Quality chats help language skills

Research shows quality of parent-child communication is more important than the number of words a kid hears.

It has been nearly 20 years since a landmark education study found that by age 3, children from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than more affluent children, putting them at an educational disadvantage before they even began school.The findings led to increased calls for publicly funded prekindergarten programs and dozens of campaigns urging parents to get chatty with their children.
Now, a growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough. The quality of the communication between children and their parents, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.

A study found that among twoyear-olds from low-income families, quality interactions involving words -the use of shared symbols (“Look, a dog!“); rituals (“Want a bottle after your bath?“); and con versational fluency (“Yes, that is a bus!“) -were a far better predictor of language skills at age 3 than any other factor, including the quantity of words a child heard.

“It's not just about shoving words in,“ said Kathryn HirshPasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and lead author of the study . “It's about having these fluid conversations around shared rituals and objects, like pretending to have morning coffee together or using the banana as a phone. That is the stuff from which language is made.“

The idea that quality of communication matters when it comes to teaching children language is hardly new. But this year's studies are the first time researchers have compared the impact of word quantity with quality of communication. The findings, said Patricia K Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and an author of the April study , suggest that advocates and educators should reconsider rally ing cries like “close the word gap,“ that may oversimplify the challenges facing poor children.

“I worry about these messages acting as though what parents ought to focus on is a word count, as though they need a Fitbit for words,“ she said. The use of the word “gap“ may be counterproductive, said Hirsh-Pasek. “When we talk about gaps, our natural tendency is to talk about filling them,“ she said. “So we talk about the amount as if we're putting words inside the empty head of a child.“

For the new study , Hirsh-Pasek and colleagues selected 60 low-income 3-year-olds with varying degrees of language proficiency, a long-term, wide-ranging study of 1,300 children from birth to age 15.Other researchers reviewed video of those children at age two in play sessions with their parents. The researchers watching the video were unaware of how the children would later develop.

“We were able to ask whether those interactions held any clues accounting for the differences we saw at age three,“ said HirshPasek, who was an author of the long-term study . “It turned out we were able to account for a whole lot of the variability later on.“

Quality of communication accounted for 27% of the variation in expressive language skills one year later, she said. The results were not significantly changed when the researchers controlled for the parents' educational level.

But those who urge parents to talk to their children more say that increased quantity of language inevitably leads to better quality .

“It's not that one mother is saying `dog' and the other is saying `dog, dog, dog,' “ said Ann Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford. “When you learn to talk more, you tend to speak in more diverse ways and elaborate more.

Ann O'Leary , director of Too Small to Fail, a joint effort of the nonprofit Next Generation and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation that focuses on closing the gap, acknowledged that messages to parents could do more to emphasize quality . “When we're doing these campaigns to close the word gap, they capture the imagination, they get people understanding that we need talk a lot more,“ she said. “But we also need to be more mindful that part of what we need to do is model what that talking looks like.“

Why we marry wrong

Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest ­ and costliest ­ mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary , and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are. The Philosophers' Mail makes this provocative ­ or utterly sensible, depending on your point of view ­ statement in a discus sion on `Why we Marry Wrong.' The reasons are under pithy sub-heads like `We don't understand ourselves', `We don't understand other people', `Being single is so awful', `Instinct has too much prestige', and `We want to freeze happiness,' but are elaborated on, along with evidence of bad decision-making in marriage ­ images of couples like Prince Charles and Diana, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, and Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.

“The time has come for a third kind of marriage,“ says the Mail. “The marriage of psychology. One where one doesn't marry for land, or for `the feeling' alone, but only when `the feeling' has been properly submitted to examination and brought under the aegis of a mature awareness of one's own and the other's psychology .“

Source: thephilosophersmail.com

Singapore's sexist sex-ed

A Singaporean teenager's rant about a sexist, regressive sex education class she was made to attend has gone global. Agatha Tan posted an open letter to her principal earlier this week, after attending a sex-ed workshop sponsored by the Christian non-profit Focus on the Family (FoTF). The booklet handed out by the group refers to girls as "gals" and contains generalisations about them like "Gals need to be loved", "can be emotional", "want security", "[want] you to listen to her problems", "[want] to look attractive".

The sex-ed facilitators also spoke on topics like "what girls mean when they say yes or no", reinforcing harmful stereotypes about women not knowing their own minds, while saying that "guys" are "direct" and "always mean what they say".

Tan also accused FoTF of shutting down a question on alternate sexualities, when a student asked why the organisation's material did not include language targeted at LGBT couples. FoTF is rather red in the face right now.