Abstract: Preventing the intergenerational transmission of poverty is a new challenge faced by China's poverty relief work in the new era.Previous research paid more attention to the adverse impact of poverty on individual development and ignored the potential role of children's subjective perceptions and beliefs about poverty in the cycle of poverty.Based on the implicit theory,the poverty mindset contains a series of concepts and cognitive models related to poverty constructed in children's interaction with their surroundings or others.By emphasizing the important value of individual initiative and subjectivity in coping with poverty,the study of poverty mindset has provoked new ideas for education to poverty relief.In the current research,children's mindset on poverty mainly include poverty reasoning (children's discrimination of the rich and the poor and the inference of individual qualities and behaviors based on it)and poverty attribution (children's understanding of the causes for the differences between the rich and the poor).Individual differences in poverty mindset have certain effects on children's behavior and performance in terms of fair distribution and cognitive ability.However,the individual's mindset on poverty is cultivatable by some indirect methods,which help improve the behavioral performance of poor children.Future researches need to expand the content of the poverty mindset,investigate other possible impacts,pay attention to the development mechanism and group differences,and finally provide scientific basis for effective educational intervention programs.

Key words: poverty, economic inequality, poverty mindset, childhood