Word gap: When money’s tight, parents talk less to kids

A cynical explanation is that they talk less because on some level they know that talking tends to reveal needs that require money to meet.

A somewhat suspicious aspect of these claims is that not all of the studies actually attempt to isolate poverty as a causal factor of tersity, rather than tersity and poverty sharing a causal factor (which a priori seems much more likely to me). One of the studies does use time-of-month vs tersity, to attempt to control for such shared factors, but time-of-month seems like a questionably accurate (if clever) proxy variable here.

But consider also:

> It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?

> The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society.

> This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.

https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/what-if...

Good point. Even if I sincerely care only about my children, if most of their prospective needs require money to meet, the most effective response to a lack of money is to devote more time to getting money and less time to listening.

nvm