There is growing evidence that children growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty fare worse on a range of health outcomes, even after controlling for individual and family-level variables (Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn 2000; Pebley and Sastry 2004). Neighborhoods may be more influential for younger children who spend a greater proportion of their time in that environment (Jackson and Mare 2007; Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn 2000). Research into how neighborhood poverty affects young children is especially timely as children, compared to other age groups, disproportionately live in neighborhoods of high concentrated poverty (Bishaw 2011) and the proportion of Americans living in concentrated poverty neighborhoods has increased from 18.1%
