Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children

by
Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley
The University of Kansas

Contents

1. Intergenerational Transmission of Competence
2. Sampling Children's Developmental Experience
3. 42 American Families
4. Everyday Parenting
5. Quality Features of Language and Interaction
6. The Early Experience of 42 Typical American Children
7. Accomplishments of the 42 Children at Age 3 and Later
8. The Importance of the First 3 Years of Family Experience
9. Intervention to Equalize Early Experience
10. References
11. Appendix A: Quality Features
12. Appendix B: Figures
13. Index

About the Authors

Betty Hart, Ph.D. and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D. began their careers in the early 1960s at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Washington, where they participated in the original demonstrations of the power of learning principles in influencing young children. Both are Senior Scientists at the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at The University of Kansas.

Intergenerational Transmission of Competence

America in the 1960s found a cause worth committing to: the War on Poverty. The aim was to interrupt the cycle of poverty—the economic disadvantages arising from employment disadvantages, which had their sources in the educational disadvantages that resulted from growing up in poverty. An attack was mounted on two fronts: breaking down barriers to the advantages mainstream society enjoyed, and providing a boost up through job training and early education. Desegregation laws removed barriers to jobs, housing, and educational institutions. Job training programs and early education programs provided a boost up into the job market and the school system.

Because poverty was differentially prevalent among minorities, racial discrimination had to be targeted. But race, rather than the cycle of poverty, was a central issue only in designing strategies to preserve cultural identity within mainstream society. Early education programs such as Head Start were funded to serve African American children in inner-city ghettos, Native American children isolated on reservations, and white children in rural Appalachia. All across the country, experts in early childhood education designed intervention programs to give children isolated in poverty the social and cognitive experiences that underlay the academic success of advantaged children.

Events continue to remind us that the War on Poverty did not succeed. After barriers were removed and a boost up was provided, the people who had the knowledge and skills that could influence and motivate the next generation of children moved away and left those less competent isolated in communities riddled with drugs, crime, unemployment, and despair. The War on Poverty was more successful in destroying the past than in creating the future, the competencies for participating in an increasingly technological society.

Early Intervention Programs

Competence as a social problem is still with us. American society still sees many of its children enter school ill-prepared to benefit from education. Too many children drop out of school and follow their parents into unemployment or onto welfare, where they raise their children in a culture of poverty. We recognize now that by the time children are 4 years old, intervention programs come too late and can provide too little experience to make up for the past.

Early intervention during the War on Poverty did not solve the problem of giving children the competencies they need to succeed in school. Children disadvantaged from living in isolated areas were brought into preschool programs similar to those advantaged children attended. The programs offered the enriched materials and activities available in such preschools, but replaced the traditional emphasis on social development with an emphasis on compensatory education, especially language and cognitive development.

Innovative curricula were designed and field tested to teach in the preschool the competencies advantaged children acquired at home. Programs differed in emphasis and teaching methods, depending on theoretical orientation.

Comparing Language Use

The Laboratory Preschool at The University of Kansas provided us a setting and program very similar to that at the Turner House Preschool. We learned from the computer processing of the data that in similar activity settings the children in the two preschools talked about much the same things in much the same ways. Though the specific words were sometimes different, the functions of language were the same. The difference was in how much talking went on.

Recorded Vocabulary Size

All words spoken

The widening gap found between the vocabulary growth curves of the professors' children and the Turner House Preschool children.

The vocabulary growth rates were strongly associated with the differences in the children's scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The children enrolled in the Turner House Preschool were learning more slowly than the professors' children; the gap in rates of vocabulary growth was related to the immense gulf in the amount and richness of daily experience separating the advantaged children of professors and the children from families in poverty.

An End and a Beginning

We found we could easily increase the children's vocabularies by teaching them new words. However, we could not accelerate the rate of vocabulary growth so that it would continue beyond direct teaching; we could not change the developmental trajectory. Removing barriers and offering opportunities and incentives is not enough to overcome the past, the transmission across generations of a culture of poverty.