Hispanic Immigrants' Children Fall Behind Peers Early, Study Finds

[Francis Hult]

[Moderator's note: This article seems to call for an op-ed piece from the educational linguistics community...any thoughts about this study?]
 
October 21, 2009
Hispanic Immigrants' Children Fall Behind Peers Early, Study Finds

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON - The children of Hispanic immigrants tend to be born healthy
and start life on an intellectual par with other American children,
but by the age of 2 they begin to lag in linguistic and cognitive
skills, a new study by researchers at the University of California,
Berkeley, shows.The study highlights a paradox that has bedeviled
educators and Hispanic families for some time. By and large, mothers
from Latin American countries take care of their health during their
pregnancies and give birth to robust children, but those children fall
behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach grade
school, and the gap tends to widen as they get older. The new Berkeley
study suggests the shortfall may start even before the children enter
preschool, supporting calls in Washington to spend more on programs
that coach parents to stimulate their children with books, drills and
games earlier in their lives.

"Our results show a very significant gap even at age 3," said Bruce
Fuller, one of the study's authors and a professor of education at
Berkeley. "If we don't attack this disparity early on, these kids are
headed quickly for a pretty dismal future in elementary school."
Professor Fuller said blacks and poor whites also lagged behind the
curve, suggesting that poverty remained a factor in predicting how
well a young mind develops. But the drop-off in the cognitive scores
of Hispanic toddlers, especially those from Mexican backgrounds, was
steeper than for other groups and could not be explained by economic
status alone, he said. One possible explanation is that a high
percentage of Mexican and Latin American immigrant mothers have less
formal schooling than the average American mother, white or black, the
study's authors said. These mothers also tend to have more children
than middle-class American families, which means the toddlers get less
one-on-one attention from their parents.

Full story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21latina.html?em=&pagewanted=print <https://pearl1604.utsa.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21latina.html?em=%26pagewanted=print> 

_______________________________________________
Edling mailing list
Edling at lists.sis.utsa.edu
https://lists.sis.utsa.edu/mailman/listinfo/edling
List Manager: Francis M. Hult