Pravin Sathe - Long Form

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Visualizing Parent-Child Communication Statistics

About a year and a half ago a fascinating article, "What it Takes to Make a Student", was published in the New York Times Magazine about the achievement gap between students from low income versus high income families. The article, rather than focusing on legislation, turned its attention to research describing the communication style of parents towards their children. What they found was startling,

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child's language development and each parent's communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children's I.Q.'s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.
When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child's home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child's vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" -- anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy -- to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.
What's more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of "discouragements" a child heard -- prohibitions and words of disapproval -- compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another -- all of which stimulated intellectual development. (Tough, 2)

These statistics are not only alarming for parents but should be particularly alarming to teachers as most children invariably spend 8 - 9 hours of their day in schools.

After reading the article I had two questions I would like to answer at some point in the future:

• What were the positive and negative words/phrases used by parents and did any families use the exact same words/phrases?


• Could this be made into an art piece/visualization that could either be useful to parents, teachers, researchers or all three? That is, can it add to the discussion?

Pravin has worked in fields ranging from pure science research to the arts, technology and education. He received his B.A. from New York University in Politics and Economics in 2003 and his M.P.S. from ITP @ NYU in 2008. He is currently exploring ideas that lie just below the surface of the images and objects we see and use everyday.