Child development experts working to close the so called “achievement gap” between well off and underprivileged children have put decades of research together to discover that language and vocabulary skills are heavily influenced by how much babies are talked too in their first years of life. According to their research, a big part of the problem underprivileged kids face in catching up to their privileged peers academically starts with the fact that their parents don’t talk to them as much, or use as many words with them, when they are very young.
Betsy Hart was a graduate student when she started her research in the 1960’s. She and a professor at the University of Kansas decided to work with extremely poor children in a local day care center with the goal of helping them speak as well, and with as broad a vocabulary, as the children of professors at the university. They tried everything they could think of but it didn’t work. It turned out they were too late – developing vocabulary had to start earlier. To determine exactly how early they set out on an epic research study, observing and recording the interactions of families on both sides of the poverty line, all of whom were extremely invested in helping their children grow and thrive.
“We really wanted to know everything that was happening to the kids,” Hart told NPR. “Who talked to the child, how long, how often, how many different words were said and how many total words were said. How many past-tense verbs and in what circumstances. You know, what people actually do all day long.”
What they found after ten years of research was compiled and analysed was shocking.
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. The disparity was overwhelming. How were underprivileged kids ever supposed to catch up coming from that big a language use deficit at home?
For Hart, it was demoralizing. ”Horrified might be a better word,” she told NPR. “Horrified when you see that the differences are so great, and you think of trying to make up those differences. I mean, the image that you have is of running after a train. You just look at it and say, you know, ‘it’s hopeless.’”
But it’s not hopeless. A new program, developed by Alan Mendelsohn, a pediatrician at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, seems to be having success in teaching underprivileged families to help develop their children’s language skills. He published a paper on his work this month in the journal the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
Mendelsohn emphasizes that helping parents learn to interact with and stimulate babies in their early years isn’t nearly enough to make up for all of the other social challenges these kids are facing, but it’s a start.
