Increasing low-income children's access to books has paid off: Research by Georgetown University's Rebecca Ryan, PhD, finds that children from today's low-income families are far more likely to own a copy of "Goodnight Moon" and visit the library with a parent than they were two decades ago. They are also more likely to visit a museum, spend a day at the zoo or see a play—experiences proven to enrich children's cognitive development.
But Ryan's findings also suggest that those gains may not be giving these children as much of a boost in school readiness as educators and psychologists have hoped for. By sifting through nearly 25 years of U.S. parenting data, Ryan and colleaguesopens in new window found that high-income parents are still more likely than middle- and low-income parents to read to their children and expose them to cultural activities.
Parents at all income levels have increased the amount of time they invest in such activities, but "more affluent parents increased these activities much more rapidly," says Ryan, who has studied class differences in parenting for more than 10 years.
Ryan spoke to the Monitor about the challenges this "parenting gap" presents and how studying socioeconomic differences can guide better interventions to support parents.
What is worrisome about wealthier parents pulling ahead this way?
It will become harder for low-income parents to help their children get ahead if higher-income parents are doing more and more. We already know that low-income children enter kindergarten with fewer school readiness skills than their more affluent counterparts, and we know that that difference doesn't close as they progress through school. In most cases, it widens.
That gap predicts differences in all kinds of things we care about, like high school graduation rates, college attendance and graduation, and future earnings. We know from looking at other psychologists' research that the gap in children's test scores between rich and poor kids has also grown a lot [by 40 percent] in the last 34 years, at least through 2001. So, it's a concern that the gaps that have already existed for a long time could be increasing.
What are some ways to help low-income children catch up?
There needs to be support for all families so that they have the time, resources and knowledge of child development to be able to do the kinds of things that would best prepare their kids for school. That means the next generation of interventions needs to focus more on parenting behavior and less on materials. We have gotten the message out that your children need books, and there's a lot of logistical support for getting books into homes and getting parents into libraries. But the next step is supporting some parents' motivation, ability and maybe even skill at doing the reading.
A good example is what my University of Chicago colleagues Ariel Kalil and Susan Mayer have been doing with Head Start parents in Chicago in a program called PACT, where they use behavioral economic insights to encourage parents to read to their preschool-aged kids. They give parents a tablet with books preloaded and then they send text messages to the parents with suggestions of what to do for the week in terms of reading and reminders. There are social rewards built in for doing well. It has been hugely effective, and now they are trying to do the same thing to encourage parents to help their children more frequently with math. I can imagine creating similar supports for encouraging parents to engage in cultural activities.
The 25-year data revealed another trend that is important for optimal child development—that parents at all income levels are spanking children far less—which you published in Pediatricsopens in new window last year. Why is that finding important?
We found that all parents are reporting on average that they use spanking and other forms of corporal punishment far less than they used to, and many more parents are saying they are using noncorporal strategies, such as timeout and just reasoning with children. That was exciting overall, but what is so interesting to us is that these reductions in spanking have gone down a lot for both wealthier parents and poorer ones.
Increasingly, you hear parents saying, "If I hit my child, it teaches him or her to hit." That's social learning theory, which is not new, but it is now becoming part of how people think about raising kids in a way that it was not in the '60s and '70s.
We went from a nation that in vast majority spanked children when they misbehaved to a nation that rarely uses corporal punishment. When you consider the possible effects of corporal punishment on children's development, this could be a really meaningful difference.
You have a 5-year-old son. Did studying parenting present new challenges once you became one?
This question of change in parenting over time has become more immediate and real to me, in part because I often think about what I am doing and how my parents raised me.
My mother will watch me play with my son and marvel that she has no memory of ever playing with me. She'll say, "Are you sure it's good for him, shouldn't he be learning to entertain himself?" From her perspective, teaching me to entertain myself was hugely important. Parents today are doing things differently, and I am curious as to what it's going to mean for this next generation of kids.
