Excellent article by Katherine Boo in the New Yorker about a new program that attempts to stop the cycle of poverty by using nurses to teach young mothers how to be good parents. These nurses enter the homes and the lives of these young women, some of whom don’t really want to hear the lectures. They give basic parenting lessons, like how to talk to infants, and also berate the mothers into getting their GEDs and getting themselves a steady man.
Despite its success, this program has had many critics, including those who feel that the government interference in the home is wrong and those who worry that this programs will take away from schools and daycare programs.
I think this program sounds great, but I think it’s a mistake to assume that the sole cause of poverty is the bad habits of poor people. They need more than a stern, matronly woman to instruct them to read to their kid. Programs like this one have to be supplemented with jobs programs and school reform.
Still, this is a fascinating article.
Apt. 11d 
That’s an interesting article. I like the focus on teaching mothers how to do things right to begin with, rather than just coming after them later when they’ve screwed up. But I do disagree with one thing: “In America’s moneyed and well-educated quarters, parents spend easily a thousand dollars a year on Baby Einstein DVDs, smart-baby sign-language classes, and other efforts to give their toddlers an intellectual edge before formal schooling begins…” Sign-language classes can be very helpful, from what I hear, but does anybody out there really think that Baby Einstein is for the baby? Nearly all expensive infant classes and products are for the parents’ benefit, to add some variety to their lives, get them out of the house, and keep them sane. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but those products and classes are not what creates the educational gap between rich and poor. The secret educational weapon in the upper middle class arsenal is the hyper-educated upper middle class mama herself.
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The mama I’m talking about would do just as well by her child educationally if she were stuck on a desert island with no materials except a stick and a big sandy beach. (Although I’m not sure how well she’d do with two kids.)
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Amy P, nice counter on the Baby Einstein phenomenon and the idea that kids need products to develop their brains. I’ve tried out education CDs, Baby Einstein, and even the Leapfrog junk (the stuff gets given to us by well meaning relatives), and I think my kids have gotten more out of drawing with crayons on scrap paper. And being read to.
I can well believe that the nurse visits could be a real help. The hospital where we had both our kids has a program where if you check out in 48 hours, they will arrange for a home nursing visit. We did this for our first and it was incredibly reassuring. The nurse answered some medical and hygeine questions, gave my wife breastfeeding tips and checked our supplies. A pretty minor thing, but it made us feel a lot more confident. I would think for mothers with little resources the type of intervention described in the article would make a huge difference.
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I’m going to disagree with you there, Laura. Early childhood experiences + peer group effects seem to dwarf everything else we’ve figured out how to throw at poor kids: head start, better schools, adult interventions, all produce almost no measurable benefit, because the kids are so far behind the eight ball by the time they reach kindergarten. Friends who are involved in the education of poor kids (one as a program analyst for school districts, the other as a charter school teacher) say that while there are things that can make a difference, the goals they have for those kids strike a middle class parent as laughably poor, like sitting through an entire class and getting adequate nutrition.
Kids who do not have adequate attention paid to their needs when they are little and their brains are still in ultra-rapid-development phase just don’t catch up. Even the Perry Pre-School project, the gold standard for early-childhood interventions, had extremely modest benefits: it reduced high school dropout rates and arrests, and showed a modest increease in the number of the children who worked as adults. It did not show substantial increases in, say, children who went to college or otherwise joined the working class; it just turned out marginally more functional poor kids. This at a cost of over $20,000 per year in today’s dollars.
The parenting deficits that underclass kids experience are huge, in terms of attention paid to them, stimulation (not the hyper Baby Einstein kind, but the ordinary “Wooga-booga-booga-boo! Baby want to play with bear? Yes! Yes, you do! Bear wants to play with baby!”) variety, diet, number of words spoken to them, and so forth.
There are things we know–like “Phonics matters” that can help kids on the margin, but the mothers that nurse is dealing with are going to produce some truly fucked up kids, most of whom will undoubtedly themselves have children young that they in turn will neglect. Better parenting dwarfs pretty much all other effects except genes; anything we can do to push poor mothers in that direction is excellent social policy, and if resources are limited, should be investigated as an alternative to money spent on things like job training programs, which the studies I’ve seen show are pretty much useless.
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Yeah, I’ve got to return to this topic in a more full blown post.
I am really in agreement with you, Jane. Early childhood dev is extremely important. I look at my son’s 6 year friends and, it’s sad to say, I know exactly where they are heading. Their future was decided by the time they were 5. There’s one little girl that he knows who I just know will be pregant by 15.
But. but. but. It’s really hard to be a good parent when you don’t have a job, when you have no future, when the man in your life is thumping you. You can teach the poor mothers to feed their kids good food, but until the moms have their heads clear of stress and worry, follow up will be hard.
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