This book presents a comprehensive description of child, family, and community-level forces that modify the outcomes of youngsters experiencing conditions of poverty. Integrating a vast and complex array of research findings, the author elucidates salient underlying mechanisms via which poverty-related factors can affect poor children’s social and emotional development. In cohesive closing discussions, findings regarding major risk and protective forces are synthesized while delineating major directions for future work in research and theory development, teaching, and interventions and social policy. This timely and thorough volume is essential reading for students, researchers, and educators, as well as clinicians and policymakers concerned with understanding and promoting the positive development of children contending with family poverty.