Socializing Children through Language

Using psychological theory as a basis, Socializing Children through Language examines naturally occurring conversations between mothers and children in the context of achievement, self-regulation, food consumption, and television watching to illustrate how families of different socioeconomic means interact and discuss a variety of topics in the home. Specifically, the chapters in this book draw on enhanced audio recordings of over 40 families across a range of education and income levels to investigate how mothers’ language relates to child behaviors over time. The unique pairing of this digital observer data with empirical data on achievement tests, regulation tasks, and parenting information on the home environment collected one year later presents an altogether revolutionary way to understand and think about how family socialization works across socioeconomic levels.

• Focuses on mother–child talk about desires, thoughts, and emotions
• Studies the relationship between math talk and children’s math knowledge and achievement
• Emphasizes the management language used by mothers to guide the behavior of their children
• Explores children’s media environment in the home, the conversations that occur during digital technology use, and whether it relates to children’s outcomes
• Considers food-related discussions in families prior to and during mealtimes, including how parents and children express food likes and dislikes, hunger, mealtime routines and expectations, and explanations about nutritional values

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academic Press
• Release date: Jun 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9780128036501

Book preview

Socializing Children through Language

Editors

Pamela E. Davis-Kean

Sandra Tang

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Dedication

Copyright

List of Contributors

Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Power of Parental Talk

Digital Observers: A New Method for Studying Parenting in the Home

A Day in the Life of Families Study

Summary

Chapter 2. You Really Need to Go to Bed: How Mothers Use Language to Guide and Control Children’s Behavior During Morning and Bedtime Routines

The Importance of Daily Routines for Children’s Development

The Current Study

Method

Analysis

Results

Summary and Future Directions

Chapter 3. Mother–Child Conversations About Thoughts, Desires, and Emotions: Relations to Children’s Understanding of the Mind

Theory of Mind Development in Childhood

Parent–Child Discourse and Theory of Mind Development

The Present Study

Future Directions

Chapter 4. Math Talk Between Children and Mothers and Its Connection to Math-Related Practices in the Home Setting

Importance of Math Talk for Children’s Math Skills

Parent Beliefs About Home Numeracy

Parent–Child Math-Related Practices

Math Talk Between Parents and Preschoolers

Methods to Study Home Numeracy

Methods

Results

Future Directions

Chapter 5. Parenting of Preschool Children’s Media Use in the Home

The Importance of Parent–Child Conversations Around Media Use

Background

Method

Results

Discussion

Future Directions

Chapter 6. Food Talk in Families

The Importance of Food Talk in Families

Methods

Results

Future Directions

Chapter 7. Conclusion: The Value of Parent Talk

A Brief Summary of Our Findings

Socializing Cognitive Skills

Socializing Health and Behavioral Skills

Limitations of the Data

Future Directions

Index

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the families who participated in this study. This research would not be possible without them and we are truly thankful.

Copyright

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List of Contributors

S.W. Bindman,     University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, United States

P.E. Davis-Kean,     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

S.E. Domoff,     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

A. Ellis,     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

A.L. Miller,     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

C.E. Smith,     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

M.I. Susperreguy,     Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

S. Tang,     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

N.E. Waters,     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

I. Wu,     University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

Preface

In 2009, a group of researchers studying social disparities came together at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan to talk about what was missing from what we know about families and child development. We were frustrated that as developmental psychologists and pediatricians, we had been collecting survey data for years but still did not fully understand how parents and children influenced each other to produce various achievement and behavioral outcomes that we were seeing in our data.

We were frustrated because we felt that the self-report survey was not getting enough data about what was really happening in the home environment of preschool children. Equally troubling was that laboratory studies on parents and children were so controlled that we did not know if the situations that we contrived were ones that the parents and children actually experienced in their everyday life. Were we creating situations that the parents only dealt with when presented with them in the laboratory and thus not really getting at the ecology of the life lived by parents at different socioeconomic levels?

I had spent most of my research career examining the behavior of parents as it is related to children’s beliefs and behaviors. It was easy to ask in a survey for parents to count the number of books in their home. It was also fairly easy to send in observers to estimate the number of books in the home. The problem has always been whether or not those books are read or whether a parent valued or expected their child to read. On a very broad level we could assume that the quantity of books in the home was an indicator of how much the family valued books and the likelihood that children would read. However, it is difficult to extrapolate with some level of confidence from this type of data other important parenting beliefs, such as the value of general schooling, of learning to control behavior, or of how to interact with family and peers. It has always been difficult for scientists of human behavior to ascertain how our beliefs influence behavior, and in the case of family researchers, how parent beliefs influence child outcomes.

How to measure parental beliefs about child rearing is a challenge. If we ask the parent to self-report on their beliefs, we often get very positive responses. Most parents truthfully want their children to do well and have happy and productive lives. However, these beliefs do not necessarily lead to the parent behavior. We thought one of the ways that parents might transmit their beliefs was through the words they say to their children. Thus, we wanted a way to capture parent–child conversations. It happened, totally by accident, that I was watching one of the morning news shows and saw a story about a new device that was being used and marketed to parents as a way to count the words they were saying to their children. This company, the LENA Foundation, had taken to heart the research of Betty Hart and Todd Risley¹ that children from a lower socioeconomic background were less likely to hear words in their environments and this lower frequency of words was related to lower achievement. This was also consistent with work by Erica Hoff² who had found that children growing up in lower socioeconomic homes were showing a significant vocabulary lag as early as 2.5  years of age. Similarly, Annette Lareau³ had just come out with an update to her book on children growing up in different social class groups, which showed that how parents talked with their children mattered for their eventual transition to adulthood.

Our group wanted to know, how parents’ words and language may be important in the development of children across a variety of important child indicators (eg, achievement, behavior, social-cognitive development). This new technology was going to allow us to record 16  h of language interaction a day without intervention from the research team. Also, an added bonus is that this was not just a digital recorder; it came with software that automatically codes who is speaking, the amount of words spoken by each person, the conversational turns between individuals, and the television signal in the home. This allowed us to use information right from the recorder to analyze what was occurring in the homes of families that varied across socioeconomic indicators like parent educational attainment and income level. We consider this digital recorder to be the equivalent of a digital observer that we are able to place in the home that can give us information on important interactions of parents and children. In our study, we were able to collect and analyze this detailed and naturalistic data for over 40 families, which is a larger sample size and introduces less biases than prior studies based on experimental and ethnographic data. It was a breakthrough for us in overcoming some of the limitations of survey and laboratory research in family studies.

This book is the outcome of this collaboration and use of a new technology for collecting data in the home environment. We are thankful to all of those who helped us get started on this journey: Daniel Keating, Fred Morrison, Julie Lumeng, and Sharon Simonton, who were part of the initial conversations on social disparities and parenting. These initial collaborations, however, would not have led to the research presented in this book without the guidance and amazing research talent of Samantha Worzalla Bindman and Maria Ines Susperreguy who designed the protocols for data collection for both waves and spent a tremendous amount of effort in recruiting and interacting with the families. Research of this caliber and magnitude can never be accomplished without the dedicated leadership of researchers like Samantha and Maria (Mané). They are the reason that we were able to do the science that is represented by the chapters of this book.

We are also grateful for funding from the University of Michigan to be able to collect two waves of data in this study. This funding was provided to Pamela E. Davis-Kean in the form of start-up funding as an Assistant Professor and two internal research grants (to Samantha Worzalla Bindman and Maria Ines Susperreguy) that allowed for the data collection. Three graduate students at the time (Samantha Worzalla Bindman, Maria Ines Susperreguy, and Irene Wu) were also able to take advantage of monies made available from the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan to aid in the data collection of this sample. We would also like to thank the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research for providing space for this project and the Family, Culture, and Development Lab (Amanda Chrzasz-Reedy, Chloe Choi, Alexa Ellis, Alison Fendrick, Rebecca Fritz, Rachel Heimberg, Megan Johnston, Neeaz Khalatbari, Michelle Krason Samantha Kublin, Lauren Leibach, Aaron Mesh, Melissa Newman, Kristen Pentiuk, Hurley Riley, III, Robin Stein, Emily Wang, Nick Waters, Juliet Wu) and Pathways to Literacy Lab (Jenny Lee, Mahya Rahimian Mashhadi, Maggie O’Reilly Treter, Trisha Paul, Kriti Samaymantri, Valerie Schroder) for providing research opportunities for undergraduates to be trained in the transcription and coding of family conversations. Also, I would like to thank Sandra Tang for recommending that we write a book on all of the interesting things we were discovering by listening to family interactions. She is the reason this book exists and she has worked tirelessly at organizing the authors and chapters.

Finally, we do this research for those who contribute so much to our understanding of child development, the families and children who agreed to participate in the study. They let us listen in on their worlds for 3 days and participated in our study for 2 years. We are forever grateful to them for their time and commitment in helping us understand more about families and children.

Pamela E. Davis-Kean

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¹ Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Paul H. Brookes Publishing.

² Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development, 74(5), 1368–1378.

³ Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. University of California Press.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Power of Parental Talk

P.E. Davis-Kean¹, S.W. Bindman², M.I. Susperreguy³,  and S. Tang¹     ¹University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States     ²University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, United States     ³Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

In 1971, Urie Bronfenbrenner and J. C. Condry published a book, Two Worlds of Childhood, which examined the differences in parenting and schooling in the United States and the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most profound aspect of this book is that little has changed in the last three decades in our thinking about the role of parents in raising children, namely the influence of socialization by parents and other adults on multiple child outcomes such as achievement, behavior problems, and socioemotional skills. Interestingly, the book highlights parents’ use of language as a way to discipline and promote positive behavior in children while very little attention is given to parent’s behavioral interactions except for the warmth and affection shown to the children.

In the past, research has focused primarily on the actions/behaviors of the parent toward the child and relegated parental talk as a way to develop language (Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003). We posit, however, that conversations between parent and child (or lack thereof) are an important avenue for parents to pass on their beliefs and expectations to the child. Whether it is how you prepare for sleep, moral behavior toward your sibling or friend, and even the type of food you eat, parents are socializing their children on their values and beliefs through the content of their conversations. The reason the focus has been on behavior is that it is easier to obtain these data using observation during structured laboratory tasks, single observations of the home environment, or parent surveys to gather information about parents’ ideas and behaviors. What has eluded us is whether parents and children actually interact in the natural environment in the ways that these more contrived methods have captured. In general, it is nearly impossible to unobtrusively observe the daily interactions between parents and their children (Pomerantz & Thompson, 2008). One potential avenue that has been used successfully by researchers is the ethnographic approach (Lareau, 2011) where researchers spend large amounts of time with families taking copious notes and observations of behavior. This gives rich information on the family life but due to the demand on the families, the number of families observed is generally small, which limits our ability to understand the implication of the findings in relation to the broader population.

Digital Observers: A New Method for Studying Parenting in the Home

To overcome the limitations of parenting research that depends on self-report surveys, contrived observations in the laboratory, or small-scale ethnographies, we developed a protocol for the use of an in-home digital data collection tool called the Language ENvironment Analysis System (LENA).¹The LENA is an enhanced audio-recording device that can record the words and conversations of multiple family members continuously for up to 16  hours. The digital recording device is a pager-sized digital language processor that children and adults wear in the pocket of custom-made clothing or other carrying device that is positioned near the speaker’s chest. The system’s software analyzes the sound file from the digital recorder to produce reports about the number of words that were spoken to/near the child each moment as well as the number of conversational turns the child engaged in with an adult. We adapted this method that is primarily used to record and understand language development, to be a digital observer in the home and record conversations between parents and children from the time they woke up in the morning until they went to sleep at night. As shown in Fig. 1.1, children heard more words at bedtime than they heard in the morning. Similarly, and somewhat surprisingly, children heard more words on average at bedtime during the weekdays than on the weekends (see Fig. 1.2). Also of interest was when children were speaking the most. As seen in Fig. 1.3, children are on average talking more in the mornings during the week, which is directly opposite of when parents talk the most. Thus, through these digital observers in the home we are able to capture an interesting dynamic occurring in the family verbal environment.

A Day in the Life of Families Study

The Day in the Life of Families Study was designed to investigate variations in parenting during the preschool years, a time when children acquire many important cognitive and social skills needed for formal schooling. The study focuses on the impact of parenting on four major skill sets: language, literacy, math, and executive function. The primary aim of the study is to use the LENA system to examine variations in the amount and content of parents’ language during a 3-day period in the home.

Figure 1.1  Average words spoken by the adult in the morning versus at bedtime.

Figure 1.2  Average words spoken by the adult on a weekday and weekend in the morning and at bedtime.

Figure 1.3  Average words spoken by children during the day.

Characteristics of the Sample

First Wave of the Study. Forty typically developing preschool-aged children (27 boys, 13 girls), whose ages ranged from 3  years 10  months to 5  years 9  months (M  =  4  years 6  months; SD  =  5.5  months) at the first wave of the study, and their primary caregivers (ie, the mother) participated in the study. Recruitment was accomplished through direct mailings to families, fliers and invitation letters in preschool and Head Start centers, and an advertisement in a free local parent newsletter in counties representing Southeast Michigan. Families were invited to participate in a study on the complexities of a week in the life of a mother and her preschool-aged child. They were asked to record 3  days of conversations by using an innovative data collection method (LENA) and to complete some questionnaires (mother) and assessments (child). They were invited to participate if they had the following characteristics: their primary language in the home was English, the age of the target child was approximately between 4 and 5  years, the child was attending preschool, and the child had not been diagnosed with disabilities or major illnesses. Families who chose to participate in this study were asked to provide their address, phone number, and email address when they consented to participate in the study. Families who consented to participate in the study were visited in their homes and asked to record their normal conversations during 3  days of a week.

Figure 1.4  Maternal educational attainment at wave 1.

These 40 families