Boston social workers are showing poorly educated parents how to talk to their babies and toddlers so they’ll develop the language skills they’ll need when they start learning to read. From the Boston Globe:
Literacy coaches have begun fanning out among housing developments in the city, urging parents of infants and toddlers to embrace the unnatural role of a sportscaster. They should narrate a play-by-play of their actions, the coaches say, while bathing and dressing their little ones, riding the bus with them, preparing meals, and running errands - even if the babies respond with nothing more than a blink, smile, or coo.
The goal is to close the gap in achievement between low-income students and their middle-class peers, who generally are exposed to a much greater number of words at an early age. The more words young children hear, research has shown, the easier it will be for them to read and write as they grow. Watching television does not count.
The story cites the 1995 Hart-Risley study, which most middle-class children develop much larger vocabularies than children from low-income families.
Middle-class parents speak, on average, 300 more words per hour to their children, according to the study. The vocabulary gap at age 3 correlated with language scores in the third grade.Low-income parents are also less likely to acknowledge their children’s conversational initiatives and more likely to use words like no, shut up, and stop, the research showed.
I’d love to see TV shows watched by mothers join the baby talk campaign. Oprah! Cosby! You can make a difference.
This is WONDERFUL! I truly believe that if we are to see a difference in achievement for children from these families, the families themselves MUST see the need to take action themselves, rather than expecting schools to make up for the sad deficit of language at home. I was exposed to the Hart-Risley study during my credential program, and I felt it shed an incredible amount of light into the “achievement gap.”
There’s also the issue of a “print-rich” environment. Not only are there fewer words spoken in these homes, but there are few to no written words to be seen. That’s everything from the obvious books to the not-so-obvious little wall-hangings with inspiring quotes. I’d like to see the powers that be get on that as well. If I ruled the world.
I wonder what would happen if lower SES mom’s began to speak to their children more, have more books available in their homes, and read to them more, but the achievement gap remained. Verbal skills are not the only way to measure performance and IQ. I’m no scientist but I wonder; is this correlation or causation? The Raven IQ test use no language but is a respected and reliable IQ measure.
I think this lack of early verbal stimulation is becoming the excuse that schools and teachers are using to rationalize the continuing poor performance of these kiddos. “How can we be expected to successfully teach these kids when they come to us so poorly prepared, the poor, poor little darlings?”
It’s pretty clear that there are huge differences in language exposure by SES, and I’m glad to see it addressed. However, changing behavior is notoriously difficult to do, and it’s not clear that this approach is effective. I would prefer to see the education establishment focus on what we already know works: systematic explicit phonics instruction, with a response to intervention (RTI) model, provided by teachers highly trained in evidence based reading science.
Once they are doing THEIR job correctly, they can go after the parents.
Canada has had for a number of year a ‘talk to your baby’ advertising campaign on television. ‘Talk to your baby. Sing to your baby. Play with your baby.’
There’s also a British ‘talk to your baby’ program run by the National Literacy Trust. http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/talktoyourbaby/news.03.html
Of course, if you don’t believe in the government doing stuff like this, then I guess you have to depend on Oprah.
re: correlation, causation, etc.:
I have a 2 yr old. I’m home with him. I didn’t find it ridiculous or weird or odd to play “sportscaster”. I found it the most natural thing in the world to talk about everything we were doing, name evrything he looked or pointed at, tell him about all of the world around him.
In my case, it was because I was actually interacting with him. (Maybe other people don’t do this? I subvocalize to myself ALL of the time, so saying things out loud to him didn’t seem odd at all.)
It seems difficult to change someone’s behavior so they “talk to your baby” if they’re not actually interacting with their child. If the infant stays in a crib or playpen, that’s different than if he is taken in the car, on the bus, to the art museum, the zoo, even the grocery store. It’s different to put him in the kitchen and let him play with measuring cups while talking about baking a cake than to leave him in the playpen by himself, even with toys. Is “talk to your baby” enough?
…that’s different than if he is taken in the car, on the bus, to the art museum, the zoo, even the grocery store.
The word “different” should be followed by the preposition “with.” You’re showing contrast rather than comparison. Therefore, the clause should read, “…that’s different from being taken in the car blah blah.
Pardon my audacity. I couldn’t help meself.
When my daughter was little, I’d pick her up from day care every day and we would often go to the store to buy things for dinner. I would talk to her in the store telling her what I was buying and why and showing her the boxes and cans. At home, I’d tell her what I was doing as I cooked. After dinner, I would read books to her; I think her first words were ‘more books’. But I never talked baby-talk to her.
On her second birthday, we were running in the rain when she stumbled on a flaw in the sidewalk but caught herself. When we got inside the library, she said, “If you weren’t holding my hand when I tripped, I would have fallen into that puddle.”
I didn’t think anything of it as she was at that time my only child and I just figured all two y/o’s talked that way. But one of the librarians looked astonished and asked me, “How old is that child?” Apparently conditional sentences are unusual in a two year old.
When she got to kindergarten, I was amazed how poorly the other five year olds spoke. Yet their speech was considered age appropriate.
I realize that my sample size is small. But, I can’t imagine that talking and reading more to a child can do any harm.
It appears that we have found the magic formula for solving the gap in achievement between middle class and low-income people. Just talk to your children. What could be simpler? Now we can go on and solve the next intractable problem.
I can’t believe that anyone could believe such nonsense that poor people don’t know to talk to their children. This article reminds me of the advocates for the homeless who believe that their problem is the lack of a home. If we only gave them a home then everything would be okay. Of course the vast majority of people who are homeless have either mental or addiction problems, so without solving those problems they would once again become homeless.
Once again we are missing the forest for the trees. The problem isn’t that some low-income people don’t speak to their children enough; it is that they neglect their children. Short of being a mute, it is impossible to be with children and not talk to them. Think for a moment about how you interact with your pets. Do you not continuously talk to your dogs and cats? Of course you do. The same goes for anyone, rich or poor, who cares for his or her children. He or she will play with them and communicate with them. If a person on the other hand has no love for her child she will neglect the child and by doing so she will or course not talk to the child. Frankly suggesting that poor people do not know that they should talk to their children is a canard that only “well-meaning†leftist could get away with. It is only poor people with other problems such as addiction who don’t interact with their children. In other words for these people you must solve the underlying problem before you can address the lack of communication problem.
How is that a rationalization? It’s politically incorrect, but it’s a perfectly valid explanation.
If you want to get even more un-PC, just start doing adoption studies and trying to measure the genetic contribution of performance. Won’t be long before you’ve got dozens of examples of Godwin’s Law.
I constantly talked to my children when they were young, and instead of listening to the radio in the car, we played spelling games, discussed things we saw along the way, and practiced math facts. I now do the same thing with my grandchildren, and they love it. They are like little sponges.
Richard, It isn’t that lower SES don’t talk to their children. The issue is what they say and the limited and inapproriate ways in which they express themselves. “Shut the %#*! up!” is not an appropriate conversation with a child no matter how often it is repeated.
There’s a very good interview with Dr. Todd Risley about the landmark Hart-Risley study. The biggest difference they found between the groups was in the sheer volume of words spoken. The second major difference was in the content of the language, including larger vocabulary and complex syntax.
My guess is that you can get the parents to talk more to their kids, but I doubt if the vocabulary and syntax will change much. I’d like to know if there are any peer reviewed studies that show this approach works.
Michael, you are not trying to say that all low-income parents treat their children that way, now are you? My point was that it is only the low-income parents with other issues that ignore their children (or tell them to shut up). Thus, sending literacy coaches (literary coaches?!) out to teach these “ignorant†parents to speak to their children will not have the desirous effect. It won’t do anything for the parents who already speak to their children and it won’t change the way the parents who have other issues act towards their children.
I’d like to think that by merely telling people they should be more intellectual would actually result in more children being brought up in intellectually rich environments. Somehow, I think there is a genetic aspect to intellectually dull parents raising intellectually dull children. Schools ought to be the place where children with a glimmer of intellectual potential can be recognized and given opportunities not available at home.
I think of myself as pretty cynical, but the post by Richard Nieporent caught me by surprise. I had not questioned the basic idea that poor parents don’t talk much to their kids, and that gives the kids an important disadvantage. But a few thoughts come to mind.
Yes, all reasonably normal parents, rich or poor, do talk to their kids, but I would still think there is probably a substantial difference in degree, and a subtantial difference in quality. There may be a lot of potential to be exploited.
When I say “rich or poor”, as I just did, I am obviously engaging in sloppy language, or sloppy thinking, or both. But it is not polite to talk about class. To accuse parents of having “lower class” values, or habits, or perspectives, or life styles, is to open oneself to charges of insensitivity, or worse. When I say “the poor have bad habits”, or talk about “problem people”, my enlightened friends look at me disapprovingly. But I’ll risk those disapproving looks because I think there are some important things to think about, and to talk about. I think it is true that the poor have bad habits - not all of them, of course, but in general, and it is in society’s interest to be blunt about it at times.
My skepticism about actions of government having any effect on social problems goes way back. But something that also goes way back is my conclusion that personal attention can be both a powerful motivator and a powerful resource. It’s hard to know much about this program from a very brief description, but we can hope that it doesn’t pay bureaucrats to shuffle papers so much as it pays relatively low level social workers to go out and actually talk to people about their children. Okay, there’s plenty of pitfalls in that, but parents, good or bad, are generally eager to talk about their children. And even poor parents, if you can get past their defensiveness, their maladaptiveness, their petty grudges of the day, and a lot of other things that prompt them to tell their kids to “shut the . . . . . . . .”, do want to do the right thing by their kids. Personal attention does not come cheap, but I wonder if it might be comparatively cheap, considering the potential.
But how would we know success even if it happens? The dreamers, it seems to me, would count success only by totally eliminating the lower 30%. That only works in Lake Woebegone. The achievement gap will never be “closed”. There’ll always be a lower 30% in parenting, and their children will show it.
I would argue that we can look a lot deeper than a talk-or-no-talk dichotomy. Parenting is complex, and all parents, good or bad make their share of mistakes. As usual, I have put some words on paper in the past about the current subject. So if I may again take there liberty, here’s a link: http://www.brianrude.com/par-rea.htm
I don’t know if we can look at this particular bit of research without some highly ingrained biases regarding rightness, wrongness, causes of poverty and the extent to which intellect is predetermined.
For instance, might we consider that the American middle class are not the pinnacle of parenting practice? I recall reading a similar study (actually, I think it may have been a bit more carefully controlled) that examined the things that Japanese mothers say to their babies as compared to the things that American mothers say to their babies. Apparently the Americans are very heavy on noun use (possessions!). The Japanese tend to overlook the nouns (perhaps even substituting non-sense words in their place) while modelling language of interaction.
Now, the last I looked, the Japanese were outscoring us on most of the international tests. So maybe before we rush to teach the lower classes how to talk to their children we should fix how the rest of us are doing it? Or maybe we should just focus our attention on doing the best job we can of teaching the children we are actually faced with?
How can parents with an impoverished vocabulary impart a rich vocabulary to their children?
Some of these studies show that a kindergarten child with two professional parents will often have a richer vocabulary than the typical welfare mother.
I hope this program makes a difference. I doubt it will be large.
The only thing that will begin to address this gap is a content-rich curriculum combined with teacher-centered direct instruction.
The bottom line is that the parents are the primary educators of children and there is only so much that can be done to compensate for poorly raised children in the school setting.
I don’t object to a privately funded effort based on voluntary participation. I don’t think it’ll have a huge effect, though, because I suspect they’ll end up preaching to the choir. Parents who join a playgroup at the local community center do not fall on the uninvolved side of the spectrum of parental involvement. As with most parental coaching efforts, the most involved parents will take advantage of help, and those whom the organizers really want to reach will ignore it.
I’d also, on further thought, be very suspicious of any “results” from such a program, if they’re trolling for clients in the areas where they’re likely to find involved parents.
“Low income” is too unspecific a category, if you’re able to take the cream of the category, you can create the impression that the program’s more effective than it really is. For heaven’s sake, the article had an example of a DAD participating in the playgroup. Whatever programs they participate in, that family has great chances, compared to the families in which “dad” is close to a theoretical concept, i.e., sometimes defined, but never seen.
Now, if they were getting referrals from state agencies which deal with families in crisis, that would be different, I suppose.
“The bottom line is that the parents are the primary educators of children and there is only so much that can be done to compensate for poorly raised children in the school setting.”
I wouldn’t go quite so far. As I understand it, this study generalizes from eight African American families on welfare in Kansas and ten “professional” white families. Among the findings are differences in the ways in which parents communicate behavioral expectations. The poor (or eight African American families on welfare in Kansas) speak in simpler more direct sentences. “Pick up the toys,” as opposed to “Don’t you think it’s time to pick up the toys now?” Clearly these two smallish groups–as illustrated in the example–communicate differently. And the middle class professional researchers place a higher value on the second, as being more polite and offering choice.
Now, when you take those middle class professionals into a school setting of students who understand that “pick up the toys” means “pick up the toys,” and “don’t you think it’s time to pick up the toys now?” means that the adult lacks the intellect to know what is supposed to happen next, is it any wonder that there are problems not only with learning, but with discipline?
But, if you are just counting words–the middle class white professionals win.
our 1 y.o. receives speech therapy on a weekly basis due to a similar state program. our pediatrician referred us to a private agency that provides speech therapy to “deficient” children such as ours. (he understood 2 languages, he just didn’t feel like talking.)they receive state funds for each child they treat, so they have an incentive to overdiagnose. we get this for free despite being in a high SES.
After they get social workers to get them to speak to their kids, they’ll get another one to show them how to feed and dress their kids. After they’re properly infantalized they’ll get some new intervention from DSS to show them which TV channels to watch and how the clicker works. Then another social worker will show them how to walk their kids to the school bus stop. This is the kind of ‘help’ that has long term unintended consequences. My son used to go to an elementary school in Boston and this is the approach they used in tackling the achievement gap. They’re still confounded as to why it persists.
This reminds me of something I read years back — it was either in a parenting magazine or book: about how you *shouldn’t* use more than one word to describe something until you were certain your child understood the ‘one’ word — then move on from there. For (a very loose) example: you would teach ‘yell’ before you would ever introduce them to ’shout.’ And I remember thinking at the time “No, no no!”
I *always* have taught my children three versions of a word simultaneously — the word they were learning; an easier version (synonym) of the word, to make sure they understood the word correctly and could link it to something they already knew; and a harder version (synonym) that they hadn’t yet been exposed to. As age appropriate, I’d explain the difference in connotation of each synonym form.
It is something that I just ‘grew up learning to do’ from my family environment, and everyone in my family has an exceptional vocabulary.
I was really astounded when I read the material cited above by so-called experts, which assured me that what I’d grown up knowing how to do was certain to confuse the average child!
Also, one of our primary rules is that you can ask any question — no matter how dumb it may seem on the surface — and there will be *no* ridicule (i.e., from siblings). It’s amazing what this exposes — things you think your child would know, but doesn’t; different angles they’ve thought of that might not occur to others. Having a “free-to-question zone” has led to a lot of insights and interesting conversations.
And, yes, I’ve always verbalized non-stop to infants/toddlers. They really do soak things up like a sponge, and it is such fun to watch as they develop their vocabulary!