Over the past forty years, 16 percent of American children have been born into poverty, and 49 percent of those children remained poor for at least half their childhood, a report from the Urban Institute finds. According to Child Poverty and Its Lasting Consequence (30 pages, PDF), the chronic stress associated with early childhood poverty impairs brain development, resulting in negative effects on adolescent and adult outcomes. For example, children who are poor from birth to age 2 are 30 percent less likely to complete high school than those who become poor later in childhood. Funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation as part of the Low-Income Working Families project, the report notes that low parental educational attainment is most closely linked to persistent childhood poverty and calls for improving the home environment for newborns with less educated parents through targeted home-visit, parenting, and relationship counseling programs.