<div dir="ltr"><h1 class="">The Middle Class (Thinks It) Knows Best: Daring to Intervene in Disadvantaged Households</h1><div style="height:61px;width:570px" id="float_tracker" class=""><menu style="display:block" id="social_badges" class="">
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<p><em>Written by Susan D. Blum, Lizzie Fagan, Kathleen C. Riley</em></p><p>In a recent New Yorker article, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/talking-cure" target="_hplink">Margaret Talbot</a>
discusses Providence Talks, a project designed to address the so-called
"language gap" that, according to 30-year-old research claims, is
directly related to an "achievement gap" at school. Generalizing from
data about language use in only six African American families on
"welfare," <a href="http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/TheEarlyCatastrophe.pdf" target="_hplink">researchers estimated</a> that by the time disadvantaged children enter school, they will have heard <a href="http://tmw.org/" target="_hplink">30 million fewer words</a>
than the children of professionals. This research reveals several
methodological problems: too few children and families were studied, the
link between the number of words and school achievement is only
suggestive and many other aspects of children's lives that might account
for school failure were left unexamined. </p><p>But, here we want to
focus on problems with the interventions being promoted to assist these
families: first, the proposed cures are not necessarily welcomed by
disadvantaged households; and second, the cures, even if implemented,
may have unfortunate side-effects.</p><p>First, when outsiders come in
and tell low-income young parents how to talk to their children, the
advice is never about only language. Because the way we talk is deeply
enmeshed with how we think, feel and act in the world, our critiques of
how others speak are frequently a smoke-screen for our critiques about
other aspects of their lives. For instance, when Lizzie Fagen was a
23-year-old social worker in New York City, she went to the house of a
Seventh-Day Adventist family. Confident in her own training and
expertise, Lizzie suggested that the mother's strict religious rules,
such as forbidding her son to read comic books, were interfering with
his education. After all, aren't we often told to invite children to
read anything they find interesting? The mother responded, in effect:
"How dare you?!" </p><p>But many young and insecure parents would not
have the same ability to resist a social worker's authority; instead,
they would attempt to implement the suggested changes, and yet the
results could be deleterious. The parents might simply fail at it (and
feel it as a failure) because talking in new ways (especially to one's
children) usually depends on one's ability to take on new ways of
thinking and behaving, so closely are talk, action, and belief
intertwined. Further, to the degree that they do succeed in
superficially executing these new ways of talking, these families may
lose much of what was valuable about the way they would have raised
their children. This unfortunate effect is what we wish to address in
the rest of this post.</p><p><a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/sociolinguistics/language-socialization-across-cultures" target="_hplink">Anthropologists</a> have shown that most children around the world<a href="http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0111.xml" target="_hplink"> grow up capable and competent of saying the basics</a>
in most of the settings they will encounter in their immediate
communities. Moreover, they are raised to become the kind of people
valorized by their communities, and the socialization strategies
employed by their caregivers are designed to accomplish this end. In
some societies, children are placed on someone's back and experience the
world as if from an older person's point of view, while others are
placed on cradleboards to be kept safe and out of the way. In some
societies, children are not seen as potential conversational partners
until they are able to utter certain telltale words while elsewhere they
are engaged in "say-it" routines even before they can speak.</p><p>White
middle-class North American professionals tend to engage in the latter
behavior, believing that in this way they are showing children not only
what can be discussed, but also how it should be discussed. If the
children don't get it out of their mouths as expected, the adults
scaffold their attempts and applaud their every effort. <br>
<br>
In upper-middle-class families, every moment is a teaching moment.
Talbot described the model mother in a training film used by the
Providence Talks program, shopping with her child at a high-end grocery
store.</p><blockquote><p>"Bubba, we're running out of room. What are we
going to do? Did Mommy buy too many groceries today? I think we should
get the creamy, too, because Murphy does not like when I get that
crunchy. And we like to have the peanut butter because peanut butter's
good for you. It's got protein."</p></blockquote><p>In this idealized world of privilege, children are not left alone for an instant. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/education/edlife/is-your-first-grader-college-ready.html?_r=0" target="_hplink">Every moment is scheduled and every moment is devoted</a>
to college prep, test prep. No action is done simply for itself because
it is useful or enjoyable; every action is subject to evaluation and
display.</p><p>Socialized in this way, children learn to do things because it pleases a parent or teacher; they learn to crave praise. In <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-d-blum/" target="_hplink">Susan Blum's</a>
research with high-achieving college students, she found students often
go through the motions of doing things simply because it is expected,
all the while withholding their own selves, leading to what Marxists
call "alienation" and Sartre "bad faith." Madeline Levine, a
psychologist in Marin County, has shown that children who believe their
parents' love is dependent on their continued demonstration of success,
are <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201310/the-problem-rich-kids" target="_hplink">disproportionately depressed</a>. </p><p>Are we sure that we have the knowledge to push this behavior on others?</p><p>Although
now regarded as universally normal by our professional class, there is
actually no scientific foundation for claiming that the North American
standard for raising children is necessary (or even sufficient) for
turning out responsible adults. And yet, professionals now try to teach
everyone to act in this way. For instance, the Providence Talks program
attempts to train parents to engage their children in talk about objects
in a book and for every question answered or for every word uttered
that's even within the ballpark, the parent must announce: "Good job!
Way to go!" Interventions such as these can be counterproductive,
especially if one is not brought up to behave in this way with children.</p><p>We would like to suggest that some of the household interactions among less-advantaged people promote <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.2013.54.issue-4/issuetoc" target="_hplink">self-sufficiency</a> and <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/jcpp.12057/asset/jcpp12057.pdf?v=1&t=i52ix9ni&s=be286aa9474b3c85fe27e1e588c4d228929a4c17" target="_hplink">resiliency</a>
in ways that are lacking in upper-middle-class homes where children
sometimes develop into coddled caricatures of themselves... "<a href="http://www.excellentsheep.com/" target="_hplink">excellent sheep</a>"
(an inspired term suggested by a student of William Deresiewicz). By
contrast, children who do not seek adult acknowledgment for every
accomplishment are less likely to have a fragile sense of self, which
Alice Miller, in <a href="http://www.alice-miller.com/books_en.php?page=7" target="_hplink">The Drama of the Gifted Child</a>, spells out so clearly. Alfie Kohn, in<a href="http://www.alfiekohn.org/" target="_hplink"> Punished by Rewards</a>, and Daniel Pink, in <a href="http://www.danpink.com/books/drive/" target="_hplink">Drive</a>, show how the need for positive reinforcement for every action reduces people's motivation for any task.</p><p>In
a diverse society such as the United States, plans to alter the
parenting style of every citizen in order to level all distinctions and
provide each child with all of the communicative tools needed to succeed
at school and everywhere else are ill-founded and ill-advised. It is an
unrealizable dream that any socialization style would be sufficient to
raise children capable of handling every situation they will ever
encounter. For example, the children of professionals would have no idea
how to respond when caught in El Barrio without the language of respect
and defense that children growing up in that neighborhood have at their
fingertips. Of even more concern to their parents (presumably), these
same coddled children, when grown into adults, will have no idea how to
persevere at a job if they are not fed constant affirmations for their
work. </p><p>What all of us need to learn is how to learn. How to face
unfamiliar situations and figure out what to do next, sometimes on our
own, sometimes with others. In such settings, we need to know how to
figure out how to communicate in new ways, not simply rely on the ways
we've already been taught and received an A in. </p><p>Are we really so
confident that the talk-infused child-bolstering style of middle-class
exemplars represents the ideal way to teach these ways of learning to
communicate? Are we so sure we should replace all other forms of child
rearing with something so alien and with such potentially adverse
results?</p><p>How dare we?!</p>
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<b class="">
Follow American Anthropological Association on Twitter:
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.twitter.com/AmericanAnthro">www.twitter.com/AmericanAnthro</a> </b></p><p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/american-anthropological-association/the-middle-class-thinks-i_b_6653932.html">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/american-anthropological-association/the-middle-class-thinks-i_b_6653932.html</a><br></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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