Unfortunately, explained Ann O’Leary, Director of the Children & Families Program at Next Generation in a phone call, “there’s a lack of alignment among low-income parents regarding how much talking, singing, and reading to children really matters over a lifetime,” and research backs that up. One study found that low-income parents underestimate their power to influence their children’s cognitive development, sometimes by as much as 50 percent. Wealthy parents spend more time engaged in these activities because they have better access to information, and O’Leary argued that when parents understand the impact they have on their child’s cognitive development, they invest.
In other words, the word gap is not about access to income, but access to information. According to Too Small to Fail, a partnership between the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and Next Generation, insufficient vocabulary is analogous to insufficient food.
When a child is deprived of food, there is public outrage. And this is because child hunger is correctly identified as a moral and economic issue that moves people to action. We believe that the poverty of vocabulary should be discussed with the same passion as child hunger.
Earlier this year, President Barack Obama challenged Americans to bridge the word gap, and Too Small to Fail has responded by partnering with The Urban Institute in an unprecedented showing of federal, state, and local support that includes the Department of Education, The Department of Health and Human Services, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the American Academy of Pediatrics, The Centers for Disease Control, the University of Chicago School of Medicine’s Thirty Million Words Initiative, The City of Providence, Georgia’s Talk with Me Baby, Scholastic Education, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and many, many others.