From the New York Times, in an article on the “poverty of words” experienced by poor and minority children:
Though conceivably much more as well. Despite the Manhattan parody to which a scene like this so easily gives rise, it is difficult to overstate the advantages arrogated to a child whose parent proceeds in a near constant mode of annotation. Reflexively, the affluent, ambitious parent is always talking, pointing out, explaining: Mommy is looking for her laptop; let’s put on your rain boots; that’s a pigeon, a sand dune, skyscraper, a pomegranate. The child, in essence, exists in continuous receipt of dictation.
My girlfriend and I spent a Saturday morning over the summer hanging out in the town square of Mill Valley, a wealthy town north of San Francisco . We sat on a bench drinking our coffee watching parents play in the same town center with their children. The thing which I marveled at – even more than the stereotype of the people who’d let their dogs intermingle and sniff and get to know each other – was how the parents of these kids did not let one teachable moment escape their grasp. They were prowling, searching for knowledge to impart to their children.
Right in a row I saw several incidents where parents became very excited to show something new to their very small children. A dad was holding in his arms his son who looked to be less than a year old. A plane flew overhead and the dad excitedly spun around and started pointing at the plane saying “Look Dillon, look!” Dillon didn’t look; he didn’t care about the plane. Another dad was awkwardly holding up his daughter as she tried to navigate the pavement – he was straddle-walking while holding up her arms. They quickly paused to inspect a leaf on the ground. He held it up like he’d just discovered a new species and seemed to be giving a seminar on this particular leaf, but, again, the child didn’t care. While this seemed hilarious to me as an outside observer, I know these types of lessons seep into the child, filling them with knowledge and curiosity.
The article goes on to point out that children of wealthy professionals encounter 32 million more words by the time they are four years old compared to children who grow up in poverty. The article was written with the NAACP’s recent confrontation of the New York City public school system’s specialized testing for elite schools. And in this article, a similar point is made to the one both Steve Sailer and I have recently addressed independently:
And yet, all of this focus on the test — which examines reading comprehension, math skills, the ability to reason logically — suggests a myopia of its own. Expanding the ranks of poor black and Hispanic children in the top high schools would seem to require infinitely more backtracking. Consider that Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Brooklyn, one of the major pipelines to top public high schools, last year had a student population that was 0.52 percent black.
“Infinitely more backtracking” sounds kind of ominous. As Sailer recently wrote:
But, you’ll notice, over the years the conventional wisdom has slowly come to admit defeat at fixing The Gap between the races at later ages. So, the emphasis on interventions keeps getting pushed earlier and earlier in life. Currently, all the excitement is focused on pre-K. If only we can fix things up for poor children before they start kindergarten, then we will find out decades later that we have closed The Gap! (And when that proves not to work, then all the attention will be focused upon the first 12 months of life. And then when that fizzles out, the Big Thing will be pre-natal care. And then it will be the first hour after conception. And then the first second after conception.)
The Times article’s citation of the new Fix It program – one that reaches farther back than Head Start – will cost big bucks if scaled across the entire U.S. population (and which is also not helped by the fact that the government is OK with adding immigrants to the bottom of the economic spectrum which would require many more educational services than they are already provided).
All of this would seem to argue for a system in which we spent ever more of our energies and money on early, preschool education rather than less. The city has taken the right direction with the announcement of a new preschool in Brownsville, Brooklyn, scheduled to open next year, that will start with children as young as 6 weeks old. But that’s one program in a city where 7,500 children reached kindergarten this year without preschool preparation. Obviously we want equal opportunity; we also want children to know what words like “equal” and “opportunity” mean.
Scale that across the country and we’ll go broke. Not that we aren’t already.
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If only we could go back in time and get to the parents when they were children, thus imparting knowledge and curiosity unto them, then we might start making some progress. Where’s Marty McFly when you need him.
Didn’t “The Bell Curve’s” study of cross-racial adoptions show that the home environment even at very early years has little impact on the child’s IQ?
This resonates with me from the other end.
My parents were 8th grade graduates, No books or pencils in our home. I attended a three-room rural school.
But, my IQ was 130 and today I’m a 1%er.
Helicopter parents are nauseating.
I have a theory that high-investent fatherhood that I see everyday is a reaction to the low-investment fatherhood style of baby boomer parents. By low-investment, I mean the idea baby boomers — as fathers of GenX’ers and Gen Y’ers — were not much interested in their children, beyond providing for them materially. In contrast, fathers in earlier generations, who tended to work on the farm or in a trade, and school was not a huge part of their children’s lives, spent lots of time with their kids, especially their sons.
Boomer fathers, especially middle class boomers, let schools, tv, organized activities like Little League, and social environment take lead in raising thier boys. These middle class Baby Boomer fathers turned out to be a “missing link” in the tradition of father-son mentorship. The atomized nuclear family model further exacerbated the connection between boys and their older male relatives.
This is why I see young fatehrs today spend a lot of time teaching and playing with their toddlers. They may be making up for their own fathers’ overly laissez-faire style.
PA,
I’m not too certain about fathers spending a lot of time with their children in the past, at least not for all classes. Boarding schools and military academies have been around for a long time. Plus there have been many instances of men traveling for work (leaving their families behind) or working seasonal jobs. IIRC,, reading Sowell’s Ethnic American many men came over to the US alone and either went back to their home country after working for several years or sent for their family when they had enough money.
@PA
My father taught me zilch about social interaction. He was more than happy to teach me about his hobbies, but anything teachable about self-respect was done in trope-like form in front of my mother. Nothing about masculine behavior at all.
At what point does parental responsibility end and governmental responsibility begin? Clearly this demonstrates a sign of no-faith toward the parents of black kids. So yet again, the government is caught in a catch 22 of trying to belligerently support equal opportunity via government intervention. Its like saying, “look, we are equal!” while a white person is standing next to an ACME marionette.
As a father of two, I know how these parents feel. I realized fairly early on in my fatherhood that i can’t force my children into becoming hyper-achievers. Maybe because I read Pinker, I realize that any benefits from pushing and prodding are short-lived. I know that, just because my sons read early, doesn’t mean that they’ll be any further ahead come college admissions. It doesn’t hurt though and I admit that it provokes feelings of pride in me.
But, this idea that every nurturing word gives a tiny bump in the IQ is hard to shake from the current ethos. The last glimmer of hope is epigenetics. This makes it fair-game to go around believing that the full benefits won’t be felt for 3-4 generations once those latent genes are “turned on”. Don’t discount the power of faith in such ideas to maintain the insanity indefinitely.
PA, my father was older than most of my peers. I noticed he was far less involved in that way than my classmates younger fathers. I think the boomers were the thin beginning of the curve as far as father’s involvement. Perhaps the increasing possibility of divorce has encouraged men to get that connection with their children as soon as possible before the mom starts pushing him away.
Blacks and Hispanics don’t “encounter” enough words because they don’t read. That should be obvious.
Blacks would rather stand around and chill/socialize.
I have been trying to talk to my kids more that way. However, I’m not going to go around looking like an idiot, oblivious to everyone else in the world. I’ll do it when I’m alone with them mostly. The thing about fathers isn’t so much that they can turn you into a super person, just that it is a fundamental relationship in your life, and if you don’t have it, it’s a loss. He’s the one man in the world you can count on to look out for you.
Fathers also prevent you from only getting your mother’s viewpoint of the world, which is a very good thing.
Ignoring the biological determinism for a moment, such a task would be nigh impossible.
Changing the nature of Black and Brown families from low investment to high investment is not something that can be done directly top down by someone of a different race and culture. They won’t listen
Not only that we don’t have the resources (as the author mentioned) ability to allocate resources (i.e jobs) or even educational pedagogy for the task.
Not only that we don’t have the resources (as the author mentioned) ability to allocate resources (i.e jobs) or even educational pedagogy for the task.
And of course, there are those who enjoy the sinecures that such endeavors provide.
I wonder if this drive to find the earliest point for intervention will eventually lead progressives to rediscover eugenics?
If I ever have kids, I’m looking forward to doing this. Not because I believe it affects the IQ one whit, but because I’ll finally have a captive audience when discuss birding and botany and building DIY music instruments.
The quote from the times is meant, i suppose, as an example of the utility and facility of a large vocabulary. As in, Look how these big concepts are expressed, with fun fancy words! Arrogate, annotate, pomegranate. Wowser bowser.
Ironic that the style is awkward as hell, and more to the point “arrogate” is used incorrectly. And the meaning is awkward in the passive voice.
The author or editors might claim, i would guess, that it is used provocatively. It means to claim or take without the right to do so. In the passive to have claimed (for) without right. So the statement is that the words and education and indeed the high-investment parenting, was claimed for the children, with no right to do so.
That is a straightforward interpretation of that sentence, and this is not a law school class (writing should be clear). What pretentious hacks.
Though one might say that the word is used correctly and reveals the author’s and editors’ position on the parents’ role in their children’s lives. What parent does not have the right to use big words with his kids?
A mind is a terrible thing to develop http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5Slxr_JwEA
“Dillon” LOL
Well-caught, C.R..
I hear this name all the time amongst the MILFs and their little kids in my neighbourhood..
I despise these nauseating SWPL names.
“Taylor” is another one.
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the white!
Why do people keep expecting anything better/different from blacks and hispanics?
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
There are two ways that government could influence children so hard, so early. It’s either do it for the parents handout style, or teach them and police whether they do it. As for that second way, good luck with that, I have no confidence that low-income families (to use Espenhade’s phrase) are going to change much without accountability measures that liberals and conservatives alike will hate if for different reasons. Espenhade runs the two choices together verbally almost as if he anticipates us noting the dilemma: “But we already know that an expansion of early-childhood education is urgently needed, along with programs, like peer-to-peer mentoring, that help low-income families support their children’s learning.” So what’s the balance here he would recommend? We’ll be told some blue-pill feel good answer like both are needed and let’s not argue about that now when we need to concentrate on Saving The Children. But people will naturally resist government watching and coaching their child raising, so we’re back to expanding government-as-daddy.
Manosphere perspective: Could these ultra-high-investment fathers also be preemptively protecting themselves against losing their children in a potential future divorce by developing as tight a bond as possible in the child’s early years? Even if, as a father, you genuinely think it’s better to be “hands-off”, such a parenting style could easily be vilified by a divorcing wife and her lawyer. Extreme hands-on parenting now could help guarantee that he’ll still be permitted to do any kind of parenting ten years from now.
I agree with the poster above about boomer fathers leaving education to schools. My father would play baseball with me, and take me fishing from time to time, but he left me to play with the other kids on the block mostly, which I was happy to do. He left everything to the schools. There are many many things I wished he had taught me that I had to learn the hard way, or not at all. I can’t say I ever learned anything from him. But now I’ve become the super-involved father pointing out everything to my son. But he definitely has his own interests. If we take him to a farm he couldn’t care less about the animals, even though we try to, but is totally excited by the trucks and tractors. To kyo, no it has nothing to do with protecting myself against losing him in a divorce, and everything to do with knowing the the country is fucked and is going to be brutal for him when he grows up and wanting him to have what it takes to have a decent life in the inevitable dystopian future coming.
Extreme hands-on parenting now could help guarantee that he’ll still be permitted to do any kind of parenting ten years from now
I wouldn’t count on that. A spiteful bitch will manipulate that strong father-child bond against him — knowing he will desperately do anything to hang onto it, and relishing the pain he will endure if he ultimately loses the child.
Head Start was supposed to be that early investment in Pre-K learning for the lower classes, but after decades of study, any benefits from the program vanish by the 3rd grade. So we’ve tried to help these kids and failed, but these kids do need some sort of help. My sister was a teacher and she did a Head Start internship. She said she worked with kids who had never seen a book before and didn’t know how to open one and what it was for. That indicates that there are large segments of children who have never had a story read to them.
With parenting like that, it’s no wonder that we have a wide spectrum of children who are behind and stay behind.
A not insignificant percentage of black children show up to kindergarten not knowing their own name.
To be fair, if someone put Kai’lunchious on your birph certificate, you might not know your name either. Or want to.
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