study Finds

June 16, 2026
Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

A family’s financial situation has more impact on their children’s brain development than parenting style, a new study says.

Family finances and opportunities in a child’s neighborhood account for about 16% of the variability in kids’ brain function — far more than IQ, health history or how their parents raise them, researchers reported June 11 in the journal Science.

“We set out to compare hundreds of influences on the developing brain on a level playing field, and for the first time at this scale, we showed that socioeconomic conditions leave the deepest imprint of any factor we looked at,” senior researcher Dr. Nico Dosenbach said in a news release. He’s a professor of neurology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

For the new study, researchers analyzed brain scans from nearly 12,000 children, 9 and 10 years of age, comparing those to 649 different variables that could affect a child’s development.

Of all those factors, the socioeconomic status of a child’s family had the strongest relationship to their brain structure and function, researchers said.

What’s more, the parts of the brain affected by those factors are the same ones most sensitive to sleep and stress, researchers said. This suggests that family finances affect children’s brains indirectly by stressing them out and causing them to lose sleep.

“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,” Dosenbach said.

“It’s not a less-smart brain. It appears to be a tired and stressed brain,” he continued. “The good thing is that sleep and stress are both modifiable. If we can find a way to improve sleep and reduce stress for children from households with more limited socioeconomic opportunities, we may be able to reduce brain differences linked to socioeconomics.”

Of the top 40 variables linked to brain function, 37 were socioeconomic. Similarly, of the top 40 tied to brain structure, 35 were socioeconomic.

These included the social and economic resources of a child’s neighborhood, reflected by factors like average family income, home ownership, poverty rates and access to transportation.

Other important variables included sleep, screen time and stress.

“I started calling it the ‘elephant in the brain,’ ” lead researcher Scott Marek, an assistant professor of radiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said in a news release. “I thought socioeconomic opportunity would matter, but I didn’t think it would matter this much. It just dwarfed everything else.”

Financial factors were so powerful that when researchers controlled for them, they found the link between IQ scores and brain structure or function diminished greatly.

Accounting for socioeconomic status lessened the link between IQ and brain measures to the point where roughly 70% of them were no longer statistically significant, researchers said.

And when looking at only children from well-to-do families, the link between IQ and brain function or structure vanished completely.

“If we look at children’s brain scans, we can tell how well off their family is and how much sleep and screen time they get, but we can’t tell their IQ, at least not after adjusting for socioeconomic opportunity,” Marek said.

“That tells me IQ is not rooted in neurobiology,” he said. “The environment shapes children’s brains in ways that have been misinterpreted as being reflections of IQ, when really they’re just reflections of stress and sleep deprivation. Those are things we can do something about to improve kids’ brain health.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on healthy child development.

SOURCE: Washington University in St. Louis, news release, June 11, 2026

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