Parents: Help Us Help Your Kids

Note: First, I must offer apologies to my few readers. :) The past several months have been quite tough on my soul, mostly due to the emotional roller coaster that is my life. I got engaged, got laid off, tangled with the government and a few banks and learned that red tape isn't only pervasive in politics and business -- it festers in academia, too. (In fact, I think academia is knee deep in the s@#t!)

I'm blogging again because I'm writing regularly again, but I should warn you upfront that I probably won't blog as often as I should. I've got a lot on my plate -- student teaching, wedding planning, writing a thesis and graduating! -- and it's a tough juggling act. Though I'm confident I can do it, I desperately need to write as often as I can because it's become a cathartic act for me. The page (and the screen) have become absolutely essential, particularly as I try to make sense of my observations of students and of the things they teach me. I can take out my frustration on the page and find healing between the lines. This is why I wanted to become a teacher: writing allows me to make sense of the world, to find a place that's my own and plant roots. It's that power that needs to be passed on to children. -Me


Speaking of empowering children...there's something that I've learned over the course of my studies that I want to share with parents, particularly parents of younger children. The world is an uber-competitive place (one of the sixth graders used the word uber last week, so I figured I should try to enhance my vocabulary) and the assumption is that it's the teacher's job to prepare those children and get them up to speed. But so much of what is -- and is not -- happening at home makes its way into the classroom. Consider the following:

A long-term study of families in Kansas City by Betty Hart and Todd Risely published in American Educator* found that the "average child on welfare was having half as much experience per hour [with language] (616 words per hour) as the average working-class child (1,251 words per hour) and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour)." Put into numbers:

a child in a professional family
over a 100-hour week will accumulate experience with 215,000 words
over a 5,200-hour year will accumulate experience with 11.2 million words
in the first four years of life will accumulate experience with 45 million words

a child in a working-class family
over a 100-hour week will accumulate experience with125,000 words
over a 5,200-hour year will accumulate experience with 6.5 million words
in the first four years of life will accumulate experience with 26 million words

a child in a welfare family
over a 100-hour week will accumulate experience with 62,000 words
over a 5,200-hour year will accumulate experience with 3.2 million words
in the first four years of life will accumulate experience with13 million words

Source: The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap By Age 3. American Educator, Spring 2003

If you've heard of the 30 million word gap -- the gap between the number of words known by wealthier children and poorer children -- this is the data on which it is based. Folks like Obama are putting a huge emphasis on early childhood education as a means to minimize the gap.

Here's what we know: parents and families are largely responsible for the socialization of their children prior to the start of the schooling experience. The study found that children's vocabulary often mimics their parents, that the words in a child's vocabulary are largely words in their parents' vocabulary. Hart and Risley wrote that "by the time the children were 3 years old, trends in amount of talk, vocabulary growth, and style of interaction were well established and clearly suggested widening gaps to come. Even patterns of parenting were already observable among children. When we listened to the children, we seemed to hear their parents speaking; when we watched them at play at parenting their dolls, we seemed to see the futures of their own children."

And it's not just about how often you speak to your children but how you speak to them. The study found that children from professional families had more instances of encouraging feedback (affirmatives) and less instances of discouragements (prohibitions) than children of working-class and welfare families. Those numbers skew even more negatively when dealing with welfare families, wherein the average child "might have had 144,000 fewer encouragements and 84,000 more discouragements of his or her behavior than the average child in a working-class family" by the age of four. Imagine the damage it does to a child to equate words and talk with the negative instead of the positive? Teachers wants to develop independent learners, but intervention can be hard when children are not comfortable with taking risks and indulging their own voices/ideas as students. (Particularly if they are concerned about right answers or pleasing the teacher.)

So parents, talk to your kids. Don't be afraid to veer from baby language and use grownup words with them. And step up your own vocabulary. (It will do wonders for your personal and professional development.)
When kids ask questions, don't dismiss them, even if you think the questions are silly: genuinely respond to them. And if you don't know an answer, own up to it. In doing so you create an opportunity for inquiry and exploration that you can share with your child, thereby fostering an enjoyment of exploring curiosities.

Additionally, try to give your kids authentic experience with the many worlds (and words) of our world. E.D. Hirsch argues that there is a cultural and contextual vocabulary with which students must be acquainted in order to succeed. While he's controversial -- so much of his cultural vocabulary seems to focus on the culture of power, e.g. Anglo culture, and forgoes similar contexts and knowledge in other cultures -- there is some truth in what he says. Consider the trouble an urban student might have when the word subpar is used to describe a negative experience if they have no idea what the word par means, the contexts in which it's used, etc.

The exposure of which I speak doesn't require much: sure, it's nice if you can take your kid to the zoo or museum once a month, but that can get expensive. The easiest thing to do is read with your children. Experience can be shared, empathy can be encouraged. And worlds that are normally inaccessible become accessible through the written word.

*Hart, Betty and Todd R. Risley. (2003). The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap By Age 3. Originally appeared in American Educator, 27 (1), 4-9.