It's the economy stupid! This was the phrase that kept the Clinton election campaign on track in 1992. The phrase has been mimicked in several contexts. Here is could be 'it's education' or 'it's the brain' or after Jeanne Brooks-Gunn's expert lecture it could be 'it's neighbourhoods stupid!'

Brooks-Gunn, winner of an award for distingushed contributions to public policy for children in 2005, would be the first to point out that child development is not about any one thing. Indeed, the well received book From Neurons to Neighbourhoods published in 2000 was an attempt to re-balance policy discussion that had suggested, at about the time Clinton came to power, that it was all about the brain.

Brooks-Gunn started by acknowledging her debt to William Julius Wilson and Urie Bronfenbrenner who urged scientists to see their studies of the individual child, or the family in the context of the society in which the child and family was situated.

The potential contribution of neighbourhoods has been brought out very well in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) that finds that about 11 percent of the variance in emotional well-being is explained by the neighbourhood in which the child lives, after controlling for all the other possible explanations. Some studies show that neighbourhoods have effect sizes greater than many prevention programmes.

Brook-Gunn has also worked on the Moving to Opportunity study in which 800 families with children aged three to 18 years were randomly allocated to a programme that allowed them to move home to a better neighbourhood. Similar findings are found as from longitudinal studies like PHCDN, but the results are more equivocal?

Why should this be? One explanation is the fact that less than half of the families offered the opportunity moved to a more affluent neighbourhood. Another is that many that move, eventually go back to the community they left.

Whatever its effects on their children's well-being, some families prefer the disadvantage they know than the relative affluent contexts they do not.