I stumbled upon this This American Life, talking about the differences between children in families on welfare versus children with professional parents. It references a study done in the 80s about the differences in language heard by a child living in each type of home. It's good stuff. I've transcribed some of it here:
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Scientists have concluded that the most effective time to intervene in the lives of poor kids is between the ages of zero and three, when the only people who can really give that help are the parents.
The more you introduce language to them, the more they grab it. So at the earliest ages, your child has a brain capacity that's way past where we are.
One research project ... was done in the 1980s in Kansas City. A pair of psychologists did a close-up study of two sets of families, one group in which the parents were on welfare, and another in which the parents held professional jobs. It turned out that the biggest difference between the two sets of homes was language. The kids with the professional parents heard 20,000,000 (twenty million) more words in the first three years of their lives than the kids on welfare, mostly just the regular jibber-jabber of parents talking to their children, and those extra words had a huge impact on their verbal ability. It was stunning news, that the biggest factor in determining a child's later success in school wasn't any of the things we always assumed to be true. It wasn't money, it wasn't parental education, it wasn't race; it was the sheer number of words your parents spoke to you as a child.
Among scholars who study inequality, there is more and more evidence out there that the divide between the kids who make it and the kids who don't, starts in the very first years of life. The researcher who has done the best job of pulling all of this together is a man named James Heckman.
Heckman is an economist at the University of Chicago. In the early 90's, he was hired to study some government programs aimed at adolescents from poor neighborhoods. All the traditional solutions to poverty we've been using for the last forty years, things like job training, GED programs, programs for dropouts. And much to his surprise, he found that none of these programs were actually working. Job training was supposed to be the solution to welfare, but Heckman found that for the young adults he was studying, it wasn't doing any good at all. The premise behind job training is that young people who can't find a good job are just missing one particular skill, or body of knowledge; teach them that, and they'll be fine. What Heckman found is that the people in these programs had a much bigger problem. There were some very basic skills and abilities that they had never learned. And it was hard for them to absorb anything new without those skills. Things like ...
(HECKMAN) "...The ability to communicate, to solve simple mathematical puzzles, to understand how to even read the newspaper, as well as the non-cognitive: self-control, motivation, the ability to get out of bed, to show up at work on time, to engage and be open to ideas, these traits were in very serious short supply for individuals that I was looking at, the disadvantaged. And so I came to ask the question, how is it that these skills get formed?"
The bad news was that if kids don't get these very basic skills pretty early in life, ideally before reaching kindergarten, then those skills become harder and harder to acquire.
If you can get to a poor child early on, in the first few years of life, even small interventions can have huge effects.
[On reading, playing, singing songs:] "by giving them that kind of early encouragement, you saw real benefits, a tremendous difference, actually. A tremendous difference in crime rates, in integration in the larger society, in home ownership, earnings, and on and on and on..."
That language study that discovered that well-off kids heard 20 million more words than poor kids before age three, also found that the kind of language poor kids hear is different. The researchers counted the number of encouraging and discouraging remarks that children heard from their parents, and the difference between the two groups was staggering. By age three, a child of professionals hears about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. A child of parents on welfare hears almost the exact opposite: just 80,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements.
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