The number of words spoken to children early on in life make a world of difference!
Here's a quote from this report on an amazing research project:
But in the end, the finding that most struck people, Hart says, was not about the quality of the speech — how often rich versus poor parents asked questions or positively affirmed their children — but about the quantity.
According to their research, the average child in a welfare home heard about 600 words an hour while a child in a professional home heard 2,100.
"Children in professional families are talked to three times as much as the average child in a welfare family," Hart says.
And that adds up. Hart and Risley estimated that by the age of 4, children of professional parents had heard on average 48 million words addressed to them while children in poor welfare families had heard only 13 million.
Spend a bit more time here and isten to the less than 6 minute report from NPR:
5 comments:
Well the way to solve this problem is to decrease the poverty wage threshold. That way we can eliminate poverty as a cause of stupidity.
Life is full of choices. The poor have an opportunity for education and ultimately an opportunity to leave the cycle of poverty. Those that remain in the poverty level, made choices that preempted upward mobility. These choices most often taken the form of doing what is expedient for the moment rather than pursuing a long term plan for poverty removal. Growing government welfare has provided a mechanism for those in poverty to continue there.
as one with a 14 month old - thankyou for this.
-Casey McCollum
So is inequality responsible for parents not talking to their children?
Dallaswatchdog:
Thanks for updating our understanding of poverty. You might want to get in touch with Jesus and offer a critique of his teaching about the poor.
Happy Birthday, Larry!
Alan Bean
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