Blog 4 (Chapter 9)

I find language development in children to be very fascinating, and more fascinating still is how growing up in poverty affects the language development of young children. According to the textbook on pages 249-250, a child growing up in poverty has been exposed to roughly 13 million fewer words by the age of 4 than those being raised in families that are classified as “professionals”. There are several reasons for this disparity among what lower SES versus higher SES children are exposed to regarding language. When living in poverty, typically those with young children are highly stressed, more so than those of higher SES families, due to most likely living in dangerous areas and having a smaller support group to help them with their children, as well as having a less expansive knowledge of child development than those classified as “professionals”. All of these reason compound to those in higher SES families having more time and making more of a concerted effort to expose their children to correct grammar, sentence structure, and increasingly difficult words.

It is unfortunate and unfair that those born into poverty are given so much less for reasons out of their control. Another factor relating to language development is the fact that typically children in lower SES families are raised by caregivers in daycare, or perhaps untrained babysitters, whereas many higher SES mothers are able to stay home during the day to talk more with their children (and to even talk to their infants as well). I have been told many times that when I was an infant and young child, my mother never stopped talking to me. Therefore, I was using correct sentence structure and highly developed language by the age of 2, and supposedly I haven't stopped chatting since! It is not a matter of those born in lower SES families being developmentally different than those born in higher SES families, it is simply a matter of resources.