Two
pioneering scholars, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, spent more than two years
observing forty-two families. Hart and Risley taped the parents' interactions
with young children, transcribed the tapes, and then counted the words. They
found that the age at which babies began to speak didn't correlate to family
income, but the number of words they heard depended hugely on socioeconomic
status, A child on welfare heard about 3 million words spoken a year, a
working-class child about 6 million words a year, and a child of professionals
about 11 million words annually.
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By
the age of four, a child of professionals would have heard 32 million more
words than a child on welfare. This "thirty-million-word gap" appears
to have a huge impact in the child's development. "With few exceptions,
the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children's
vocabularies were growing and the higher the children's IQ test scores at age
three and later," Hart and Risley wrote. They continued to follow the
children until they were nine years old and found that the number of words
young children heard seemed to have a substantial impact on their brain
development, IQ, and school performance. Later research has confirmed their
findings, as well as their conclusion that by school age poor children are
often so far behind that it is difficult for them to catch up. Moreover, many
of the words low-income children heard were stem ones of scolding, while
professional parents praised their children at every opportunity. Children on
welfare heard two words of discouragement for every encouraging one, while
children of professionals received six encouraging words for every discouraging
one.
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As
David Olds and many other researchers have found, it's not that poor families
are averse to talking to their babies or to praising them. Nobody aspires to be
a bad mom or dad. By and large, parents of every background love their kids,
want them to succeed, and are happy to help them thrive. The problem is that
struggling single moms living in poverty are stressed and busy, don't realize
that talking to a baby is critical, and often are accustomed to a parenting
style that is authoritarian. Some mothers think that putting a child in front
of a television set is a substitute for conversation. Hart and Risley
discovered in their data that what mattered was an actual human being speaking
to a child: television had no impact on vocabulary and cognitive development.
I-LABS, a Seattle brain laboratory, examined babies' brains in a $4 million
magneto encephalography scanning room - the only one in the world set up for
infants - and found the same thing. When a baby listens to a real person, it
treats this as a social interaction and processes the information. When the
baby is in front of a television screen, the child's brain treats the words as
random noise.
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We've
already discussed some of the earliest interventions that improve long-term
outcomes and help chip away at the cycle of poverty. Research also points to
effective ways to help children continue through pre-kindergarten to build
literacy and verbal skills. Children who are readers help themselves, and
nothing gets kids more ready for school than giving them the joy of reading.
Oklahoma, Georgia, West Virginia, and other states have shown what works in
creating broader opportunity through early childhood programs. Some of those
programs offer ways that each of us can playa role in advancing these goals.
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Nicholas
Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "A Path Appears" (2014)
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