Imagine that – “The importance of talking to very young children [and looking] beyond the classroom and examin[ing] what [goes] on inside the home…. Researchers found that the wealthier parents consistently talked more with their kids…. ‘With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were growing and the higher the children’s I.Q. test scores at age 3 and later.’… The way you converse with your child is one of the most intimate aspects of parenting, shaped both by your personality and by cultural habits so deep that they can feel automatic…. In the recordings of the professional families, they found a ‘greater richness of nouns, modifiers, and past-tense verbs,’ and more conversations on subjects that children had initiated…. Among the more affluent families studied by Hart and Risley, a higher proportion of the talk directed at children was affirming, which was defined to include not just compliments like ‘Good job!’ but also responses in which parents repeat and build on a child’s comments…. A mother holding a child on her lap but talking on the phone, for instance—contributed less to language development…. Children under the age of two appear to learn language only from other humans [not television and other electronic devices]…. Although improvements in test scores associated with preschool programs fade as students proceed through elementary school, broader benefits can be seen many years later. A few oft-cited studies have shown that low-income kids who attended high-quality preschool programs were more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to become pregnant as teenagers or to be incarcerated; they also earned more money, on average, than peers who were not in such programs….” newyorker/magazine/2015/01/12/talking-cure?mbid=social_facebook
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 22:57:30 +0000
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