Research conducted by TUCI shares, “…a problematic home environment can disrupt the brain’s stress response system, reduce the quality of caregiving a child receives, and interfere with healthy development” (TUCI, 2012. p. 44). Additionally, challenging home environments can led to developmental deficits and problems including language and communication, behavior (e.g. depression, anxiety, and aggression), and impaired cognitive development to name a few; these environments have also been linked to high school graduation declines, teen pregnancy and parenthood, and lower adult employment and earnings (TUCI, 2012). One can relate this to some adolescents living inner cities who may not communicate well, especially with written and spoken language. This communication deficit potentially forms from the dialect and language adapted from their home and social environment. These adolescents are prone to demonstrating difficulty in academic courses including English and language arts, science, and math due to underdeveloped skills with cognitive processing of information and general understanding of the subject …show more content…
As previously mentioned, learning begins in the home and sets a developmental foundation. Students with problematic environments tend to present “gaps” in development, especially cognitively and are likely to struggle with academic performance and success. For example, as compared to an adolescent that lacks the resources (e.g. cognitive skill development, parental academic expectations, or financial stability), an adolescent that attends a great school that includes funding, better academic and extracurricular opportunities, and diversity is much more likely to perform well academically. This student may have developed better critical thinking and deductive reasoning skills, language and communication skills, and more as opposed to an adolescent from a high school with extremely limited financial resources, high dropout rates, prominent gang violence and drugs, and so forth. As research suggests, the correlation between environment and academic performance is strong. Therefore, adolescents with problematic environmental influences, especially within the home, are against the odds and essentially have greater difficulty with academic performance and, most importantly, lifelong success as demonstrated by future outcomes (i.e. financial status and education attainment level). And unfortunately, a cycle and probability of success or “failure” is influenced by