I want to reverse my usual direction of travel in this little essay. Benign Neglect has been about persuading mainstream parents that they could "lighten up" without doing irreparable harm to their offspring. These arguments have been buttressed by evidence from other cultures where laissez faire is more the norm and kids turn out fine. But there is one area of parenting where typical Blog readers are engaged in "best practices" while the families typically studied by anthropologists are coming up short.
Stanford anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath conducted a landmark study, published in the early 1980s, that highlighted the cultural basis of children's acquisition of literacy. In a poor southern African-American community, "Tracton," use of books (other than the Bible) and printed material were limited, and parents did not engage in elaborate conversations with their young children, nor did they see it as their responsibility to act as the child's first teacher (1). She recorded sentiments that echo those recorded by anthropologists studying schooling throughout the world (2).
Heath also studied "Maintown," a community that was economically comfortable and where parents had considerable formal
education. In contrast to Tracton, Maintown children's lives were saturated with literacy:
...as early as 6 months of age, children give attention to books and information derived from books. Their rooms contain bookcases and are decorated with murals, bedspreads, mobiles, and stuffed animals that represent characters found in books...When children begin to verbalize about the contents of books, adults extend their question from simple requests for labels...to ask about the attributes of these items ("What does the doggie say?" "What color is the ball?")... Adults jump at openings their children give them for pursuing talk about books and reading. (3)
Subsequent work by Catherine Snow and colleagues provided many additional cases of literary and non-literary home environments. Scenes representing the latter condition included homes without any books, magazines or newspapers, parents who claimed never to read and who had no awareness of or involvement in the children's homework. Ms. Pagliucca "...knew Derek went to the bookmobile...but she never asked to see his books or talked to him about what he was reading." Not surprisingly, the dominant family pastime was TV-viewing. (4)
But mainstream parents don't stop at immersing kids in printed material and literary allusions. Another rich area of parental intervention is the "dinner-table" conversation. For very young children, these conversations promote the child's curiosity, its self-image as a learner of things and, its role as pupil vís-a-vís the parent-as-teacher. Creativity and cleverness are rewarded as well (5). "Mealtime [is] a richly supportive context for the use of rare words in informative contexts." (6) Cross-national variation also appears as dinner table "lessons" are somewhat different in middle-class French (7), Japanese-American (5) and, Italian households. (8)
Then we have parental intervention in children's make-believe play. Well-educated mothers encourage fantasy even before the child begins to pretend on its own. They do this by providing character toys and dolls and the props to go with them. Parents may model pretending for the child, by holding up and making a stuffed animal or doll talk. With toddlers and pre-schoolers they provide play scripts and embellish their children's early fantasy constructions. (9)
As Martini notes, "Children learn to 'talk like a book' before they learn to read." (10) And it isn't just talk, children who enjoy a lengthy period of "emergent literacy" really are much more likely to learn to read before starting formal reading instruction and more likely to enjoy reading. (11) When quantitative comparisons are made, children exposed to greater amounts of narrative and explanatory talk were advantaged on a number "of language and literacy measures." (12)
Unfortunately, the number of children who experience a rich pre-reading experience remains quite small. In much of the world, parents are ambivalent about their children's schooling. As the photos illustrate, they may have other, more pressing priorities for them including helping to care for their siblings, earning a living, or taking care of the herd. (13)
In Poomkara village, South India:
...children could be everywhere in the house but could claim none of the spaces as theirs. Children had no rooms of their own in the tiny huts. Schoolbooks were often simply stuck under the palm roof and children's clothes hung on a rope. Children did their homework sitting on the same mat on which they slept at night. Even this mat was often shared with others. (14)
Wood Carver, Toradjaland, Sulawesi
Even when village parents embrace schooling for their children, they don't command the suite of behaviors (reading stories, engaging in make-believe, dinner-table conversations) that introduce children to the literary practices associated with education and professional employment. (15, 16) More importantly, indigenous notions of how children learn are incompatible with teaching by parents. Parents-especially Native American and immigrant- would far rather encourage children to learn through emulation than to try and "manipulate" them. (17, 18, 19)
Absent a rich emergent literacy experience, children don't seem to "catch-up" once they're in Elementary School. At least that's one conclusion we might draw from national surveys indicating that only about 50% of students who elect to enroll in college are actually able to read sufficiently well to succeed in college. (20) Even more alarming are the results from a very thorough survey which found a significant, recent decline in reading by younger Americans. (21) While at one time we aspired to become a "Nation of Readers," replicating and extending the emergent literacy practices of well-educated parents-as recommended by the experts (22)-appears to be an insurmountable challenge.
1. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways With Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. McNaughton, S. (1996). Ways of parenting and cultural identity. Culture and Psychology, 2: 173-201.
3. Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11:49-76.
4. Snow, C. E., et al (1991). Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5. Martini, M. (1996). ‘What's new?' at the dinner table: Family dynamics during mealtimes in two cultural groups in Hawaii. Early Development and Parenting, 5: 23-34.
6. Snow, C. E. and Beals, D. E. (2006). Mealtime talk that supports literacy development. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 111: 51-66.
7. Sjögren-De Beauchaine, A. (1998). The Bourgeoisie in the Dining Room: Meal Ritual and Cultural Process in Parisian Families of Today. Stockholm: Institutet for Folkslivsforskining.
8. Sterponi, L. and Santagata, R. (2000). Mistakes in the classroom and at the dinner table: A comparison between socialization practices in Italy and the United States. Crossroads of Language, Interaction and Culture 3: 57-72.
9. Haight, W. L. and Miller, P. J. (1993). Pretending at Home: Early Developmental in a Sociocultural Context. Albany,NY: State University of New York Press.
10. Martini, M. (1995). Features of home environments associated with children's school success. Early Child Development and Care, 111:49-68.
11. Lancy, D. F. (1994). The conditions that support emergent literacy, in D.F. Lancy (Ed.), Children's Emergent Literacy: From Research to Practice. (pp. 1-19) Westport, CT: Praeger.
12. Beals, D. E. (2001). Eating and reading: Links between family conversations with preschoolers and later language and literacy, In D. K. Dickinson and P. O Tabors (Eds.) Beginning Literacy with Language. (pp. 75-92) Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brooks.
13. Goody, E. N. (2006) Dynamics of the emergence of sociocultural institutional practices. In D. R. Olson and M. Cole (Eds.) Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society. Edited by Pp. 241-264. Nahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
14. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2003). Growing up between places of work and non-places of childhood: The uneasy relationship. In K. F. Olwig and E. Gullov (Eds.) Children's Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. (pp. 99-118) London: Routledge.
