Talk to Them

I am currently reading a book by two MIT professors, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, about poverty.  The book is Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.  It is a good read, and it seeks to cut through some of the major ideological divides.  The poles are often referred to as those of Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs, who argues that more foreign aid can eliminate poverty traps around the globe, and New York University's William Easterly, who argues that aid hurts more than helps because it prevents necessary self-agency, undermines and corrupts local institutions, and hinders the proper functioning of market forces (see pp. 3-4).  All of these authors, Banerjee and Duflo included, have a different, sometimes competing way of assessing and fighting global poverty.

Enter a different sort of prescription for tackling poverty, which so often disproportionately disadvantages children:  talking.

"The Power of Talking to Your Baby" is the title of a short post entry by Tina Rosenberg in yesterday's New York Times Opinionator section.  The entire post is worth reading.  But I'll reproduce the main points of the research she reports.  In prior posts (here, here, here, and here), I have touched on poverty and economic class differences. The research that Ms. Rosenberg discusses is noteworthy because it, like some of my prior posts, highlights the correlation of aspects of family life to poverty.

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.)

This raises a number of questions, and much could be said even before those questions are answered.  I am suspicious, for instance, that early-age word usage by parents accounts entirely for later academic success disparities among students. I think it may be one reason, and may be an important one.

More generally, the notion that talking to one's children in their earliest years might have long-term effects would seem to be as intuitive and obvious as it is apparently lacking in many homes.  Getting some families to talk more to their children, however, will not be as simple as informing them that it is important to do so.  This is not a quick fix.  Background challenges involving the social structure of these welfare children's home, particularly the single-parent nature of so many of them, will also be necessary.

I have not read the full paper by Professors Hart and Risley, but it would be interesting to know whether they also examine the correlation of decreased word use to children in single-parent homes.  Does word use go up or down depending on the household's marital structure, in other words?  If it goes down in single-parent homes relative to two-parent homes, then this study would be additional evidence that family structure, as well as what takes place within it, has a predictive effect on the presence and prevalence of poverty in the United States.

This study from the 1990s is stimulating, but it is only one window into a complex problem.