The Fascinating First Three Years

Today at work I listened to an episode of This American Life while working. The episode was #364 - Going Big and the first act was called Harlem Renaissance. A very fascinating story, especially given that we have three kids under two years old right now.

From the This American Life site:

Paul Tough reports on the Harlem Children’s Zone, and its CEO and president, Geoffrey Canada. Among the project’s many facets is Baby College, an 8-week program where young parents and parents-to-be learn how to help their children get the education they need to be successful. Tough’s just-published book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem’s Children Zone is called Whatever It Takes.

The biggest takeaways from the study they mention:

• Kids in ‘professional’ families hear 20 million more words than kids living in poverty during their first three years.
• The kids in the professional group hear 500,000 words of encouragement during this time and 80,000 words of discouragement. The poverty group was pretty much the opposite: 80,000 words of encouragement and 200,000 words of discouragement.
• The role of language in the first three years is more important than race, parent’s education, and economic factors in how kids develop and gain skills to be successful in the future. And those skills get increasingly more difficult to obtain as kids get older. So much so that job training classes (usually thought of as the way out of welfare for adults) has very little impact, if they don’t have the skills normally gained during their youth.

Really underscores the importance of reading and talking to your kids. And gives us hope that the cycle of poverty can be broken for many kids in the future. A lot of focus has been on pulling the parents out of poverty, but in reality it’s much simpler: it’s all about language.