[HN Gopher] Word gap: When money's tight, parents talk less to kids
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Word gap: When money's tight, parents talk less to kids
Author : ClarendonDrive
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-07-18 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.berkeley.edu)
| awaythro wrote:
| My dad is from a rural area. He doesn't know how to talk
| intimately or how to reveal emotions. This puzzeled me a lot and
| made communication between us difficult.
|
| I found out later that most men in his village are like that. A
| lot of feelings are being swallowed in silence and not talked
| about. A real "word gap". I wonder if it has to do with poverty
| (it's a poor village) like the article says.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| It's a male thing, nothing to do with poverty.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I heard by his referred to jokingly as the Real Man Starter
| Kit, aka the set of values that everyone thinks are
| requisite.
| hollerith wrote:
| A cynical explanation is that they talk less because on some
| level they know that talking tends to reveal needs that require
| money to meet.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I think if you are worried about money (or stressed in
| general), you will find it more difficult to engage in the
| sorts of conversations that are good to have with children.
| conductr wrote:
| Or because they're working multiple jobs/overtime and do all
| the chores themselves. Wealthier people have stay at home
| parents and pay other people to do the housekeeping.
| pryce wrote:
| I'm eating crackers until my paycheck arrives tomorrow or the
| next day, and I can say for certain that its a big part of why
| I talk less right at the moment. The plural of (my) anecdote is
| not data, of course.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Is that cynical? It seems like a reasonable guess. It was my
| first thought before even heading to the article or comments
| hollerith wrote:
| Good point. Even if I sincerely care only about my children,
| if most of their prospective needs require money to meet, the
| most effective response to a lack of money is to devote more
| time to getting money and less time to listening.
| blfr wrote:
| _In the first experiment, researchers sought to observe how
| parents would interact with their children (in this case, 3-year-
| olds) after the parents were asked to describe times in which
| they had recently experienced scarcity. A control group of
| parents were instead asked to describe other recent activities._
|
| How many studies like this need to not replicate before we stop
| treating them seriously?
| mc32 wrote:
| There was a report by a psychologist who said Native American
| mascots have a negative effect on children of native Americans.
|
| This may or may not be the case or may be true in some specific
| circumstances (Redskins, for example) but may not be true for
| all, however, many high schools are changing their team names
| based on this one study/conclusion which was funded by a tribe.
| Which is fine, but usually when there is a conflict of interest
| one wants to have additional independent studies that come to a
| similar conclusion.
| pryce wrote:
| If you're referring to Fryberg, Markus, Oyserman & Stone
| 2008, do you think that schools deciding to change their team
| names/mascots might have something to do with far larger and
| more broad cultural trends over the last couple of decades
| rather than these schools decisions resting primarily on the
| robustness and applicability (or otherwise) of this one
| paper?
| reader_mode wrote:
| It fits my world view so it must be true.
|
| Jokin aside I've seen way better studies of this kind where the
| parents would wear a mic at home and they would then do a word
| count, word analysis, etc.
| wyager wrote:
| A somewhat suspicious aspect of these claims is that not all of
| the studies actually attempt to isolate poverty as a causal
| factor of tersity, rather than tersity and poverty sharing a
| causal factor (which a priori seems much more likely to me). One
| of the studies does use time-of-month vs tersity, to attempt to
| control for such shared factors, but time-of-month seems like a
| questionably accurate (if clever) proxy variable here.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I believe it was also coupled with survey data about how many
| times the parents experienced financial stress.
|
| If being more terse at the end-of-the-month can be reliably
| reproduced, what other causitive factor would you propose? And
| why would it apply to some families but not others? What hints
| do you have that lead you to the conclusion that poverty and
| terseness probably share a common cause?
| hanoz wrote:
| The photo looks like me on Hacker News, reading about some
| pseudoscience, whilst I should be playing with my daughter.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| But consider also:
|
| > It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual
| White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in
| languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In
| addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the
| richness of non-standardized varieties of English that
| characterize the homes of many children of color. This language
| gap increases the longer these children are in school. The
| question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to
| address it?
|
| > The major cause of this language gap is the failure of
| monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the
| multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued
| existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted
| efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial
| mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated
| enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with
| anybody who does not speak Standardized American English
| providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the
| multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society.
|
| > This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the
| cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is
| because linguistically isolated households lack the rich
| translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households
| and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal
| households. This leaves monolingual White children without a
| strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result,
| many of these monolingual White children lack the school-
| readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and
| graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized
| American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in
| intercultural communication.
|
| https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/what-if...
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Interesting article, but don't expect a fruitful discussion
| when you bring race into it.
| jsbdk wrote:
| "speak vernacular, or else"
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| Is this grounded in a peer reviewed paper?
|
| Bilingualism - while awesome, does not track well with skill
| development (maths / science) in other areas even in immersion
| type programs where there is no further language barrier.
|
| Non-standardized varieties of ANY language also are negatively
| correlated with positive outcomes. So folks speaking pidgen or
| strong dialects of spanish etc also struggle.
|
| Families - even immigrant families, who go big on the
| monolingual thing (some parents will not speak to children in
| other than dominate language) have very positive outcomes - so
| mono-linqual is not just a white thing.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09116...
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| nvm
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Did you bother reading the title which is: "What if we talked
| about monolingual White children the way we talk about low-
| income children of color?"
| [deleted]
| nemo44x wrote:
| Thank you for clearing that up.
|
| However, I'm not sure how this idea is helpful. We can
| pretend everything is made up and it's only power
| structures that impose reality on people but it's not
| helpful. In the end you have to consider society is and
| will be and you can either participate in it in reality or
| you can cynically scoff at how it's all make believe
| anyways and live miserably.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Kids know. They always know and they understand.
|
| My family went through a bankruptcy when I was a kid. We lost the
| family business. My parents never told me about it, but I knew.
| The discussions, the fear of coming home to nothing. It's all
| real.
|
| Tell your kids, explain to them. Use the difficult time to build
| a closer bond with them instead of leaving them in the dark.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| I actually came here to say that funnily enough, my parents did
| the opposite. Santa even had a damn budget...
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