I am a huge fan of language development research for obvious reasons. [Gestering at the formerly mute child in the Skylanders t-shirt.] A couple of weeks ago, the Times had a great rundown of the recent research in this area and a look at a new program.
Basically, the research finds that parents who talk and talk and talk to their kids end up with smarter kids. In addition, they find that parents with a higher SES talk to the kids more than parents from lower SES. Therefore, kids from lower SES families start school with a much greater deficit than other families, and they never catch up.
This research is pretty solid. So just on a personal note, don't ever shut up around your kids. Babble all the time. Car time is talking time. Do not have silent dinners. And words on TV don't count.
So what to do about this gap in parenting experiences? If we all want to reduce inequality, and we all do I think, then we have to start giving parenting lessons. It's almost too late even by Kindergarten. You have to start earlier. But then we start moving into a really icky area of government. Who wants government to start intruding into the very personal matter of parenting?
Providence, RI has an interesting program that will provide parenting advice, but in a non-icky fashion.
The idea has been successfully put into practice a few times on a small scale, but it is about to get its first large-scale test, in Providence, R.I., which last month won the $5 million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, beating 300 other cities for best new idea. In Providence, only one in three children enter school ready for kindergarten reading. The city already has a network of successful programs in which nurses, mentors, therapists and social workers regularly visit pregnant women, new parents and children in their homes, providing medical attention and advice, therapy, counseling and other services. Now Providence will train these home visitors to add a new service: creating family conversation.
That seems a fairly benign way of teaching people about the impact of family speech.
Apt. 11d 
I’m with you on the vital importance of Family Conversation. Have you read Bruce Feiler’s “The Secrets of Happy Families”? He spends a chapter on the importance of family dinner – for the speech that takes place there, and the sharing of family stories that can help children have a positive identity.
But it seems to me that even smart, well-educated parents quickly tire of parenting advice (as you say, there is also “icky” advice) and just won’t accept any more of it unless there is something seriously wrong with their kid. I have so many friends who have not voluntarily sought out any parenting advice since their first child was a newborn (and that book was probably about sleep). It’s a shame, because there is good, non-icky stuff out there, but maybe not very much intellectual curiosity on the subject. And also, “parenting classes” are a form of punishment in some jurisdictions.
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Angel Tavares is a frickin’ rock star. He’s Cory Booker without the flash and with a bit more substance. Let me put it this way: Angel Tavares fired all the teachers in Providence, and progressives still love him. He’s a ball of magic.
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I would really like to see this done with adoptive kids. Otherwise, there’s a big risk that you’re really recording hereditary differences in verbal capacity.
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As an exhausted introvert, I find this all very depressing. Even more societal pressure to talk talk TALK! all the time. And we can blame Mom when kids fail to absorb all the words they ought to. (Yes, the article mentions dad and caregivers, but you know it’s really going to be Mom’s fault.)
Ah well, my youngest two are almost 5, so my taciturn-ness has already done its damage, and the kids all seem fine. (Two are determined extroverts, even, chatty enough to drive me a bit crazy. Sigh.)
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Hush said:
“And also, “parenting classes” are a form of punishment in some jurisdictions.”
Right.
Laura said:
“In addition, they find that parents with a higher SES talk to the kids more than parents from lower SES. Therefore, kids from lower SES families start school with a much greater deficit than other families, and they never catch up.”
Megan said:
“I would really like to see this done with adoptive kids. Otherwise, there’s a big risk that you’re really recording hereditary differences in verbal capacity.”
I’ve been beginning to have some doubts about the talking research.
1. Is it possible that it only makes a big difference in extreme cases like Ian?
2. I talk lots to my kids once they’re verbal, but in all honesty, I’ve never talked much to our babies. In general, I don’t think I use as many words as women from my demographic allegedly do (except maybe when hanging out with a friend and needing to bring her up to speed). The kids seem to do OK (granted, our middle child only had a handful of words at 2).
3. I think there may be issues with the research process. On the one hand, upper middle class women know darn well how they are supposed to be parenting. I am a different mother at home versus when I’m in front of strangers or when I’m with my in-laws. I’m not necessarily always worse, but I’m different when I know I’m being observed. Likewise, it’s possible that non-middle class women panic and get tongue-tied when they know that they are being observed, because they may have inhibitions about using their normal speech. Upper-middle-class women, on the other hand, tend to have a lot of confidence in their grammar and vocabularies.
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4. I think some credit needs to be given to the quality of intra-adult conversation that kids get to listen to. These days, when I’m attempting to talk to my husband about some grown-up topic in the car, I’m very likely to be interrupted multiple times by a small voice from the back seat, asking for elucidation.
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I don’t know. The benefits of having a talky-talky family on child development have been demonstrated over the years and in multiple disciplines. Sociologist, Annette Lareau, touched on this issue in her research, too.
The results mentioned in this article…”Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.”
I bet that Roberta and Amy talk a lot to their kids and don’t realize it.
With Ian, I had to take speech to an extreme and talk all day, but most middle class parents don’t have to do that with their normally developing children.
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I’m not familiar with the study (just read the article), but that quote actually throws up a huge red flag for me. If what the researchers found is that talking to your child is highly correlated with SES and also correlated with child development all they discovered is what we already know: SES is highly correlated with child development. The interesting question is whether this is hereditary or if there are parenting techniques that matter (and this matters both for equity reasons and as ‘parenting advice’ issues). But you have to measure the parenting technique while controlling for all other measures of SES and I’d need to see multiple such studies before I really believed the results. I’m not saying parenting techniques don’t matter, because I believe they do, but it is going to be really hard to prove anything regarding a specific technique that is highly correlated with SES, because it will be hard to detangle the two (and the statistical noise jumps tremendously when you are trying to detangle a weak effect from a strong effect the weak effect is correlated with). And there are studies out there which suggest everything is hereditary (adoption/twin studies).
This is also why I’m not super eager to take parenting advice and I don’t think many people even should be. As far as I can tell, there’s very little that’s actually known about the broad and long term effects of parenting techniques. And how would I even identify that someone I was talking to knew what they were talking about, ie, really knew what the relevant literature had truly proved? This may not be the case for kids with specific developmental problems, but that’s just why it actually makes sense not to seek out advice unless you have a specific problem.
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We never used “baby talk” with our children, even when they couldn’t form words. Babies do communicate, though, it’s not a one-way street. They have many ways to show their interest in conversation. Or their lack of interest, really. It’s a shame adults can’t burst into tears when bored!
Talkative parents and children who develop large vocabularies may be correlated. Did one cause the other, though? Or is it that the inclination to express oneself verbally has a genetic component, which parents and children frequently share? Adoption studies would be a good step.
There’s a limit to how much kids will cooperate with speech. When they were overwhelmed, our kids would fall asleep. It would be very stressful for taciturn parents to feel guilty about not chattering. There are days when I relish peach and quiet. It could potentially be very stressful for children who are themselves taciturn to..have..everyone…talking…all…the…time.
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The best way to control this research would be to control for SES–specifically, do the study using all high or all low SES families, and then record how much speech they direct at their children. Ideally, it would be a continuous measure from few words per day up to many words per day. (Of course, getting this continuum within one SES group will likely be tricky, but I bet it’s possible.)
Adoption studies may not work if it turns out that it doesn’t matter that there’s a language switch after a couple of years (and it turns out that the input in the first couple of years is pretty good). Maybe cognitive development only requires Language Input, regardless of the language and whether there’s a change in the language at some point. So I’m not sure that’s the solution.
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“And there are studies out there which suggest everything is hereditary (adoption/twin studies)”
IIRC it’s been shown that even twins separated at birth and placed in different families still ended up being raised in families with very similar traits and parenting strategies (i.e. middle class, Protestant, married heterosexual parents, suburb-dwellers, rode in a station wagon, played little league, ate the same foods) – such that we can’t properly claim “it’s all hereditary” given the adoptive families tended to be relatively similar on virtually all relevant metrics. No families living in poverty have ever had the financial means required to adopt. This may change in the future as more families who don’t fit the various social norms are finally allowed to adopt.
I enjoy parenting books, while my BFF finds them threatening. I’m also someone who likes to be exposed to new ideas, and enjoys reading things like self-help books even if I never actually follow any of their advice. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and Free Range Kids though my own style is the exact opposite of these styles. Pretty much every UMC parent I know is by now familiar with Nuture Shock (the Freakonomics of parenting books that even a traditional dad can enjoy) and chapter 10 actually discusses baby language. I don’t know. The whole “I hate parenting books” thing reminds me of the whole “I refuse to read YA fiction” trend – a lot of people complaining about books they have never actually read.
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Interesting that Hush has a demographic that isn’t into parenting books/information/lectures. I find that my demographic (including me) has immersed itself in the literature, like a second career. I actually have a para-professional interest and child development, learning, and the brain, and thus have always been interested, but I find a surprising amount of interest among others in my circle. I’ve attributed the trend to my circle’s belief in the ultimate perfectability of their children (and, we’re taking the genetics/hereditary component for granted, so, the question is what can parenting do on top of that to create the most perfect person ever.)
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My snarky post got eaten. I’ve decided to take the internet’s eating of my posts as a sign, so will not try to repost.
But, I do sometimes wonder how much of a feedback loop the talking is. My younger one was an incessant talker. Hanging out with him in any environment whatsoever from the time he was a bitty one involved answering a constant stream of questions. He needed that interaction and pulled it from people around him by any means necessary (and, we were responsive).
Laura’s story of Ian, though, is my anecdotal counter-example and makes me question my question.
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So Ian was born with below average verbal IQ, even though he has parents with a high verbal IQ, and we were able to raise his abilities significantly with lots of talking at home and with therapists. If it helped him, wouldn’t help other kids?
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“But, I do sometimes wonder how much of a feedback loop the talking is…”
Of course it’s supposed to work that way–with an average child, there’s a real dialogue going from even just several months old. Baby reinforces mommy or daddy or big sister or big brother, and they in turn reinforce the baby. And around we go! (There’s a very nice treatment of this in Penelope Leach’s Your Baby and Child.)
You can break the feedback loop by not spending face time with the baby, of course, and our modern life offers many temptations (like this one).
“Laura’s story of Ian, though, is my anecdotal counter-example and makes me question my question.”
Exceptional children need exceptional treatment that average children may not need.
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“So Ian was born with below average verbal IQ, even though he has parents with a high verbal IQ, and we were able to raise his abilities significantly with lots of talking at home and with therapists. If he helped him, wouldn’t help other kids?”
It would probably help quite a lot with similar children, but I bet you could dial it down quite a bit with Jonah without hurting him much.
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Sorry, bj, four of your comments were stuck in the spam filter. Fixed it.
Your comment about your son was interesting, bj. Your son hungered for interaction and he sought it out. Ian didn’t. He completely gave up on people who talked from an early age, because he had no idea what anybody was saying. He couldn’t ask questions and even if he did, he had no idea what the words meant. He needed direct and constant chatter. Like Anne Sullivan who worked with Helen Keller. Normally developing kids don’t need the intense parenting that Ian recieved, but halfway measures probably help them, too.
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We have a son with a very high verbal intelligence. We rather dread vacations and long weekends, because he talks (even) more at those times. School is fun for him because there are more people to talk to. People tend to do things more frequently if they are intrinsically rewarding.
There is certainly a level of sufficient verbal interaction. What is it? The assumption that more talking in professional families _causes_ larger vocabularies in their children should be tested. What of all the children of professional families in day care, or with paid nannies? Do they have smaller vocabularies than children of similar families whose parents chose not to use outside help? Do the verbal IQs of children vary by their parents’ professional decisions during their infancy?
I just saw an article which reports that children have conscious experiences at 5 months: http://seattle.cbslocal.com/2013/04/23/study-babies-have-conscious-experience-of-the-world-as-early-as-5-months/.
I don’t think it will be possible to make people talk more to their children on an ongoing basis, because I think we each have an innate set-point for social interaction. It wouldn’t harm anything to fold advice on parenting, such as, “talk to your baby,” into sex ed classes. Start in 5th grade.
Our oldest children loved Barney. Many of the songs the eerie Barney children sing are out of copyright, which means they are good places to start in developing a standard American vocabulary.
For what it’s worth (not much!) I like what I see of the Core Knowledge preschool curriculum, which includes vocabulary lists for preschoolers and teachers: http://www.coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/documents/494/CKFSequence_PreK_Rev.pdf.
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4. I think some credit needs to be given to the quality of intra-adult conversation that kids get to listen to.
This is the missing piece for low-SES kids, I think. There is research that shows that higher SES kids are exposed to far more positive social situations (think: going to the zoo, museums, restaurants, traveling) than their low-SES peers and the language they’re exposed to in those situations has a big impact on their development.
It’s not just about talking to your kids, it’s about them seeing adults talk to each other.
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I had an interesting experience riding Greyhound about a year ago. I was in the window seat and I ended up sitting next to a woman with a 3 year old daughter. The daughter insisted on sitting on my lap most of the way, and I let her. Kind of automatically, I spent a lot of the bus ride narrating what we saw out the window to the girl, and asking her to point out things (e.g. “look, there’s a cow? do you see the cow? oh, what’s that? what color is it? etc.) The mother seemed annoyed by this interaction, in part maybe because she found the narration annoying, and in part because she thought her daughter was imposing too much on me, and she kept telling her daughter to be quiet and not bother me. When the mom was holding the daughter, she didn’t really speak to her or play with her except to tell her not to do something. When the girl got fussy, she handed her a toy. I know the mom was a very caring mom, because we had a long conversation on how she was worried about her daughter’s future, and studying to get a better job to support her daughter and try to move to a better, less violent, school district in their town.
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I have mixed feelings about this research. I have two kids, 7 and 2, who could not (so far) be more different. My eldest was probably spoken to way more deliberately and my youngest spent his first year dragged around by an increasingly exhausted family to hospitals and rehab, and then time with a nanny who did talk to him so I don’t know how to measure that.
My oldest just is not a verbal learner. He does fine and maybe if we hadn’t talked to him as much as we did he would not be doing well but…I also feel like he needs space to absorb things. He uses his hands to learn, does amazing stuff with clay, and completely shuts down at questions like “what happened at school today?” or when emotional. Part of being his family is respecting that I think (which I know is different from a life-impacting disability.) His father is similar.
My youngest, at just over 2, already spontaneously shares way more about his day than my 7 year old ever, ever has. When he is upset words come out of him. It’s been quite something to see the difference.
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I didn’t mean to imply that I wouldn’t read anything someone wrote about parenting techniques. But I would treat it much differently than what a doctor has to say about a specific medical problem. That is, it’s just another opinion, which is probably not actually well grounded in empirical data.
That’s interesting to hear about the twin studies, though. I didn’t know that.
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I was kind of depressed for at least a couple of my kid’s early years and I’m also an introvert. I remember feeling overwhelmed by this requirement that I constantly interact with my kids verbally. And I had a real problem with having to adopt the constant kindergarten teacher persona that required that we count aloud how many apples we
were putting in the cart at the supermarket, etc. On the other hand, I have noticed that we use a lot more language with our kids and always have in comparison to our neighbors. I too have noticed the phenomenon of people who barely interact with their kids at all, and wondered what it was doing to them. The Atlantic Monthly had a piece last year about a writing program in the inner city in Houston (I think), and it described the large numbers of kids who couldn’t construct complex sentences (which used phrases like: Even though . .. or “despite the fact that . . “). The article described how these kids were now being consciously taught things that we might have simply expected them to acquire on their own. IN other words, that language deficit was affecting them academically in every area.
However, I’m not sure that a parenting class would do the trick — If the parents converse on a fifth grade level (and somebody else’s parents convernse on an eleventh grade level), then exposing the kid to more fifth grade level language is never going to be the equivalent of having him raised by someone who is college-educated. Personally, I think the solution is to get the uber-moms to stop trying so hard and take the pressure off the rest of us. (I think I’m joking here, but not entirely.)
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“I was kind of depressed for at least a couple of my kid’s early years and I’m also an introvert. I remember feeling overwhelmed by this requirement that I constantly interact with my kids verbally. And I had a real problem with having to adopt the constant kindergarten teacher persona that required that we count aloud how many apples we were putting in the cart at the supermarket, etc”
So true. And I’d go so far as to suggest that the requirement to talk-talk-talk animatedly about stuff that you don’t care about might in fact contribute to maternal depression. There’s no getting out of it in cases where the child needs serious speech intervention, but as a general rule, I think that being happy is a mother’s #2 responsibility, right behind protecting children’s physical well-being. If you find the conventional wisdom on what you should be doing with your child depressing and alienating, you don’t have to do it (barring extreme special need, of course). You should do stuff that you actually enjoy with your child.
Here are two cheats that won’t work for everybody, but that I have found useful. 1) I find that when I hang out with congenial adults, I’m more verbal and expressive and the baby benefits. 2) There are other people besides me in the baby’s life, for instance her older sister and brother. They are much more energetic than I am, are dying to see the baby in the morning, and have lots to say to her.
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