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Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children By Betty HartTodd R. Risley ( Paul H Brookes Pub Co )
Release Date: 1995-07-03
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List Price: $34.95
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Product Description
This study of ordinary families and how they talk to their very young children is no ordinary study at all. Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain well behind their more economically advantaged peers years later in school. Their painstaking study began by recording each month - for 2-1/2 years - one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. Rare is a database of this quality. "Remarkable," says Assistant Secretary of Education Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, of the findings: By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families. Between professional and welfare parents, there was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour. Extrapolating this verbal interaction to a year, a child in a professional family would hear 11 million words while a child in a welfare family would hear just 3 million. The implications for society are staggering: Hart and Risley's follow-up studies at age 9 show that the large differences in the amount of children's language experience were tightly linked to large differences in child outcomes. And yet the implications are encouraging, too. As the authors conclude their preface to the 2002 printing of Meaningful Differences, "the most important aspect to evaluate in child care settings for very young children is the amount of talk actually going on, moment by moment, between children and their caregivers." By giving children positive interactions and experiences with adults who take the time to teach vocabulary, oral language concepts, and emergent literacy concepts, children should have a better chance to succeed at school
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 Superb Insight Into The Differences In Language In SES Homes ( jamal5000 )
Here's some not-so-new news: Poor and rich families talk to their kids differently which may result in why the later group does better academically than the former.
Hart and Risley's book thoroughly investigates what is said in poverty, low SES, professional, and elite families over 10 years (both data compilation and analysis). Most interestingly is the nature of the TYPES of utterances said. The prevalence of directive (i.e. giving orders or chastizement over misbehaviors) dialogue increases as the SES of a family decreases. On the other hand, the prevalence of conversational (i.e. exploration, discussing about things, and problem solving dialogue) talk increases as the SES increases and decreases as SES decreases.
As an early childhood professional, I think it speaks volumes to experts in emergent literacy and parent education. Parents MUST talk to their children as intelligent adults would talk to them--not as babies or in a condescending way--if they are to promote optimal language, literacy, and communication proficiency for later life.
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 Easy to understand research
I bought this book by mistake, as it was removed from the required textbook list for a class I registered for. In spite of not being needed for the class, I still read it. I enjoyed the level of detail and the identification of control measures for minimizing observer bias. The research and conclusions are very helpful to anyone who works in the early childhood development arena.
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 too academic
This is an academic study, presented in a scholarly manner. While it is very good, it will only hold the interest of those who want to read scholarly jargon.
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Of critical importance to parents, policy makerers, and edu
Hart and Risley have created an easy to read volume that speaks readily to parents, policy makers and educators. This book is a must for anyone who truly wants to understand the relationship between the way we interact with children and the evolution of their intellectual development. If you are interested in poverty prevention, early literacy intervention or the impact of family based literacy on childrens' academic success, you will be inspired by the work of Hart Risley.
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Serious implications for early child intervention efforts
This book is one of the by-products of one of the most dedicated efforts to understand variances in the development of language. One of the reviewers of the book states that the work "...is a detective story of the most serious academic kind." Yet the book is written in a manner that would allow it to be required reading for "Parenting 102" if not "Parenting 101". The implications for parenting and public policy are profound
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Addiction
