Children and young people in neighborhood settings Children are influenced by a wide variety of things, whether it is the media teaching children how to behave or their peers who shape them to be socially acceptable, or perhaps even by their parents who raised them to discover their own identity. But while there are many obvious influences in a child's life, there is one that is more subtle than the others: the surrounding environment in which children are raised, more specifically the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood. Socioeconomic status (SES) is a measure or position of a person's economic and sociological work experience on a hierarchical social structure in relation to others based on income, education, and occupation (The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, third edition, n.d. ). It's hard to believe that a neighborhood's SES has an influence on children, but according to Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, both experts in neighborhood context, adolescent context, and individual and community socioeconomic status, they concluded that a neighborhood's socioeconomic status neighborhood affects a child's academic achievement and cognitive abilities. In Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn's article, neighborhood characteristics are represented by its SES and show how each neighborhood is measured differently. For example, previous nonexperimental research on how neighborhoods influence child and adolescent development has revealed that high SES is related to income, the percentage of professionals, and the percentage of college-educated residents; low SES is correlated with poverty measures linked to the percentage of female-headed households, the percentage of public assistance and the percentage of unemployed...... middle of the document ...... h…. arrests for violent crimes were lower among young males who moved to less poor neighborhoods than among their peers who remained in high-poverty neighborhoods” (p. 3). This supports the MP's argument, perhaps because of the culture of poverty, which refers to a social theory that explains the cycle of poverty based on the concept that the poor remain in poverty due to their adaptation to the burdens of poverty. It is unfair for wealthy neighborhoods with high SES to be able to have better education, opportunities and outcomes while poor neighborhoods, affected by low SES, have very low standards of education, opportunities and outcomes, but we must consider that these neighborhoods are changing through gentrification, immigration and through programs that help and support low-income families emerge from the culture of poverty.