Talking to our infants - The Key

Jeremy Hiebert has this link that talks about the critically important value of having proper conversations with infants to Joanne Jacobs excellent site

Here is a snip:

Teach the parents wellPoor children don't have a chance to do well in school, because their parents don't talk to them in ways that develop verbal ability, writes William Raspberry. The Washington Post columnist summarizes research from Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley.

• Verbal stimulation (roughly the number of words a young child hears at home) may be the most important predictor of the child's future academic, economic and social success.

• The difference in the amount of verbal stimulation received by children of poor families and those of the middle class is so huge as to be essentially unbridgeable.

. . . For example, the 11- to-18-month-old children of professionals (mostly university professors in the study) heard 642 utterances during a typical hour, with 482 of these addressed to the children themselves. Children of welfare parents heard an average 394 such utterances, with only 197 directly addressed to them.

Similar differences were noted in texture of the language the children heard: more nouns and modifiers among the middle class.

And this: The children of professional parents heard more words of encouragement (and fewer imperatives and prohibitions) than the children of working-class families. The working-class children, in turn, heard more encouragement than the children of welfare families.

Raspberry rightly concludes that providing dawn-to-dusk child care with talkative teachers is not going to happen. The change must come from parents.

Poor parents love their children and want them to be happy and successful. The problem is, they don't always know how to make it happen.

I've concluded that it may be easier to teach the parents some of the necessary "tricks" than to rescue children who've already fallen behind. Indeed, I believe it so strongly, I've decided to invest time and personal resources to see how much meaningful difference can be accomplished in the small community that happens to be my Mississippi home town.

It won't be easy to get parents to change habits they learned from their own parents. But they can do better, if someone tells them how.

Doug Wilms's research at UNB partially supports this. The vocab issue plays out enormously in later life. A 2 year old that can understand 150 words - the low end of the spectrum - is likely to read at grade 5 level by the time they reach grade 10. No amount of remedial work seems to improve this position. A 2 year old that can understand 300 words at 2 - am apparently small difference - reads at a second year university level at grade 10.

There is more to Wilms' view. His data goes beyond the simple socio-economics of Raspberry. Because Wilms can see all of the Canadian data, he has found that the vast bulk of the kids at developmental risk are middle class. Likely the most at risk - the time stretched super family? For Wilms, the issue is less socio economic status but family culture and time. Underpinning all of this is the nature of the relationship with the infant. Highly authoritarian and highly permissive relationships have a lot of risk attached to them.

I have added links to earlier posts of these points if you want to see more.