Brain development is buoyed by continuous interaction with parents

This is encouraging, Trying to Close a Knowledge Gap, Word by Word by Motoko Rich. It has long been known that dynamic and responsive interaction with infants is a critical component of cognitive development, that children arrive to school for the first time with a three year range of cognitive skills, and that language and vocabulary are highly correlated with academic capabilities. Hart and Ridley did the first solid quantification of this issue nearly twenty years ago finding that the aggregate volume of words heard by a child by the time they entered kindergarten was 13 million for children from welfare homes, 30 million for middle class children and 45 million for kids from homes with executives or professionals as parents.

I think we have been too slow in acting on what is empirically known for fear of being seen to blame the victim or disrespect them (as some of the comments to the article indicate). None-the-less, I hope this works.

Amid a political push for government-funded preschool for 4-year-olds, a growing number of experts fear that such programs actually start too late for the children most at risk. That is why Deisy Ixcuna-González, the 16-month-old daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, is wearing a tiny recorder that captures every word she hears and utters inside her family’s cramped apartment one day a week.

Recent research shows that brain development is buoyed by continuous interaction with parents and caregivers from birth, and that even before age 2, the children of the wealthy know more words than do those of the poor. So the recorder acts as a tool for instructing Deisy’s parents on how to turn even a visit to the kitchen into a language lesson. It is part of an ambitious campaign, known as Providence Talks, aimed at the city’s poorest residents to reduce the knowledge gap long before school starts. It is among a number of such efforts being undertaken throughout the country.

This need for dynamic, responsive interaction with infants is hard to achieve in single parent homes and I think is one of the root causes behind some of the issues discussed by Ron Haskins in Marriage, Parenthood, and Public Policy.