Amount of time parents spend in conversation with children per week?

[Lynn Santelmann]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my query about the amount of time in 
conversation that parents spend with their children.

The most oft cite resource was:
Hart, B. & Risley T. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday 
Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

This is the reference that talks about the striking number of different 
words children hear, and extrapolates the amount of language experience 
children from different SES backgrounds hear.

In addition,
I received 2 other citations:
Bogaerde, E.M. van den (2000). Input and Interaction in Deaf Families, 
2000, Utrecht: LOT (wwwlot.let.uu.nl)
Weijer, J. van de (2002). 
<http://www.ling.lu.se/persons/Joost/Texts/gala01.pdf>How much does an 
infant hear in a day? In: J. Costa and M. João Freitas (eds.). Proceedings 
of the GALA2001 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 279-282). Lisboa: 
Associação Portuguesa de Linguistíca.

Most studies address the issue of "how much input" with a tally of number 
of words, rather than total time. (Though, I suppose one can be converted 
into the other.)

van de Weijer (2002) recorded all input to an infant in the Netherlands for 
several months. This infant received about 20 minutes a day of direct 
interaction with the parents and/or caregivers. However, the infant's older 
sister (age 2) spent approximately 90 minutes PER DAY (60% of the recorded 
data) either addressing (45 min) or being addressed by (45 min) an adult. 
Since the recordings were made for the infant and not the older sibling, 
it's possible that recordings of the older sibling would be different.

This is a 2 year old in an academic family in the Netherlands, so we should 
probably be hesitant to generalize this to U.S. American families, but it 
makes me all the more suspicious of the oft cited "38.5 minutes" PER WEEK 
of "meaningful conversation" with parents. (The author of that figure has 
clearly never driven home with my son!)

Lynn

Thanks to:
Shanley Allen,
Annick De Houwer
Laura DeThorne
Eve V.  Clark
Lois Bloom
John N. Bohannon III
Linda Cote
Beppie van den Bogaerde
Diane Pesco
Gedeon Deák

Apologies to anyone I've forgotten - -I had a massive e-mail failure this 
week and am slowly reconstructing the missing links.


Original Query:
Does anyone have figures or references as to a rough amount of time that 
parents spend in conversation with preschool and school age children?

I have read numerous places (mostly parenting type publications or web 
sites) that "the average American parent spends 38.5 minutes a week with 
their child in meaningful conversation". Having read this EXACT same figure 
over and over again, I became suspicious and began to search for the 
source. If they give a source, it's always "American Family Research 
Council. "Parents Fight 'Time Famine'as Economic Pressures Increase." 1990."

I cannot, however, track down the original article (nor can I seem to find 
the American Family Research Council, though it may be part of a 
conservative political group of some sort).

Does anyone have any reliable references/data on how much parents do 
converse with children (leaving aside the "meaningful" issue, which is, at 
best, difficult to operationalize)?

I remember the work in differences in communication for different 
socioecomonic levels (though I couldn't cite it or find it off hand), and 
somewhere I remember seeing a figure comparing Philadelphia (Jewish?) 
families with Pennsylvania Dutch families, but can't find the reference.

Exact citations or directions to look in would be appreciated.

Thanks

Lynn




***************************************************************************************
Lynn Santelmann, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Applied Linguistics
Portland State University
P.O. Box 751
Portland, OR 97201-0751
phone: 503-725-4140
fax: 503-725-4139
e-mail: santelmannl at pdx.edu (that's last name, first initial)
web: www.web.pdx.edu/~dbls
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