Talking to children 0-3

[Copper]

Did anybody else read this article

www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1114792,00.html (sorry, still can't do links - perhaps some kind soul could do it?)

on an American study of the importance of talking to children age 0-3? Apparently this is the time when they absorb language: if they don't get talked to sufficiently in this time, they won't be able to pick it up later.

It's here

Haven't had chance to read it yet - just being a 'kind soul' and obliging

Interesting. I live in a Sure Start area ? ie enough deprivation to secure extra Government funding for parents and pre-school children. I go to Baby Peep (parent education something) class which I was surprised to discover mainly about singing nursery rhymes and reading stories ? things I do anyway but is good to get out of the house. But now realise this is really good for babies who wouldn't otherwise have this experience. Mind you, this is a very mixed area (London) so many of the parents are 'middle class' and initially felt guilty about using resources aimed at needy families ? but SS needs people to use classes to keep funding so actually encourages everyone to come along. Suppose also good for babies and parents to mix with varied group of people from different backgrounds. PS If you are interested, any community group can apply for SS resources.

I received an invitation to go to a Sure Start meeting when ds2 was born 4 months ago. I asked HV if this was for people in so called deprived areas, and she looked very embarassed and said er no, I don't know exactly.
I'm sure parents from low-income areas will jump at the chance to be patronised by these mind- numbing programmes. Why do I need to be taught how to raise my children because I live in a certain area?!

I'd be interested in finding out more about how this study was organised. What, for example, happened when a "welfare" family became a "working" family and vice versa? I personally would have fitted into all 3 categories at some point in my adult life. Does this mean I would have changed my parenting methods accordingly?

Not surprising, somehow. But the saddest statistic for me is:

Roscoe, the piece states that most people don't seem to be able to make the moves any more -

Not sure this is nearly as true in the UK as it appears to be in the US. I also think that "welfare families" in the US are a lot poorer, in all senses, than in the UK.

O.k theres a Sure Start meeting today I will go and see for myself if its patronising.
Very offensive and probably inaccurate study btw.

Thanks, JanH.

errr not sure about this. For starters this whole business about langauge having to develop by a certain age is no onger accepted as being true. Secondly they say that there predictions at 3 helpd out at 9 and 10. Well yes, but I'm sure the poor 3 year olds ended up going to a crap school, and the rich ones a good one. It may say a lot about different educational environments.

A lot fo early language development is actually developmental and not environmental. Of course being spoken to etc makes a difference, and hearing a wwide vocabularly will make a difference, but I don't think we should get too smug (sometimes these studies can be very smug). And if a child doesn't develop great langauge skills early on we shouldn't assume it is environmental I have been on the wrong end of this. Was told - by the manager of "the evil nursery"- when ds1 was 22 months that he wasn't speaking- so either I wasn't talking to him (I said I was) so therefore I must be talking over him. Well he's still not talking at 4 and a half, so I must be doing a lot of talking over him.

There is a lot more than environment in langauge development. In fact some studies and books- such as BabyTalk say that nursery is the worst place for young children to learn language as they never have extended periods of one to one- so the study may be wrong there.

"Probably inaccurate" - you are so right, Cherubs! I was assuming a large study (ie several thousand children in each category?) but just googled and found this:

FORTY-TWO FAMILIES? Out of 250 million people? That'll teach me to trust Polly Toynbee's opinion.

"For starters this whole business about langauge having to develop by a certain age is no onger accepted as being true."

I agree with everything you've written, jimjams but not sure about this one. I thought studies done on feral children (i.e. children who have had no human sound input at all) if they haven't been found by a certain age means they can never speak - they've missed the learning "window". (Did anyone see that programme on that kid in Russia that lived with the stray dogs on the estate? - horrific). It's one of the reasons why health professionals push so hard to find out about hearing difficulties at the earliest age possible so the kids don't miss out.

I agree with you 100% though that verbal ability is not directly equivalent with parental communication skills.

I knew you'd all come up trumps - looks like a good discussion brewing here.

Many thanks, kmg, for creating the link - I think I've missed the window for learning how to be computer literate. Well done, janh (at the risk of sounding patronising!)

I really dread these language surveys. People (especially family) used to hand them to me as 'proof' that ds1 wasn't talking simply because I didn't talk to him enough. One relative even told me I was a terrible mother and obviously neglecting ds1 (but that's a whole new thread ). As Jimjams says, there are so many other factors to be taken into consideration.

Georgina - Jimjams is right in that there is no evidence that children who don't pick up language by 3 years won't pick it up. There are studies which suggest that children of age 8 or 9 who haven't aquired language will never do so properly but as you say, those studies come from feral children and it is impossible to separate the lack of language input those children have received from other deprivations/abuse they have been subjected to.

And as Jimjams says, the difficulty in separating one variable from another is also a problem with this study.

I think those are exceptional circumstances though georgina- you do need some input! What I mean was that it used to be though that language had to be learned by age X otherwise you were stuffed. That's now known not to be true. For example my friend met someone who hadn't learned to speak until he was 14 (not a typo- 14). Obviously he had been exposed to language before hand. There are also beooks out there where children started to speak at late ages (gerogi stehl??? something like that was pretty ancient- sure she was around 12 or something).

Did rad something recently about this and the brain and langauge is far more plastic than previously thought. No idea where I read it but that's the sort of tihng I remember (and hang on to tbh).

coppertop-= poke in the eye to that relative from me. Hope you snub them at every available opportunity. Honeslty why do people have to be so mean.

Hmm, interesting to know that the study only looked at 42 familes, thanks for that Janh. Didn't we all think that class and language were linked though? Shaw certainly thought so when he wrote Pygmalion. And she says:

"So if we really want to change class destiny, it can be done. But it takes good teachers in high-quality children's centres where children of all classes mix, not bundling all the deprived together. The Treasury sees a limited roll-out of children's centres in poor areas as a getting-mothers-off-benefit-and-back-to-work policy. But if they took the long (and expensive) view, this must be Labour's key remedy for social class division."

But children of all classes mixing isn't going to happen (in the UK anyway) while housing in the catchment areas of many decent state schools is out of reach to all but the well off is it? (oh gawd, straying into a state vs private debate!) Very sad figures about the amount of encouragement some children receive.

God, 42 families? Typical how limited research gets talked up into some kind of univeral truth... PS Sure Start isn't patronising at all! Just offers loads of great stuff for parents and kids which many people couldn't otherwise afford ? in my area, baby massage, creche, yoga for parents, first aid classes, etc. etc. Someone has to apply for funding though.

Agree : how can a such a study on such a concentrated small group become national statistic???? It always make me laugh when reading statistics and then finding out that they were compiled in such a elementary & contracted way. In my industry this was done all the time and I had to learn to ignore the information. Very hard sometimes as parenting is so emotive how can u stay unaffected and then worried that you dont communicate with your baby/infant enough or in the right way???????

It was done with the hope of improving the lower-achieving children's lives, though - and the whole thing started in the 60s - review .

Of course there are "welfare" families who are fantastic parents and "professional" families who are rubbish at it but it's not about stereotyping people, it's about trying to improve children's lives and prospects - "Send one to your congressional representatives" it says at the end! It's just a pity it appears so flawed statistically (any statisticians out there to say it's really OK?)

The data about critical time periods for language is complicated. The accepted opinion among linguists is that children who are not exposed to language in reasonable amounts by puberty will be permanently damaged. Sadly, it is possible to sort this out from the other abuse feral children suffer due to the wide range of horrible abuse different children have suffered. Happily, pretty much every mildly sane human being talks to their children enough to avoid this problem -- you really have to have extreme and prolonged deprivation to hit the critical period. Merely being horribly abusive to your kids for, say, 10
years, won't do it...

However, there are two other important effects being mixed in here. First, very small babies are busy learning what sounds go in the language they're supposed to speak. 0-3 is a critical period for sounding right (and seeing right), which is why you want to watch carefully for treatable hearing and vision problems. A baby who hears no language until age 3 may speak fluently, but will probably always sound funny.

Second, "normal" speech achieved at whatever age isn't what most people want for their kids. Because of the way that the school systems work in Western countries, a child who learns to speak just fine at the age of 10 is probably at a permanent lifetime disadvantage. The whole deal with the importance of using lots of language with little children is not that they can't pick it up later, but that society will deprive them of the chance to pick it up later.

Finally, there's a big difference between being exposed to language and learning to speak. Some kids speak late for other reasons, ranging from diagnosable neurological disorders (some of them vague, rare, and probably of relatively little importance to day-to-day life) through just being stubborn. Whether or not those kids can be helped by more and different language exposure is going to be different for each and every child, and again, some of the issue is going to be more social than biological. A child that speaks late may be heavily penalized by the school system; then you have to decide which bends more easily and effectively, society or the child. Different children, different social situations, different best answers...

This is an interesting discussion. I have always understood that the brain is primed for language in the preschool years, and that ability reduces later, which doesn't mean that it isn't possible to correct later, or that the brain can't learn to compensate etc, but, that we need to take advantage of the early years as much as we can.

I have taught loads of kids with English as a second language, and we were taught on courses, that usually (and of course there are exceptions) kids under 7 coming into school with no English will end up speaking like native speakers, and older kids, especially those over 10 are less likely to achieve accent free English. (The point being that the older the child the more urgent the need to get them started on English) This would seem to suggest that the ear is better tuned to language at a younger age.