The Culture of Poverty - Food for thought

April 8th, 2008 at 12:38pm Kerry Burd

Hello,

 I recently read an article entitled “The Early Catastrophe” by Betty Hart & Tod Risely.  Although the article was written to show the effects of poverty on early childhood (birth - 3 years) language development, toward the end of the article, the authors also examine the psychological effects of poverty on youngsters.  Over two and a half years, the researchers compared the language differences in “professional,” “working class” and “welfare” families.  Besides the predictable differences noted in language development, what startled me was the information reported near the end of the article.

The authors that “the children’s language experience did not differ just in terms of the number and quantity of words heard….”  They go on to report that the average child in a professional family experiences a 6 to 1 ratio of “encouraging” comments to “discouraging” comments per hour.  The average child in a working class family experiences a 2 to 1 ratio of encouraging to discouraging comments per hour.  The average child in a family who lives in poverty hears 11 discouraging comments to 5 encouraging comments per hour - this is a greater than 2 to 1 ratio of discouraging comments to encouraging comments!

Extrapolated over the first 4 years of life, the average child in a professional family would have accumulated 560,000 more instances of encouragement than discouragement.  Compare that to the average child who lives in poverty, who must endure 125,000 more discouraging comments than encouraging comments.  One can begin to understand why, by the time these children who live in poverty enter kindergarten, many of them have deeply ingrained feelings of inadequacy.  It should not come as a surprise to anyone, then, that these children are at increased risk for academic, social, and behavioral difficulties from the first day they set foot in a school.

The effects of our early childhood experiences are far reaching.  Rockford’s problems are not unique.  In fact, you can find problems like the ones Rockford is facing (crime, truancy, unemployment) anywhere, provided there are enough people living in poverty.  Writing tickets for truants and building bigger jails are not going to effect the kind of change that I know our mayor and leaders want - but these problems are so complex, and the solutions even more complicated.  These solutions must begin within the family unit.  But how can we reverse the kind of early damage that this study (http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring2003/catastrophe.html) reveals?

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