I love it when interesting sociological studies are used to create public policy. There has been a lot of discussion on this blog about the research about parents talking to children. In short, the research finds that a child’s vocabulary and IQ grows in proportion to the rate their parents talk to him/her. And there is a difference between the classes in terms of how much people talk to their kids.
An article in the New Yorker looks at an effort by the Mayor of Province to implement a program to increase the parent-child speech patterns in needy families. Caseworkers would talk to young parents about the value of talking with young children.
Taveras named his proposed project Providence Talks, and decided that technology would be supported with counselling. During home visits with low-income parents, caseworkers would discuss the science of early brain development. They’d advise parents to try to understand better what their kids were feeling, instead of simply saying no. Parents would be told that, even when they were bathing a child or cooking dinner, they could be narrating what was going on, as well as singing, counting, and asking questions. The caseworkers would bring books and demonstrate how to read them: asking children questions about what was going to happen next and livening up the dialogue with funny, high-pitched voices and enthusiastic mooing and woofing.
Because I had a kid with a speech delay, I have seen the benefits of constant chatter. But the critics of these policies make some good points, too. This policy is certainly not a silver bullet. Worth a read.
Apt. 11d 
“When daily life is stressful and uncertain and dispiriting, it can be difficult to summon up the patience and the playfulness for an open-ended conversation with a small, persistent, possibly whiny child.”
And the quote from above, how they can speak to their child while cooking dinner. If both parents are working 1 or more jobs and some/all are shift work, there probably isn’t a lot of cooking dinner going on either.
Net net – it’s a luxury when you are just trying to get by.
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Most studies show that these days, the wealthy work longer hours than the middle class or the working class, and most high-income jobs (surgeon, bond trader, trial lawyer, etc.) are plenty stressful and often dispiriting when things don’t go right. The jobs in financial services are also uncertain, as our hostess can attest.
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Later on in the article, they do mention that the follow up on the studies on disparity in words that they are seeing less parent-child engagement in wealthier families — electronics seem to be the culprit.
There’s a tone-deafness in differentiating the effect on of stress on behavior and cognition in wealthy v poor families, though in your comment.
My favorite cite is this one: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976
from, the abstract
“We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks.” This is a different kind of “stress” (the authors say that it is not directly related to stress, as a medical measure, in fact).
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I’m just curious about to what extent “talking to your kids in a certain way” can be a placeholder for other factors that influence vocabulary. Similar to how “eating dinner together regularly” probably represents a whole host of other activities that impact children. And to speak to your point on the family dinner, middle and upper class families may have as few family dinners as working class families.
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Even simple things like good sleep hygiene (are the kids sleeping enough and well enough), a balanced diet, and regular exercise must have a huge impact on speech development and other cognition.
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I’m curious too about value differences. Sweeping generalizations but middle/upper classes value education more than the working poor. It’s back to what we’ve discussed before – if getting an education, speaking well, etc. means you have to leave your neighborhood/rural town/friends/family then it isn’t as an attractive venture.
We all believe that it’s better to be well spoken and well educated but some people see it as an option or almost like a hobby. Not a non-negotiable.
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Former Mayor of Providence. Elorza was inaugurated yesterday. Taveras stepped down to run for governor but lost to Gina Raimondo.
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I like the technological intervention of monitoring the interactions (but then, that’s my bias, towards data), though I’m guessing the privacy concerns would be significant. It’s so easy to slip into patterns, and monitoring is a way of knowing that they’re there (like turning on the tv all the time).
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It was a strange internet day. I learned that Phil Converse had died from Facebook instead of Twitter. Also, I had no idea he was still alive. He was the Abe Vigoda of Poli Sci.
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Twitter is a more common cause of death than Facebook? Good thing I don’t use it as much.
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I kind of walked into that one.
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Laura would have revoked my commenter card if I hadn’t said something. Statler and Waldorf are a matched set.
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