The Manhattan Institute's spring edition of City Journal is, as always, chock-full of great reads. This month, Kay Hymowitz wonders, "What's Holding Black Kids Back?" Hymowitz covers Bill Cosby's infamous arguments before singling out one in particular:
...why have we been able to make so little headway in improving the life chances of poor black children? One reason towers over all others, and it’s the one Cosby was alluding to, however crudely, in his town-hall meetings: poor black parents rear their children very differently from the way middle-class parents do, and even by the time the kids are four years old, the results are extremely hard to change. Academics and poverty mavens know this to be the case, though they try to soften the harshness of its implications...But these explanations shy away from the one reason that renders others moot: poor parents raise their kids differently, because they see being parents differently. They are not simply middle-class parents manqué; they have their own culture of child rearing, and—not to mince words—that culture is a recipe for more poverty. Without addressing that fact head-on, not much will ever change...
...poor parents differ in ways that are less predictably the consequences of poverty or the lack of high school diplomas. Researchers find that low-income parents are more likely to spank or hit their children. They talk less to their kids and are more likely to give commands or prohibitions when they do talk: “Put that fork down!” rather than the more soccer-mommish, “Why don’t you give me that fork so that you don’t get hurt?” In general, middle-class parents speak in ways designed to elicit responses from their children, pointing out objects they should notice and asking lots of questions...
There's also a study cited in which researchers discovered that infants and toddlers of educated parents heard nearly three times as many words per hour, on average, as kids from welfare homes, along with an in-depth discussion of the need for parents to be "Missionaries." Read it all (along with Joanne's take on the subject).
Posted by kswygert at April 18, 2005 09:19 AM