UAA Psychology professor Todd Risley has done his part to change the world, and he's hoping America will take the ball and run with it. His new book, Meaningful Differences in the Experience of Young American Children, co-authored with Dr. Betty Hart, plays a vital role in a growing redefinition of the child language studies field.Based on research the team conducted in Kansas, the book tells the story of how the researchers documented the lives of 42 "average" families over 2.5 years' time. The results are profound, and likely to change the nature of parenting forever. Though the book has only been out a few months, it has already achieved national recognition in professional circles, and is mentioned in Hillary Clinton's new book, It Takes a Village.
The findings are "much simpler, and much larger, than what we were looking for," says Risley, who says he is still stunned by the enormity of what his group found, "Nobody was expecting this."
What the group found was that the amount of words spoken to children, and the amount of interaction they receive in their first three years, is the largest predictor of how capable they'll be to function in a technologically advanced, problem-solving society like our own. They matched vocabulary development and Stanford-Binet IQ scores with everyday life in the home, and created a data set unrivaled in the field. "An NIH reviewer called the data a national treasure ," says Risley.
The data consists of 30,000 pages of coded language and experience, a huge database including every second of observed interaction, every word spoken and to whom, and the types of words and sentence structures that were used. It includes two and a half years' worth of observations - one-hour, once-a-month, with 42 families spanning a cross section of socioeconomic status (SES). The group employed the most advanced reliability checks and balances, including a split-half reliability test of the data set and inter-observer reliability assessments.
Researchers grouped the families by SES into three groups - welfare families, middle-class and professional, and the findings were extreme (see sidebar, bottom). "We're beginning to see the cross-generational transmission of inarticulateness," says Risley, "half of the middle class is not preparing children for verbal or symbolic skills."
While these correlations were tied to income, recent research indicates that changing children's exposure to language can be accomplished with interventions that produce surprising results. But, says Risley, there's no quick fix. It would take 40 hours per week of intensive language exposure to bring the average welfare child to the level of professional children.
- "We're beginning to see the cross-generational transmission of inarticulateness," says Risley, "half of the middle class is not preparing children for verbal or symbolic skills."
Citing a new intervention study conducted by Dr. Craig Remy, Risley emphasizes the importance of intensive intervention at a very young age. In the study, researchers spent 40 hours per week coaching parents and interacting with children. There were four groups - the control, early and late intervention, late intervention (2-3 years), and early intervention (0-2 years). The late intervention group saw almost no improvement in IQ scores, while the early intervention group showed "massive improvement," according to Risley. "By the time you're old enough to make you're own sandwich, it's all over," he says.
Risley's group was surprised by their results. During the observations, all of the families appeared normal. Only when the group began crunching the numbers did the enormity of the results strike them. Instead of thoroughly analyzing the data, the group published their first book immediately to get the information out to the public. Risley and Hart plan to release two more books based on the data: the next about what the children themselves said, and the one after that an explication of child language theory based on the data.
"Nobody was expecting this," says Risley, "These people aren't drug addicts and they're not geniuses. They're normal, good families - not the super-affluent, nor child abusers nor the homeless. The range of normal families is so massive, and the amount of difference related to accomplishments - it still stuns me. God knows where traumatized kids are. We really have to worry [about them.]"
Though Risley wants to see change, he's not working on the political front this time. A fourth-generation Alaskan and former Director of Mental Health under the Cowper administration, Risley says, "I'm not politicking - I'm being an Alaskan. This is not a political issue. Families raise children, but they need to be responsible - we need to help them be responsible. Both the government and the private sector should have a clear understanding of what we need."
A what we need, he says, is to talk to our kids. "There's not any trick, which is bad news and good news. It's easy - just talk a lot to your kids. It's much simpler, and much larger, than what we were looking for," he says. There will no doubt be resistance to perceived attempts at intrusion into the family, but Risley believes that people will respond favorably to the research.
- "By the time you're old enough to make you're own sandwich, it's all over."
"Fetal alcohol syndrome is a good model," he says, "We got everyone to think about it - cocktail servers, the alcohol industry, pregnant mothers. All responsible people understood the research and the culture supported it. The amount of time we allocate to our children is a similar issue."
"We live in a symbolic, analytic, problem-solving culture, and there are rising requirements for upward mobility," says Risley, convinced that we are leaving a large portion of our population in the dust. "It all goes back to vocabulary - having a complex brain and language with strong symbolic depth - how we deal with meanings. There's no quick fix and no shortcuts," he says, "We've got to allocate adult time to kids. We have to dance with them, not just keep them safe."
Though the statistics for welfare families were abysmal, Risley points out the importance of examining the middle class, who were distributed across the spectrum without regard to income level. "Look at the people in the middle - it's easy to forget them," he says, "but they range across the spectrum. It's popular to focus on poverty or race - and the remarkable advantage our (professional) children have over other middle-class children. But it's not rich or poor. It all comes down to the experience the child has."
Astonishing Differences
- In a typical hour, professional parents spent nearly twice as much time interacting with their children as welfare parents.
- Children heard 2,100 words per hour in the average professional family, 1,200 per hour in the average working class family, and 600 per hour in the average welfare family.
- By age 4, the average child in a welfare family may have 13 million fewer words of cumulative language experience than the average child in a working class family.
- Professional parents gave children affirmative feedback more than 30 times per hour - twice as often as working-class parents, and five times as often as welfare parents.
- Children in welfare families heard a prohibition twice as often as they heard affirmative feedback.
Where do the differences lie? Aside from the sheer amount of words, perhaps the most important predictor of achievement, the researchers examined five qualitative differences in language. Even when extremes in advantage and disadvantage were removed (including race), these qualitative differences predicted equally well the vocabulary growth, vocabulary use and IQ scores of working class children:
- Language Diversity: The number of different words a child hears
- Feedback: The amount of affirmative feedback a child receives
- Guidance Style: Parents' use of prompt and questions rather than commands
- Language Emphasis: Proportion of parent talk with nouns, modifiers and past tenses, the language features that focus on naming, qualifying and remembering experience.
- Responsiveness: The amount of parent talk that is in response to a child's social behavior.