How living in violent neighborhoods hurts kids’ brains — and what Sacramento can do about it

High levels of community violence, like a January shooting at Sacramento’s Grant High School, can weigh upon youth over time, affecting how their brains detect and respond to threats and even cause long-term mental health challenges, new research has found.

The challenge of helping kids overcome stressors often falls to their parents, placing a heavy burden on adults who may be struggling with broader societal inequities, said Luke Hyde, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who co-authored the study.

“We shouldn’t keep expecting parents to fix big societal problems,” Hyde said.

Exposure to community violence, he explained, can be the result of “concentrated disadvantages” that stem from past practices such as race covenants that limited where people of color could buy homes and redlining by bankers who refused to make loans in their neighborhoods.

Local leaders must continue working to find solutions that will “reduce the concentration of disadvantage in neighborhoods and the risk for exposure to violence in the community,” said Hyde and his study co-author, Michigan State University researcher Alex Burt.

This might sound like a lofty goal, but both academic researchers and family advocates offered up some practical strategies to decrease crime and improve opportunity.

For instance, Hyde said, mixed-income neighborhoods help to balance the scales for parents who have limited financial resources. These neighborhoods, which include affordable housing options, have been shown to have low rates of violent crime; a reduction in environmental hazards; and more equitable access to employment opportunities, public transit, financial services and more.

Planning and design can be used to really help teens deal with the impact of violence on their life, said Patsy Eubanks Owens, a professor of landscape architecture and environmental design at UC Davis.

She has spent 40 years looking at how physical environments can nurture the development, health and well-being of youth, and she’s enlisted youth in design decision making.

One thing she’s learned is that they love being able to connect with nature, escape or decompress in it, she said. It could be as simple as a view of a tree or a spot away from the hubbub of traffic where they can admire the sky.

How to make outdoor spaces feel safe

As teens travel their neighborhood, visual cues can signal whether they’re safe and welcome in a place, Owens said.

In West Sacramento, the city had planted flowers along West Capitol Avenue, Owens said. One teen saw itas validation that someone really cared about that space. Other teens noted that it doesn’t look or feel safe when streets and sidewalks are littered with broken glass and trash.

“Many communities have a tendency to push teenagers, in particular, aside,” Owens said. “We don’t want to see them. We think that they’re causing trouble, that they’re up to no good, and if we do try to design a place for them, we put it somewhere out of view.”

In West Sacramento, there was a park with a playground for children and a sign that prohibited anyone older than 14 from using it, Owens said. These age limits make teens feel unwanted and leave them without a place to socialize.

The goal should also be to make outdoor spaces for teenagers feel safe, Owens said, so they should be in the open where residents can see the groups but set back from high-traffic areas such as streets, playgrounds or bike trails.

Parents can’t be the only defense against violence

Christine Stoner-Mertz, the CEO of the California Alliance of Child & Family Services, said communities should adopt policies and invest in programs that will strengthen broader family cohesion and build a support network for both parents and children.

Many neighborhoods have nonprofits and schools offering free or low-cost safe spaces where children and youth can go after classes or over summer break, Stoner-Mertz said. Most of these programs are also aimed at helping students improve their academic performance, she said, and they also may offer classes in how to improve parenting skills or tips to better advocate for children in schools.

Parents have so many stressors, particularly if they’re living in poverty, Stoner-Mertz said.

“You’re not just trying to manage the sort of basic safety issues, but you’re also trying to manage working two or three jobs, making sure basic needs are met and housing is met,” Stoner-Mertz said.

She recalled how, starting in 1969, the Black Panthers built community solidarity in the Oakland area with a campaign to provide free breakfast to thousands of hungry children ahead of school. Biographies and history books now recount how Black Panther outposts around the nation marshaled volunteers to develop healthy food options, raise money to buy ingredients and then cook the meals.

After a recent parent meeting one evening at Roberts Family Development Center in North Sacramento, the staff and volunteers had a meal ready for participants to take home for their families. The nonprofit provides academic wraparound services to children around the region and, as an incubator for the Black Child Legacy Campaign, works to reduce the disproportionate number of deaths among African-American children in Sacramento.

In late May 2023, Derrell Roberts, co-founder of the nonprofit, was marveling that, for the first school year in some time, his neighborhood had gone without a shooting associated with Grant High School. Then a few days later, he said, he got news that 18-year-old Billy Ray Scott had been killed.

Before the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office identified Scott as the youth who had been killed, a Sacramento Bee article noted last year, students wore T-shirts dedicated to his memory a day after the shooting at Grant’s commencement.

Money to sponsor senior trip went to funeral instead

RFDC had paid to sponsor Scott on his senior trip and instead donated the money toward his funeral, Roberts said. The community continues to confront the challenge of containing violence. Early this year, Grant High was put on lockdown after an on-campus shooting injured a 17-year-old student.

Roberts said the Grant High community, and others like it, need local leadership committed to confronting the challenge and a dedicated annual investment to accomplish goals.

Nonprofits are often doing the work to help stabilize families — offering low-cost, high-quality child care, help with food security and other essential needs, giving parents the tools to strengthen the protective factors for their individual families, said Stoner-Mertz.

When parents are wondering how they will pay the rent or buy school supplies, it can be difficult to provide the level of nurturance needed to help children overcome the impact of community violence in their lives, Hyde said.

Some parents, however, succeeded. They did so by regularly doing things like asking their children to share their concerns and experiences, making time to do things with their kids, keeping tabs on where their children spent their time and comforting them when they felt discouraged, Hyde said.

As parents do this work, researchers said, communities must identify and try a variety of neighborhood-level interventions and strategies to protect children.

“Being exposed to any violence is bad for kids,” Hyde said, “and ... we can do things as society to help decrease their exposure by making neighborhoods more diverse and by not concentrating disadvantage in small places because that’s what ends up concentrating violence exposure for kids,”