This is a good potential example of the multi-generational impact of poverty.

We knocked out LaMarck's concept of the heritability of acquired characteristics once we started to understand Darwinian genetics. (Lamarck believed a giraffe, for example, passed along its adaptations to its children, leading to successive generations of longer and longer necks. Darwin teaches us that the longer neck is a random development, but it enabled those lucky giraffes with that random mutation to be more successful and have more children. The gene becomes more and more expressed as a feedback loop continues favoring longer and longer necked giraffes until it hits a point of diminishing returns).

However, we are now starting to understand that LaMarck's theories may have had some degree of value after all. For example, children of Holocaust survivors have altered stress hormones as a result of the events their ancestors went through.

Epigenetics is a growing field that touches on everything from homosexuality to stress hormones to a tendency to gain weight. A high-level takeaway, however, may be that people who come from happy homes with enough resources tend to set their children up for success as well; both culturally, financially, and possibly even epigenetically.