'Street Children' of Latin America

One of my research interests is on how socioeconomic factors interact with cognitive and brain development. I’ve done studies with homeless adults in the UK and Japan, and have a study planned here in Ecuador. However, in Quito, the most conspicuous aspect of socioeconomic deprivation from a psychological perspective is the ‘street children’. This is in fact a common feature of several Latin American cities.

A street child that I photographed in Asunción, the capital city of Paraguay. Children selling things to motorists is a common feature of life in many Latin American countries

Street children are a very poorly defined group, and perhaps the term shouldn’t be used at all. It really just means very poor young people who spend a lot of time unsupervised in urban environments. They are not necessarily homeless, and in fact most may have homes to go to and may even be attending school. In Quito the reason for being in the streets is usually to earn money, selling candies on buses and in bars, or shining shoes. I published some musings on this issue of definition a couple of years ago on Favelas@LSE (Pluck, 2015a).

Shoe-shine boys in Quito's Centro Historico. Many 'street children' are really working children. 

Nevertheless, the term sticks, as ‘street children’ is useful shorthand. The research I did was with students of Universidad San Francisco de Quito who helped as research assistants. We interviewed 37 former street children attending an educational program in south Quito. The first part of this was an evaluation of traumatic experiences. That revealed a very high rate of exposure to violence, and consequent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In fact, about 60% of the children we spoke to met criteria for PTSD (Pluck, Banda-Cruz, Andrade-Guimaraes, Ricaurte-Diaz, & Borja-Alvarez, 2015).  For that part of the research I was interviewed by Universidad San Francisco de Quito and they put a video clip about the research on YouTube.

A video about my street children research made by Universidad San Francisco de Quito

Next we collected data on a group of 26 ‘control’ children who had never been street connected. Both the street children and control children were assessed with several tests of cognitive function. These included a test of fluid intelligence, a test of visuospatial ability, and two tests of executive functioning, the Towers Test and Design Fluency. The reason that we were interested in these functions was that some of the anthropological literature has suggested that street children may fair remarkable well, and may even develop in some ways better than children who stay at home (in probable poverty and possible abuse). On the other hand, the medical literature on substance abuse, psychological trauma, exposure to violence etc. suggests that being street connected is particularly toxic to child development. A literature review that I did a couple years earlier tended to agree with that, in several studies from around the world, samples of street children were shown to perform poorly compared to non-street-connected children (Pluck, 2013).

Another photo of a child street vendor in north Quito, this was featured on the front cover of the Psychologist magazine. Inside was a review article titled 'The Street Children of Latin America' (Pluck, 2015b)

Our own data from Quito tended to agree with the medical view, the street children that we encountered scored quite badly on all of the cognitive tests, significantly worse than the control group. However, we did find some evidence that executive functions might be relatively preserved (Pluck, Banda-Cruz, Andrade-Guimaraes, & Trueba, 2018). This partly agrees with the anthropological perceptive, that the special challenges of being in the street environment as a child may drive the development of some abilities.

We also collected data on Theory of Mind ability in the same sample of street children. Those tests were measures of mentalizing, i.e. the ability to understand the mental contents of other people. We hypothesized that this could be enhanced in children who have to live in a competitive adult world. However, that data has proven quite a challenge to analyse. We are now collecting extra control data and hopefully should be able to add something new to the research literature soon.

Pluck, G. (2013). Cognitive abilities of ‘street children’: A systematic review. Chuo Journal of Policy Sciences and Cultural Studies, 21, 121-133. PDF

Pluck, G., Banda-Cruz, D. R., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., Ricaurte-Diaz, S., & Borja-Alvarez, T. (2015). Post-traumatic stress disorder andintellectual function of socioeconomically deprived ‘street children’ in Quito,Ecuador. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 13(2), 215-224. PDF

Pluck, G. (2015a). Challenges and strengths, thinking about´street children´. Favelas@LSE. PDF

Pluck, G. (2015b). The 'street children' of Latin America. The Psychologist, 28(1), 20-23. PDF

Pluck, G., Banda-Cruz, D. R., Andrade-Guimaraes, M. V., & Trueba, A. F. (2018). Socioeconomicdeprivation and the development of neuropsychological functions: A study with“street children” in Ecuador. Child Neuropsychology, 24(4), 510-523. PDF