Language and Children Living in Poverty

All poor children are not alike. They do not share the same culture. They do not share common language practices. They do share economic deprivations but even then poor families tend to move in and out of poverty. Poor children are also at higher risk for academic failure but, as Jonathon Kozol has documented, children living in poverty are rarely offered the same, high quality educational opportunities experienced by their more affluent peers.

Yet school districts serving large numbers of poor children continue to undertake initiatives that implicitly blame the poor for their economic, social, and academic struggles. A recent article in the Boston Globe (“With babies, words for wisdom,” April 2, 2008) described Boston’s “Early Words” program that seeks to increase the amount of talk low-income parents direct to their children. According to the Globe, the rationale for this initiative comes Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s 1995 study that “showed that by age 3, most middle-class children had much larger vocabularies than children from low-income families. Middle-class parents speak, on average, 300 more words per hour to their children, according to the [Hart and Risley] study.” (See my earlier blog on Hart and Risley.)

I’m all for parents talking to their children. What troubles me is the presumption that low-income parents don’t talk to their children. It seems more that a little unreasonable to make general claims about parents and children living in poverty based on Hart and Risley’s study of six poor families from Kansas City, all of whom were Black. It would be very hard to argue that these families have much in common with poor families here in Boston or anywhere else in the country.

I think we should focus less on what poor parents may or may not be saying to their children and consider the frightful toll poverty takes on poor children and their families. Recent research by neuroscientists, for example, indicates that the heightened stress levels associated with living in poverty may impair the brain development of children, limiting their future life chances (“Here and Now,” March 6, 2008). This line of research makes it pretty clear that the problem for poor children is poverty, not parents who are poor.