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To: fightinJAG

Poor children:

Government school;
Little contact with parents;
Lots of television;
no reading.

Rich children:

Private school;
More contact with parents;
less television;
reading.


41 posted on 12/06/2008 7:31:46 PM PST by Arthur McGowan
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To: Arthur McGowan
"Poor children: Government school; Little contact with parents; Lots of television; no reading. Rich children: Private school; More contact with parents; less television; reading."

I generally agree with your statements with one partial exception. This regards the "contact with parents" element of your assertions.

My own observation, along with some research that I have read suggests something a little different. Poor kids may actually have quite a lot of contact with their parents while rich kids may actually not since their parents often lead extraordinarily busy lives.

My observation is this: many (certainly not all) poor kids seem to experience very little in the way of complex verbal interactions with parents and other adults. Many poor parents simply don't talk to their kids all that much, and when they do, it's in the nature of ordering the kids to quit doing something the parent finds irritating. I have observed this behavior again and again, most often in stores and malls, and I have read research that describes it as well.

Rich parents may or may not spend a lot of time with their kids, but when they do, they generally engage their kids in back-and-forth conversation and speak in complex sentences. Poor kids generally enter school with much smaller vocabularies than rich kids do, and that has been documented. Now, obviously, this is a statistical truth, not a universal truth. Obviously there are exceptions.

58 posted on 12/06/2008 8:05:41 PM PST by Irene Adler (')
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