[quote][b]The Power of Talking to Your Baby[/b] By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth. [...] All parents gave their children directives like “Put away your toy!” or “Don’t eat that!” But interaction was more likely to stop there for parents on welfare, while as a family’s income and educational levels rose, those interactions were more likely to be just the beginning. The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental. [...] And [url=http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/risley.htm]they argued[/url] that the disparities in word usage correlated so closely with academic success that kids born to families on welfare do worse than professional-class children entirely because their parents talk to them less. In other words, if everyone talked to their young children the same amount, there would be no racial or socioeconomic gap at all. (Some other researchers say that while word count is extremely important, it can’t be the only factor.)[/quote] [url=http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/the-power-of-talking-to-your-baby]Tina Rosenberg | The New York Times[/url] tl;dr: Talking to a child between birth and age three is such a hugely important factor in their development it may be the entire source of significant educational disparities between families of different socioeconomic levels. tl;dr:tl;dr: Poor people are stupid because nobody talked to them as babies. Is this surprising to you? Do you know if your parents talked to your or your siblings much as children, and how this may have affected you? And for the handful of you who are parents, have/do you talk to your children much, and do you make a conscious effort to do so? I personally find it really surprising, and I'm a bit sceptical of the claim that it could be the sole cause of socioeconomic educational disparities, but it's still really promising as a way of potentially closing the gap between low and middle to high income households/families. It might be a bit of a strain on working class parents who might often be exhausted or otherwise occupied, though, and the main limiting factor on the effect is the parents' own level of language development, so there's still going to be disparities due to that. What do you think?