A teenager’s health may depend partly on what a family owns and not only on what it earns, per the researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.
In a study, the team said programs aimed at low-income households can miss adolescents whose families have little wealth.
About a quarter of U.S. adolescents live in households with insufficient wealth, the researchers said. That is 2.5 times the share living in low-income homes.
Net-Worth Poverty Raised Risks for Children
Income is what comes into a household. Wealth is what a family has built up and can fall back on: savings, property and the ability to borrow.
Over the past few decades, wealth has eroded for many families. The income gap hasn’t moved much in that time, the researchers said.
A paper that was published in September in Child Development Perspectives argued that “net-worth poverty” raises risks for children no matter what a family’s income is.
Emily Jones and Portia Miller, research associates at Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center, wrote it with center Director Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal and Jamie Hanson, a former research scientist there.
The authors described four ways it could play out. Parents with little wealth may struggle to pay for a safe neighborhood or a good school.
Money worries can raise stress at home and strain the bond between parent and child. Families may come to expect less for their kids’ futures. And children may feel set apart from their peers because of social class.
An earlier paper, published in 2025 in Health Psychology Review, was written with Christina Gibson-Davis of Duke University.
It found that adolescence is when gaps in chronic disease risk factors tied to socioeconomic status begin to show up and that wealth has been overlooked as part of that picture.
How Family Assets and Debts Affect Teens’ Health
Now the team plans to test the idea. It was reported that Jones, Miller and Votruba-Drzal received a five-year, $3.56 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
They will study how family assets and debts affect teens’ cardiovascular health. They also want to know whether wealth matters even after accounting for income and parents’ education.
Separately, Pitt researchers and Duke are also involved in a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development-funded project worth around $2.7 million.
This study examines the relationship between youths’ daily functioning and mental health and income and economic well-being.
What Impact Will Policy Create in the Future?
Jones cited current initiatives to reduce debt, such as restrictions on predatory lending and to increase family wealth, such as child savings accounts.
Future studies on whether those initiatives have “collateral benefits for adolescent health” could be facilitated by the team’s results, she said.
