Do Parents Matter? by Robert A. Levine

Author:Robert A. Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610397247
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

American parents care a great deal about talking and hope to see their children talking as early as possible. In Chapter 3, we saw the contrast between American parents’ practice of talking to their babies—conducting “play dialogues,” “mock conversations,” or “protoconversations” in which they ask questions of the infant and provide the infant’s answers—and the views of East African mothers we’ve worked with, who think talking to babies is silly. The African mothers have noticed that children acquire the abilities to speak and understand speech without direct instruction during the second and third years of life; this finding from folk knowledge is confirmed by linguists who studied language acquisition in remote corners of the world during the second half of the twentieth century. There have been no reports of populations in which a significant proportion of children—or any children at all—grow up unable to speak because their parents neglected to train them in the local language. In other words, the acquisition of the basic grammatical competence to make and understand sentences in a particular language during the early years (especially between eighteen and thirty-six months) is a robust universal development in humans that makes few demands on parents, particularly if the family’s residence offers an environment full of opportunities for watching and participating in speech every day—even when most of it is not directed to the child. Agrarian societies, including those of eastern Africa with their mother-child households, also offer such opportunities: older siblings, cousins, adult women, and, at least occasionally, men talk inside and outside the house daily. The youngest child is surrounded by a flow of verbal interaction in and around the home.

But what about the sharply bounded, often isolated households found in modern urban societies, where a firstborn two-year-old may be alone with his mother most of the day? These might seem from the viewpoint of an agrarian society to put the child at risk of speech deprivation. In fact, however, the toddler has a modern mother who comes culturally equipped with the desire to talk to and with him (as she did when he was a baby) and deluges him with a flow of child-directed speech that guarantees the child will acquire the abilities to speak and comprehend the local language. Yes, it’s true that if an American mother did not speak to her firstborn toddler, hire a babysitter, or put him in day care, the child’s language development could be delayed, but such a woman would be considered so inadequate, and possibly mentally ill, that she might be legally declared an “unfit mother.” We tend to be so confident that mothers want to talk to their children that we perceive no risk in a housing standard that puts mothers into isolation with their toddlers. In fact, from an American point of view, it is the rural African mothers, with their infrequent face-to-face verbal interaction during infancy and after, who put their children at risk of failing, not to acquire the language of their community, but to build the vocabulary that will help them in school.

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