Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth.
There is no consensus, however, about what form these attempts should take, because there is no consensus about the problem itself. What is it about poverty that limits a child’s ability to learn? Researchers have answered the question in different ways: Is it exposure to lead? Character issues like a lack of self-control or failure to think of future consequences? The effects of high levels of stress hormones? The lack of a culture of reading?
A poor child is likely to hear millions fewer words at home than a child from a professional family. And the disparity matters.
Another idea, however, is creeping into the policy debate: that the key to early learning is talking — specifically, a child’s exposure to language spoken by parents and caretakers from birth to age 3, the more the better. It turns out, evidence is showing, that the much-ridiculed stream of parent-to-child baby talk — Feel Teddy’s nose! It’s so soft! Cars make noise — look, there’s a yellow one! Baby feels hungry? Now Mommy is opening the refrigerator! — is very, very important. (So put those smartphones away!)
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.
The Providence Talks program will be based on research by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published a book, “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.” (see here for a summary.) Hart and Risley were studying how parents of different socioeconomic backgrounds talked to their babies. Every month, the researchers visited the 42 families in the study and recorded an hour of parent-child interaction. They were looking for things like how much parents praised their children, what they talked about, whether the conversational tone was positive or negative. Then they waited till the children were 9, and examined how they were doing in school. In the meantime, they transcribed and analyzed every word on the tapes — a process that took six years. “It wasn’t until we’d collected our data that we realized that the important variable was how much talking the parents were doing,” Risley told an interviewer later.
All parents gave their children directives like “Put away your toy!” or “Don’t eat that!” But interaction was more likely to stop there for parents on welfare, while as a family’s income and educational levels rose, those interactions were more likely to be just the beginning.
The disparity was staggering. 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.
Hart and Risley later wrote that children’s level of language development starts to level off when it matches that of their parents — so a language deficit is passed down through generations. They found that parents talk much more to girls than to boys (perhaps because girls are more sociable, or because it is Mom who does most of the care, and parents talk more to children of their gender). This might explain why young, poor boys have particular trouble in school. And they argued that the disparities in word usage correlated so closely with academic success that kids born to families on welfare do worse than professional-class children entirely because their parents talk to them less. In other words, if everyone talked to their young children the same amount, there would be no racial or socioeconomic gap at all. (Some other researchers say that while word count is extremely important, it can’t be the only factor.)
While we do know that richer, more educated parents talk much more to their children than poorer and less educated ones, we don’t know exactly why. A persuasive answer comes from Meredith Rowe, now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. She found that poor women were simply unaware that it was important to talk more to their babies — no one had told them about this piece of child development research. Poorer mothers tend to depend on friends and relatives for parenting advice, who may not be up on the latest data. Middle-class mothers, on the other hand, get at least some of their parenting information from books, the Internet and pediatricians. Talking to baby has become part of middle-class culture; it seems like instinct, but it’s not.
If you haven’t heard of Hart and Risley’s work, you are not alone — and you may be wondering why. These findings should have created a policy whirlwind: Here was a revolutionary way to reduce inequities in school achievement that seemed actually possible. How hard could it be to persuade poor parents to talk to their children more?
Very hard, it turned out — because there was no practical way to measure how much parents talk. Each hour of recording took many hours to transcribe and classify: to count the words uttered near a child and attribute them to a parent, the main child, a sibling, someone else or a TV. The cost was prohibitive.
“The only thing researchers could do was to ask the parent if they were talking a lot,” said Jill Gilkerson, the language research director of the Lena Research Foundation, which develops technology for the study and treatment of language delay. “But you need an objective evaluation. Asking anyone to observe their own behavior with no reference point is completely useless.” Without measurement, parents who did try new things couldn’t know whether they were helpful. Hart and Risley’s research languished.
What has revived it is the technology and measurement practices developed by Lena, which stands for Language Environment Analysis. A child wears clothing with a special pocket for a voice recorder that can unobtrusively record 16 continuous hours — plenty of time for the family to forget it’s there and converse normally. The analysis is done by speech-recognition software, which can count and source words uttered, count conversational turns (one party says something and the other responds) and weed out background noise and TV. For privacy, the recorder can encrypt the actual speech and delete the speech after it is counted. And a family can hit the “erase” button whenever it wants.
Lena’s system came out five years ago, and is now being used in about 200 universities and research hospitals — with deaf children, autistic children and children developing normally. The first studies are only now being published.
The studies most relevant to Providence Talks come from two researchers. Gilkerson gave the recorder to 120 families, who used it and viewed the reports once a week for 10 weeks. Of those families, 27 started out below the baseline. Even with no coaching at all, over the 10 weeks their daily word average rose from about 8,000 to about 13,000 — an increase of 55 percent. (The paper was presented at a conference, but not yet published.)
More recently, Dana Suskind, a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon at the University of Chicago who founded the school’s Thirty Million Words project, did a study with 17 nannies in Chicago. Each attended a workshop on the importance of talk, strategies for increasing it, and how to use the Lena recorder. Then they used it once a week for six weeks. Suskind found (pdf) that the nannies increased the number of words they used by 32 percent and the number of conversational turns by 25 percent.
Suskind has also done a randomized controlled trial with low-income mothers on Chicago’s South Side — not yet published, but with good results: she said that parents asked if they could keep getting reports on their number of words even after the study finished.
All these studies were small, short-term and limited in scope. “One thing is to say we can change adult language behavior,” Suskind said. “Another thing is to show that it is sustainable, and that it impacts child outcomes.”
Providence has the money to be more ambitious. The city plans to begin enrolling families in January, 2014, and hopes to eventually reach about 2,000 new families each year, said Mayor Angel Taveras. It will most likely work with proven home-visitation programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership. The visitors will show poor families with very young children how to use the recorders, and ask them to record one 16-hour day each month.
Every month they will return to share information about the results and specific strategies for talking more: how do you tell your baby about your day? What’s the best way to read to your toddler? They will also talk about community resources, like read-aloud day at the library. And they will work with the family to set goals for next month. The city also hopes to recruit some of the mothers and fathers as peer educators.
Taveras, who was raised by a single mother, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, chose the program because of the role Head Start played in his own life. At Harvard, he found that his roommate and several friends were also Head Start babies. “It did and still does have a big impact,” he said. “The research on the gap that exists is pretty startling in some ways. But this is something we can address with different strategies. We have an opportunity to level the playing field.”
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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”
A previous version of this article misstated details about the Thirty Million Words Project. The study involving nannies was held in Chicago, not Denver, and the randomized control model studied low-income mothers of all ages, not teenaged mothers only.
517 Comments
Jessica Delacruz
Shauger October 9, 2015In my opinion its seeems bazare that one years olds are learning speech slow and its being blame on the parents , Speech does deteremine whether youre gonna be smart enough but some kids learn differently, Speech/ talking comes slowly on its way and it doesnt determine wealthy or not .
sarai
ny, ny December 27, 2013T he most important thing for a child, starting maybe even in the womb, is to know that they are unconditionally loved. Infants can sense this.
gary e. davis
Berkeley, CA September 17, 2013CONCERTED CULTIVATION is a key.
Some years ago, sociologist Annette Lareau, UNEQUAL CHILDHOODS (2003/2011) showed an exact difference between the parenting styles of middle-class / more-educated parents and poor / less-educated parents—between a "concerted cultivation" (active) approach to parenting vs. a "natural growth" (passive) approach, i.e., children will turn out fine on their own, if you house, feed, etc., well enough.
• CC parents actively foster and assess their child's talents, opinions, and skills. NG parents care for their child and allow the child to grow on its own. ||
• CC parents seek active, mutual communication. They show desire to reason with their child, respecting child objections, bringing children into a consensus-forming process. NG parents tend to issue directives, object to child questioning of parent decisions, and expect children to simply accept what's told to them. ||
• CC parents engage in creatively organizing their child's free time; NG parents let their child just "hang out." ||
• CC parents tend to be advocates for their child with schools and other institutions. NG parents tend to take a dependent, accepting role toward institutions affecting their child. ||
CONCERTED CULTIVATION: It's a beautiful concept.
jean valliere
new orleans July 2, 2013As a middle class "talker and explainer" mom, as well as a professional in the infant mental health field, I work to promote language with all of my clients.
At this time, I work predominately with younger moms who are low income. I have been at this for 30 years. I find my older moms do better than my younger moms, (28 vs 18, roughly, forget 15 and 16 year olds) . I have many low ses clients whose babies are doing well with language. These moms did do well in school, or if not, had the potential to do well but given their life experiences, school was not a focus. We know teen moms talk less to their children. We know television does not help with language or intellectual development, and should be avoided during the first 3 years.
In any event, this research is well known in the field and in my direct experience, it is valid. I go on walks with my younger moms and babies, model talking about grass, trees, leaves falling, birds, pink flower, yellow flowers, etc., and ask my moms to take a turn doing the talking. Even the less bright improve.
It is very important to remember that any advice will fall on deaf ears if moms are depressed. This factors into the language situation with many young poor moms. Maybe some day the elected officials in our country will actually consider that emotional, physical, and cognitive health are related to performance.
Kito
Illinois June 13, 2013After reading this article, I encouraged the families I visit as a parent educator, to talk to their children more often. What do they have to lose? And it doesn't cost them anything. I shared the advice of talking more with all my families, not just the low-income ones. Sadly, I have to concur with a statement in the article. On home visits, I have observed that many of my low-income parents do engage with their children mainly with directives such as "Stop that!" or "Sit down!" I am thankful that I can be on the ground floor, in the trenches, in the living rooms and dens, sharing researched-based solutions, such as the one discussed in this article, to help strengthen families.
DBoneHolmes
Akron, Ohio June 12, 2013A report and a group of studies that proves that poverty inhibits a child's ability to learn. Well, of course it does. A child cannot learn if their tummy is growling.
TINA ROSENBERG: It DOESN'T MATTER if there is causation or correlation between poverty and a child's ability to learn. Statistics display a direct link and we need to address the poverty issue. Hunger, lack of quality education, social inequalities among their peers as they get older, eventually access to continued education and so forth. If I have to read another article like this, I'm going to scream.
Judith 03
Sarasota, FL June 3, 2013PIAGET? Ever hear of him? Imput-output. I realize that what a child brings to school is what he experiences in the home. A colleague had a sign on her classroom door declaring that a mother is the first teacher.
Laura
South Carolina April 22, 2013Really!!!?? Talking to your baby/toddler is a genius find? ha ha ha, I love it. My mother always said she found it amazing when parents wondered why their kid wasn't talking by a certain age. She said they are not magically just going to pick up on the English language if words are not constantly repeated and everything pointed out to them. When my son was born we pointed out everything to him and repeated everything and I can now have a full on conversation with my 2 year old. This to me is common sense but I guess we need Tina Rosenberg to spell it out for us...duh.
capnhist
California June 28, 2013Um, well, not exactly. That's not quite how children acquire language. Your kid is probably highly verbal to begin with and would have developed a good verbal ability regardless of whether you spent every waking moment pointing at things and chattering at him.
There are plenty of cultures which don't have the same maniacal focus on children's language development, and their kids are proficient in their language on the same timetable as middle-class American kids. I will say, though, that they don't tend to be cultures with a tradition of written scholarship.
someone in NJ
Central NJ April 22, 2013These days there are so many studies about the so-call problems of the children, I wonder if we overly analyze and study these subjects -- social-economics of family, age of the father, the gene of the family (this is other way to say race these days), the chemical and biological pollution and etc., or we just have too many experts on too many subjects in the modern times. The problem for expert sometime just narrowly focuses on the subject he or she is in. All of them has single motive -- produce" better" children. However, human have live for centuries without these ideas, and we still survive and produce, knowledge and life are improving. So it is about time we just treat these studies as academic topics, rather than a definitely guide of life.
Chitra
India April 22, 2013I totally agree with the topic except for the fact that it does not matter who talks or how much they talk with the child. It may not be true that a child belonging to a professional family can possess more vocabulary than a poor child. On the contrary, even a child from a poor family can learn more words if he is exposed to listening more speech.In fact, children belonging to high income groups are less exposed to parent talk as they spend less time with their parents. Spending quality time just for an hour everyday is enough for a three year old to master the language.
SamR
Harlem April 19, 2013"American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed"
Ummm. No. The role of schools in U.S. society is to reproduce and stabilize the massive inequality that exists under capitalism. Bowles and Gintis explored this extensively in their seminal 1972 work "Schooling in Capitalist America" - where they dispel the myth that schools were ever even intended to lower inequality. At least the author of this article recognized that the schools never actually had positive effect on 'closing the gap' - whether it be economic or pedagogical.
kathryn
oakland, CA April 19, 2013I'm curious what the effects might be on babies who spend a lot of time with people who speak a different language from their parents. Specifically, I've been curious when I see babies with nannies who speak mostly in a language other than English, and may be with the babies for 8 or 10 hours a day. How does that affect the vocabulary and development of the child's English? Sometimes I see groups of nannies who meet in a park or playground with the children under their care and the women sit together and chatter away in Spanish or Tagalog and the babies are sitting there for hours, not hearing a word of English.
TW
SF, CA September 1, 2013There are many studies now that show what bilingual/polyglot folks have always thought: it's a great thing, cognitively (Time mag had a piece on this recently:
http://science.time.com/2013/07/18/how-the-brain-benefits-from-being-bil...
). Just be consistent: person X speaks Spanish, persons Y and Z speak English, person W speaks only Mandarin. Children in multi-lingual environments will speak a little later, but their brains will be more flexible, and they'll speak multiple languages more easily. The point being, in addition to the linguistic abilities (which in this day and age may, with globalization, or may not, with the internet, be that important), there are many other documented cognitive benefits.
Judy
Long island November 15, 2013More significant is probably whether the nannies speak to the children or only each other.
Paula
Boston April 17, 2013I think it's all about giving a child responses, even if they are essentially not sensible on the face. Children (and animals too) like to feel responded to. If you respond to your childrens' "words", they will definitely say more of them...After all, wouldn't you?
Just because they cannot talk in full sentences doesn't mean they don't have anything to communicate.
Brilee Moyers
Lexington, KY April 17, 2013I agree with a lot of the findings of this article. I think you should talk to children beginning at an early age. Isn't that how children learn words? By imitating what they hear from their parents, grandparents, siblings, etc.... I am not for sure why children from low income families do not do as well in school as compared to other children. Those parents can talk to their children just like any other children. They can read to them just as much. If they do not have the money to buy books, there is a public library where they can check out books for free. Parents should take the time to talk to their children when they are young whether they are poor are rich....It's their children for gods sake!
Bob L
Montclair, NJ April 19, 2013True, but many are less educated, less verbal, and since received less in this area when mothered themselves are less conscious of its value and have less experience from the original interactions with their own parents
whichever has a detrimental effect outside of their awareness.. It 's not as simple as you make it sound.
Omeriah
Ann Arbor, MI April 16, 2013All three of my kids were absurdly early talkers, having full conversations at 18-24 months and surprising even the most casual observers. My wife and I always half-jokingly chalked it up to "we talk a lot", but it was really true. I never doubted that simply talking to them like real people made a huge difference. Ga-ga talk and issuing orders doesn't have the same effect. Babies and toddlers deserve a lot more credit than most people give them. Talk to them like real people!
capnhist
California June 28, 2013Nope. "Ga-ga talk", known as "motherese" in the field of linguistics, is well-known to have a measurable and positive effect on children's language development.
Guess you'll have to find something else to feel sanctimonious about.
Randy Maged
Potomac, MD April 16, 2013I talk to my 3 month old granddaughter every time I'm with her, and we have a running dialogue already. I imagine that she'll be speaking English shortly, but I've
learned baby quickly. And boy, that girl can really tell a joke.
False Profit
New York, NY April 16, 2013Use some common sense, folks. Would your own language or other skills be any different if you had heard a few extra words when you were crawling around in diapers? I don't think so. This whole body of work that claims that what people experience in their first few years (and disproportionately impacted by parents' economic status) determines their entire life is absurd. People at publicly funded Universities really have too much time on their hands to dream up, research and "prove" these nonsensical theories.
John Hartman
Bristol, Connecticut April 16, 2013Clearly you have no understanding of neurocognitive development...sounds like you just don't really want to do the work on looking at the original research and in looking at the history of early educational and developmental theory...check it out and then get back and let us know what you think based on looking at the base data and information...
Gordeaux
Glen Ridge April 17, 2013Common sense? Anti-intellectual, uninformed, baseless opinion.
nlitinme
san diego April 16, 2013When resources and any sort of support are scarce, when emotional exhaustion can be an everyday occurrence, talking to your kid(s) may be the last thing on your mind. I can see how this talking gap can develop. Add a perhaps more limited vocabulary, less of an inclination to read/write in one's spare time and the talking gap widens.
junebug
Rio, Brazil April 16, 2013Does reading the NYT aloud count? I often read aloud to my two month old. She seems to enjoy it but I'm wondering if I should stick to baby books.
John S. Green
Washington state April 19, 2013Your daughter will be doing Will Shorts NPR puzzler before she's out of diapers! It does count, indeed!
Sumand
Houston June 13, 2013You can always read both!
L-N
Brooklyn, NY April 16, 2013Just to be clear, re: my earlier comment, for anybody that cites the importance of variety in a population, it wasn't directed at those on the "spectrum" of life that will become the engineers, scientists, mathematicians and/or tech experts of tomorrow (whose parents themselves may have received a dx for high-functioning autism or Aspergers had it been available 30 years ago), but those who'll need extra services across the lifespan because of a lack of communication skills and behaviors that will get in the way of an independent life.
All babies need to be reinforced early on that something is in it for them to learn how to communicate, and communicate well, and for those born with a certain genetic makeup, preventatively, without that.....
It probably should be mandatory for students, our many future parents, to learn all about it in high school health education classes. We need to start thinking more long term about our society.
L-N
Brooklyn, NY April 16, 2013I agree that these ideas are no longer "new", but nevertheless, not all college-educated or professional parents, with or without nannies (& often even with 24/7 moms or dads) will learn the importance of constantly directing a barrage of language & labeling; or of the give and take needed for later fluency (e.g., silences provided by parents/caregivers for listening to cooing sounds from birth forward); the narrating babies should hear way before expressive language (words) emerges whenever that will be, whether at 14 mths or closer to three; or how teaching perspective-taking should start early as possible. All of this is counter-intuitive for many, not only for parents from lower socio-economic brackets, but also for some math and sciency left brain types. Regardless, if a child has been privvy to certain genetic combinations, where a they could easily tip during a crucial period of neuroplacity...and they haven't had enough of it, poof! Repetitive, self-stimulating behaviors, etc., that will have slowly increased, get ingrained so it becomes harder by the day to turn around even with early intervention, and could result in autism, language "dysfluencies", "social communication disorders" or whatever DSM will label these in their next edition in May. And with the dearth of behavioral services in our health care system, when the parents are gone, guess who'll be footing the bill for services, housing, etc.?
Thanks again for this very important article!
mrspepper
BC April 15, 2013I think you need to be more carful when discussing differences between the poor and upper classes, there are a lot of assumptions in the article that are pretty brutal. The idea that 'the latest idea' or news research on development is somehow necessary for good parenting is also a stretch. Most 'new' ideas coming out of these studies can already be found in traditional parenting methods across the world and across different cultures.
d
NYC April 15, 2013There seems to be a flaw in the reasoning here. First we read, " ... the disparities in word usage correlated so closely with academic success that kids born to families on welfare do worse than professional-class children entirely because their parents talk to them less. "
Then, "we don’t know exactly why. ... (a persuasive arguments suggests) poor women were simply unaware that it was important to talk more to their babies — no one had told them about this piece of child development research."
Connecting the dots, we would conclude that before this research was done and then widely known (among more well-to-do mothers), there were no differences in children's abilities.
Also, not to be persnickety, but this article is full of grammatical errors. While this is bad enough considering the publication, the fact that the topic is related to language skill suggests that a sentence like "... only one in three children enter school ready for kindergarten reading." is so ironic as to be disgraceful.
BB
CA April 15, 2013There is a correlation between the number of words used at home and the child's language skills, but the correlation does not imply causation. It may be that smarter parents have smarter children and that smarter people become professionals. Conversely, one reason that people are poor is that they are not particularly smart. It would therefore not be surprising that their children also were not that smart. It seems critical to see if the poor children who are exposed to extra language will improve their cognitive skills.
marie
san francisco April 16, 2013wow. "people are poor because they are not particularly smart"?
maybe people are poor because they did not win the birth lotto. perhaps poorer people do not have access to higher education or opportunities to explore options. maybe poor people do not know how to gain insider trader information..... , or like you say, maybe poor people just are not as smart as rich people.
Rachel
New York April 15, 2013Great article. I have also wondered why the Risley & Hart study did not promote more policy changes, like funding programs home-visiting programs. Parents need to see language rich, positive interactions modeled.
I have to thoroughly disagree with the comment by Amanda that creating TV programs is going to solve this problem. TV programs are not responsive to a child, nor are they interactive. Babies need a familiar caregiver interacting with them regularly who can respond to their babble and burgeoning language positively.
The idea that Amanda shared that poor parents are not interested is also quite insulting. I agree with the article is that there is lack of knowledge here. I think if parents saw playful, positive, and language rich interactions modeled, got some tips for how to read and talk with their babies, and received some free books and toys on a regular basis from a trusted professional who would connect them with free resources in their community (like the library!), we would marked growth and development in these children. Let's fund homes-visiting, parent support programs, libraries, Reach Out and Read, and other literacy and parent support initiatives low-income communities. Research has shown that these interventions are a more cost-effective investment than costly remedial education programs and expensive prisons later on when these children grow up.
amanda
New York April 15, 2013Then how do poor immigrants "figure it out"? How did the professional parents figure it out? It's not lack of behavior models or instruction. Intellectual/academic engagement is just not something about which some poor mothers care.
Since inception, Sesame Street and The Electric Company have greatly helped young children -- middle class children -- to learn to read. Sadly, it has not helped poor children do the same. We keep trying these cute theories to help the poor catch up. But there's little science behind them and they simply don't work.
517 Comments