Newsflash: Talking To Babies Makes Them Brainy

Parental talk is back in the media. This 'Lexicon Valley' podcast from Slate talks about a 1995 study by researchers at the University of Kansas that studied the home environments of 42 families, ranging from professional, upper-income families to families living on welfare. The findings of the study, carried out over ten years, demonstrated that the upper-income children developed a much wider vocabulary than the lower-income children and that this gap in cognitive skills was set before the age of three.

The researchers noted four key differences between the upper- and lower-income family environments:

1. The upper-class families used better vocabulary with more complex words and usage of those words than the lower-income families

2. Praise and positive reinforcement was common among upper-class parents

3. Upper-class parents were more likely to ask their children questions and give them choices to facilitate decision-making rather than simply ordering them to do something e.g. 'It's cold outside. Do you think you need your jacket?' rather than 'Put your jacket on'.

4. Professional / upper-class families were much more likely to respond to and continue a conversational thread initiated by the child, rather than only speaking to the child on their own terms.

Upper-class parenting talk 'suggested a culture concerned with names, relationships and recall, with symbols and analytic problem-solving' whereas lower-class parenting talk was full of imperatives, prohibitions and parent-initiated talk, 'suggesting a culture concerned with established customs, with obedience, politeness and conformity', according to the study's authors.

So much for that. When I looked into the details of the study (I can't actually read it as it's $70.00 to buy online...), it struck me that the sample size is pretty small and the data does not tell us anything earth-shattering. I'm not sure why the Lexicon Valley guys are surprised that the study didn't get wide coverage at the time. It's a pretty small study from a small university, hardly a nationwide cohort study with vast policy implications.

Of course it makes sense that talking to your baby will improve his / her mind and most of us try to make the effort to do that as much as possible. If you have a lot of children, however, and limited resources  due to your 'lower socio-economic status' aka being broke then you will simply have less energy to do this. Upper-class children will always have an advantage over lower-income children as their parents have far more resources and support. Vocabulary is only a small slice of that story.

Piecemeal projects, like this Providence, RI scheme that I have previously been skeptical of on this blog, will not make a huge difference. The real way to try to improve preschool children's cognitive skills outside of the home is to offer subsidized or government-run childcare that is affordable for lower-income households. Instead of paying lip-service to the stay-at-home mom as a social ideal, politicians should start to offer struggling parents, many of whom are low-income single mothers, the kind of support they and their children need: good-quality childcare. Why not make preschool something that all children can access, not just the children of the rich who probably need it the least?