In 1995 two researchers named Betty Hart and Todd Risley published a book titled Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Drawing on their detailed study of 42 Kansas families, they documented a significant gap in the early-life
In 1995 two researchers named Betty Hart and Todd Risley published a book titled Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Drawing on their detailed study of 42 Kansas families, they documented a significant gap in the early-life language exposure of children between income groups. Aggregating across the first three years, they argued that there was a “30 million word gap” between the language exposure of higher-income children and their lower-income counterparts.
Later research has questioned whether the gap is really 30 million words or if it’s smaller. But it is clear the gap is there, and that exposure in early life is correlated with language development later, reading, and other achievement measures. The idea of the 30 million word gap has become a symbol of overall inequality in early childhood.
Dana Suskind is a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago Medical Center and the director of the University of Chicago Medicine’s Pediatric Hearing Loss and Cochlear Implant Program. In 2015 she wrote a book on the word gap: Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain.
That book, which I love, focused on using the insights from this work on the word gap to help people in their own parenting. It talks through the details of the research on language exposure, the importance of talking to kids, and even how to do it. The reality, though, is that a book like this — however helpful at an individual level — isn’t necessarily going to do much to close inequality gaps.
This is in part because of differential exposure to these messages across groups. But it’s also because these inequalities are so deeply