High Price

often lived in neighborhoods that were dominated by entrenched poverty and the knot of problems associated with it.
    Of course, before, there were also those fights and the fear and the running to the neighbors to call the police. Before, the chaos for us was mainly in our home; after, it was everywhere. And no one bothered to explain it all to us. There was no sitting the children down and telling us, “Mommy and Daddy still love you but we can’t live together.” My parents weren’t much on explanations in general. They lived in a world where you learned by example, not by explanation. You were told what to do, not why, and that was it. You figured it out or you looked like a fool. There wasn’t time for childish questions or wondering.
    Consequently, when I learned later about research comparing the spare verbal landscape of American childhood poverty to the richer linguistic precincts of the middle class, it really resonated with me. The classic study by Todd Risley and Betty Hart compared the number of words heard by children of professional, working-class, and welfare families, focusing specifically on the way parents talked to their kids.
    It was painstaking research: the researchers followed babies in forty-two families from age seven months to three years. The families were drawn from three socioeconomic classes: middle-class professionals, working-class people, and people on welfare. The researchers spent at least thirty-six hours with each family, recording their speech and observing parent-children interactions. They counted the number of words spoken to the child and described the content of the conversations.
    The researchers found that families headed by professionals—whether black or white—spent more time encouraging their children, explaining the world to them, and listening to and responding specifically to their questions. For every discouraging word or “No!” there were about five words of praise or encouragement. Verbal interactions were mainly pleasant, enjoyable, or neutral. In the working-class homes, there were also more “attaboys” than prohibitions, though the ratio was smaller. But in the families on welfare, children heard two “noes” or “don’ts” for every positive expression. Their verbal experience overall was much more punitive.
    During my earliest childhood, my family did not receive what was then called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (or welfare as we knew it before President Clinton). But we did do so after the divorce. Moreover, my mother had dropped out of high school in ninth grade. And so her educational background made our home more similar to the welfare group linguistically. MH’s relatives—her mother and sisters Dot, Eva, and Louise, who also helped raise us—shared the same disrupted and scanty education. After the divorce, when she returned to Florida, my mother was overwhelmed, with so many children to support. She worked long hours, and so just having the time to do more than discipline us if we got out of hand was almost impossible. My father also faded out of my life as I grew toward adolescence and beyond.
    Hence, unlike those growing up in more privileged families, we were brushed back more than we were praised. That may have ultimately helped me to thrive in the critical, skeptical world of science—but at first, it probably didn’t do much for my linguistic development.
    Even more stunning was the difference Hart and Risley found in the total number of unique words directed at the poorest children. On average, the professionals’ children heard 2,153 different words each hour spoken to them, while the children of welfare parents heard only 616. Before they’d even spent a second in a classroom, the children of professionals had heard 30 million more words than the children on welfare and had many times more positive verbal interactions with adults. Several other studies confirm these findings in terms of the impact of parental education, style of communication with children, and vocabulary on early language learning and readiness for school. 1 Less conspicuous factors like children’s exposure to a broad or limited vocabulary and to varying amounts of linguistic encouragement and discouragement can do far more than obvious scapegoats like drugs to influence their futures.
    There is little doubt that I was affected early on by my mother’s lack of formal education and the limited vocabulary that was used in my home and by