Twenty Years after “Meaningful Differences,” It's Time to Reframe the “Deficit” Debate about the Importance of Children's Early Language Experience

Fifty years of research have documented a sobering reality: There are substantial differences among parents in how they engage and communicate with their children, and these differences impact the development of a child's language and cognitive skills.Studies initiated during the War on Poverty first explored how parents' verbal engagement with young children varied among families differing in education and income, or socioeconomic status (SES) e.g. Bee, Van Egeren, Pytkowicz Streissguth, Nyman, Hess Schachter, 1979. In their 1995 monograph Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, Betty Hart and Todd Risley were the first to document huge disparities in the sheer amount of language that caregivers in different families directed to young children. Although they found substantial variability in child-directed speech within as well as between SES groups, the differences between children in advantaged and disadvantaged families were surprisingly large. They also found that those children who did not have the benefits of rich verbal engagement early in life were more likely to be behind in cognitive and language skills in kindergarten and elementary school.Hart and Risley's 1995 discovery of a 30-million-word gap in language to children from higher- and lower-SES backgrounds over the first three years of life is now widely cited in the popular press as well as in academic journals. But for more than a decade, this powerful study was essentially ignored. In the 1960s, claims that some learning difficulties in children from disadvantaged families could be linked to inadequate cognitive stimulation at home came to be known as the “cultural deficit” model Riessman, 1962. A fierce backlash emerged in the 1970s, rejecting this view as unsubstantiated by scientific evidence and as deeply disrespectful of minority parents in poverty whose use of language with children was grounded in cultural traditions of parenting different from those in more affluent mainstream families Fernald Huttenlocher, Waterfall, Vasilyeva, Vevea, Pan, Rowe, Singer, Rowe, 2012; Song, Spier, Huttenlocher et al., 2010; Weisleder, Otero, Marchman, Weisleder et al., 2015.This new research on the critical role of early language experience in infancy resonates with stunning developments in the fields of pediatrics, psychobiology, and epigenetics showing how poverty-related disparities in other aspects of early experience can have cascading effects with enduring developmental consequences. The debilitating conditions of poverty are particularly damaging for infants and young children, whose bodies and brains are still actively under construction. Many studies using biological measures have revealed how the developing physiology and neural circuitry of the young child are vulnerable to effects of undernutrition, stress, and instability in the first years of life, which can inhibit the development of physical and mental capacities throughout adulthood Shonkoff et al., 2012. As with physical undernutrition, lack of “mental nutrition” can also compromise the developing brain, with lasting consequences for children's ability to build the skills they will need to flourish in school and later life.Critics of the simplistic deficit reasoning of the 1960s raised legitimate concerns about not “blaming parents” for their children's lack of readiness for school and the importance of respecting differences among cultures in ways of interacting with children. But while it is important to recognize that many conditions associated with poverty shape children's experiences and development, to ignore the role of parents is to dismiss a vital influence in children's lives. Since the science is now clear that engagement in rich verbal interactions with adults is critical for children's success in school, sharing this information with parents - who all want to help their children succeed - is not a form of blame but a form of empowerment.The more our society understands how critical it is to nourish a young child's mind starting at birth, the more we all stand to benefit. We applaud initiatives that open the door to conversations about how to encourage quality in parent-child interactions, how to build more supportive communities, and how our society can play a stronger role in supporting child development.