Word gap: When money’s tight, parents talk less to kids
news.berkeley.edu
news.berkeley.edu
How many studies like this need to not replicate before we stop treating them seriously?
Jokin aside I've seen way better studies of this kind where the parents would wear a mic at home and they would then do a word count, word analysis, etc.
Especially considering that going through a tough time will colour your memory and memory is extremely unreliable.
This may or may not be the case or may be true in some specific circumstances (Redskins, for example) but may not be true for all, however, many high schools are changing their team names based on this one study/conclusion which was funded by a tribe. Which is fine, but usually when there is a conflict of interest one wants to have additional independent studies that come to a similar conclusion.
Changing a name in response to a conflicted and un-valid paper is a downside in itself.
In one you change the high school mascot from a native american cartoon to an animal or something. I'm assuming native americans were not consulted with the creation of the mascot to begin with.
In the other we change... what all the teams names? Is that a equivilent scenario?
To be honest I'm finding it hard to relate to someone would care enough about a high school mascot to even need a study at all. Low stakes B.S. But that's me.
Since this topic is probably of zero importance to anyone not native american who else is going to fund it, for that matter?
Seems like you are affirming the consequent and assuming it is harmful to native Americans.
You are ignoring the issue of the paper. If the decision is based on a scientific paper, but the paper is conflicted or unvalidated, that is harmful because of the misuse of the scientific paper.
If you want to change the mascot because of Native American’s preferences, that is a different matter.
If not it's kind of a catch 22 for the tribe, isn't it? Nobody wants to fund research on the topic, so when they fund research on it it's presumed invalid because of bias?
How does that address the harm done by basing decisions on bad science?
At least not until the reactionary media's outrage machine decides to make it their current hill to die on...
Also, this is America, where sports are taken far too seriously.
And somehow you think that schools that have nothing to do with those people finally changing their very questionable names is due to a “conflict of interest of a psychologist”? Not because it was just racist?
Should Aztecas Stadium change their name? What about the MN Vikings, NY Yankees, TX Cowboys? Kaiser Chiefs of ZA, Ebusa dwarfs of ZA?
It could also be argued that it dilutes the image/culture/history and probably a bunch more things by wrapping it up in american plastic. I wouldn't argue with that.
Broadly speaking, the symbolism being used is usually either an obvious caricature of the real thing (see: the former Washington Redskins), or uses cultural and religious elements that are at best kind of offensive in the context of being used as a sportsball logo (see: most uses of peace pipe or war bonnet imagery).
There are exceptions, but they're of the kind that generally come with either somebody actually doing the research or people of the given group actually participating locally.
As someone else mentioned most of the push against is not from American Indians/Native Americans but vicariously offended others.
I've been following the efforts to have team names changed for quite some time and have never heard of this paper, but have heard of sustained lobbying over decades from a variety of native organizations.
Let's rephrase this.
Many high schools are changing their team names because the study brought awareness to the generally ill-considered use of ethnic mascots.
The study may have been a catalyst, but the appropriation and the insensitivity to it was always a problem.
In 2016, when the main momentum of this started to come out, 9 in 10 Native Americans did not find it offensive [1]. But white people had already decided it was offensive, and white people have much more cultural influence than Native Americans, so in being perceived by white people as offensive it became offensive, to the point that just a few years later, a majority of Native Americans found it offensive [2].
But at all times through this, including today, a higher percentage of white people find the Redskins name offensive than of Native Americans. The Redskins changed their name because of pressure from white people, not because of pressure from Native Americans. More than a little ironic that even in this, Native Americans were barely listened to, while white people's feelings were considered very important.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/new-poll-finds-9-in-10-...
[2] https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/02/04/native-mascots-survey/
And, to be clear, I'm okay with presenting evidence one way or another, but I object to willy-nilly claims and crusades.
Plugging your ears and crying ethical foul impoverishes the discussion and all it’s observers.
You could instead add real arguments to the debate. That enriches the discussion.
Don’t get mad at me for calling that person out. I’m the one who wants more research - they apparently already know the answer.
> The caregiver and child were seated across from one another at a table. The child completed an unrelated experiment with the researcher, while the caregiver completed the Scarcity or Control manipulation survey on a tablet. When the caregiver had finished, the researcher left the room under the guise of loading a second survey onto the iPad, leaving the caregiver and child alone with a toy the experimenter happened to offer as she left. A video camera and/or tape recorder recorded their interactions.
The conclusion could be that being reminded or queried about hardships has a chilling effect
To be specific:
> They recruited 206 volunteers—a mix of psychologists and economists, students and professors, none of whom were involved in the SSRP itself
The point is that it's possible to relibly predict whether a study will reproduce based solely on the characteristics of the study.
(I believe one of the early controversies that sparked the reproducability crisis was the discovery that an excess of studies were using college students as their participants, skewing their results)
I'd pay that. Though in this case it's not people reading the paper, but reading the article about the paper. (On reading the paper, the findings are less conclusive than the click-baity headline, but that's almost always the case)
Hard to answer this, IMO. It would be hard to stop keep versions of such anecdata from informing our personal worldviews, for example. Business knowledge is basically made out of such stuff.
Replicability, for questions like this may be the wrong bar. Should we expect a relationship between financial hardship and talking to three year olds to be the same for a group of parents in 2021 california and 1997 Tokyo?
A lot of the replication crisis is shoddy work. Bad research. But... a lot of it is a problem of the subject matter itself. It's complex, and can't be isolated. Does dumping a ton of manure in a forest result in more leaves? more flies? Hard to describe the relationship between the manure and leaves in a replicable way. You can do controlled experiments, but the lab version doesn't answer the same question... the one about complexity.
IDK... I'm not excusing the replication crisis and many of the worst affected fields do need to pay attention to the gunk they've accumulated. OTOH, we do need ways of describing relationships that are complex. "We know nothing" is insufficient.
"Data Availability: For Study 1, all materials and analysis scripts, including the protocol to be used in the case of a future replication, are available on OSF..."
But, inspecting the data closer, it does seem like the effect is not huge, and that is perhaps why the Berkeley website that is summarizing the results did not choose to mention anything about the size of the effect.
The ethics considerations of microphones always on would need to be extremely stringent, and only for safety of the children or others should they be breached.
The study might also require the provisioning of basics like Internet access and such devices. Though these days Internet access is as necessary for a productive member of society as power and water are, and IMO it should be a universal right.
and would be done by Facebook or Google to sell the data that you need money to loan companies.
No it’s not. I have an uncle who is a plumber and gets by without Internet just fine. Banks with ATMs, branch offices, and phones. Pays bills using the the mail, etc.
In the US utilities are required to offer mail options for bills, but not email or phone. Unless you work from home over the Internet or have children remote learning, it’s absolutely just a luxury.
At the limit, this is "my parents couldn't afford proper care for a debilitating diesease" vs they could. There is one group there that would talk more.
if you're poor, broke, alcholic, meth head, on heroin, you're probably not gonna be talking to your kids as much as someone who is not.
To see that idea with a self survey is kinda hilarious. kutgw to get this stuff right.
Also stop calling Americans "interesting." Using a term like this is a deliberate insult on a culture or a person. You are examining the culture like it's a lab rat and commenting on how the behavior is "interesting."
You are not an idiot. People do not talk like this in real life by remarking on how behavior is "interesting" to the subjects face. You and others only use these terms behind the anonymity of a forum. Therefore you are aware this is insulting. Stop.
This is a common tactic used to get around the HN rules. You say "interesting" posing it as an innocent remark. It is not, you are conducting a deliberate and insulting attack on American culture here.
They're generally not referred to that way outside discussion of behaviors addicts engage in to get their fix and the discussion is limited in scope to addicts.
Making the generalization that everyone refers to the poors as meth heads serves the same ideological needs as generalizing the poors as addicts albeit to a different end.
It wasn't a self survey.
> This left us with a final sample of 84 dyads, randomly assigned to either the Scarcity (n=42) or Control (n=42) conditions. Dyads across conditions did not differ in age, child or caregiver sex, caregiver education, or family income
> The caregiver and child were seated across from one another at a table. The child completed an unrelated experiment with the researcher, while the caregiver completed the Scarcity or Control manipulation survey on a tablet. When the caregiver had finished, the researcher left the room under the guise of loading a second survey onto the iPad, leaving the caregiver and child alone with a toy the experimenter happened to offer as she left. A video camera and/or tape recorder recorded their interactions.
> This left us with a final sample of 84 dyads, randomly assigned to either the Scarcity (n=42) or Control (n=42) conditions. Dyads across conditions did not differ in age, child or caregiver sex, caregiver education, or family income
> The caregiver and child were seated across from one another at a table. The child completed an unrelated experiment with the researcher, while the caregiver completed the Scarcity or Control manipulation survey on a tablet. When the caregiver had finished, the researcher left the room under the guise of loading a second survey onto the iPad, leaving the caregiver and child alone with a toy the experimenter happened to offer as she left. A video camera and/or tape recorder recorded their interactions.
And there was also a second experiment:
> The second experiment used [..] tiny “talk pedometer” devices worn by children that record their conversations and count the words they hear and say.
> [..] analyses revealed that parents engaged in fewer conversational turns with their children at the month’s end, a time that typically coincides with money being tight
Paper doesn't really support the headline.
Statistical significance is a measure of the likelihood of getting that effect size by random if the two approaches didn't actually affect the outcome. With a large enough sample size, an effect size of 1 fewer word could be "statistically significant", even if it is practically meaningless.
In this case they got a p-value of 0.1 iirc. So assuming there's nothing special about the circumstances, you'd expect to get samples this different 1 in 10 times you ran the experiment by luck alone.
The authors listed many results, and noted whether each was significant. It seems weird that you keyed in on one measure (caregiver vocabulary) with a higher p-value, and not the other results that did suggest that when money is tight, parents talk less.
I'd still ignore it though. You see how the first 3 are under "pre registered analyses" and the significant finding is under "exploratory analyses"? That's another way of saying their experiment failed to find anything interesting so they combed the rest of the dataset to try and find something they could publish. Basically just classic p-hacking. Probably not malicious or intentionally deceiving, but p-hacking nonetheless.
If you throw your hands up and decide to check what's interesting on a 14x14 correlation matrix, you've just tested around 100 hypotheses without realizing it. If your significance threshold is 0.05, you should expect to have 5 false positives in there already.
Exploratory analysis is not in inherently p-hacking. Publishing exploratory analyses as such is the proper action. There’s nothing in their methodology that suggests they analyzed a large number of possibilities and discarded the high p-values. (How would that even work in this case? Run through all possible conversation topics? All possible time divisions of speech?) The exploratory topics extend naturally from their preregistered hypotheses, from speech and income to speech relating to income and speech on calendar days when income is an issue.
Your cynical take on publishing negative results is unhelpful, as the accusation of bad faith and the straw man.
I'm open to being proven wrong but I've reread this section a couple times and I'm pretty sure all four tests in the primary pre-registered section and both tests in the secondary pre registered section are all non-significant.
(looks like there's actually two studies here. I've only read the first)
> Exploratory analysis is not in inherently p-hacking. Publishing exploratory analyses as such is the proper action. There’s nothing in their methodology that suggests they analyzed a large number of possibilities and discarded the high p-values.
Exploratory analysis is p-hacking. p-hacking is not (always) an evil unprincipled scientist trying to push a story. It's usually a scientist without a lot of statistical knowledge trying to see what's interesting and then letting their personal biases confirm coincidences as they appear because they want to find SOMETHING. You can publish these results, but you'd better be very clear that, you know, it's not very good. They're relatively conservative as they should be in the scheme of things here, and that's good. But look at the article and the discussion its generated. Clearly some people think its a trustworthy "scientific" result.
> How would that even work in this case? Run through all possible conversation topics? All possible time divisions of speech?
You take your data, you generate a correlation matrix of everything you've got, and point your finger at the values that look high. Then you test those hot spots and find significance. Very easy. You're implying here that in order to p-hack you need to check out every possibility. Not true.
They already tested ~6 ideas. Assuming they're independent of each other (to be fair, they're not), the likelihood of finding something significant with a p value below .05, purely by chance is already 0.95^6 => 26%. That is to say, naively, if you run 4 of these studies, one of them is expected to get a positive result even if they're all bogus. If they're allowed to do exploratory tests, they're now getting the freedom to cherry pick additional options. Remember, you have to count both the things they actually test AND the things they decided not to test after seeing the correlation matrix.
If they consider an additional 3 ideas, your studies now have a 33% false positive rate. At 15 ideas you're now at a 66% false positive rate. At about 40 extra ideas you have a 90% chance of finding something significant. If everyone's doing this, then your entire field is probably bogus.
It is extremely easy to unintentionally cheat and write off 40 insignificant ideas glancing at a correlation matrix. Pre-registering ideas is critical.
and I'm harping on correlation matrices because that's probably a lot of people's first idea, but there's plenty of other ways. That is the whole point of exploratory analysis.
You can see for example that one of their exploratory analyses is what happens to the relationships when we group by income? Well, you get to test another handful of ideas, I can guarantee you that much.
> The exploratory topics extend naturally from their preregistered hypotheses, from speech and income to speech relating to income and speech on calendar days when income is an issue.
That's not remarkable at all. That's the kinds of information that existed in their dataset.
> Your cynical take on publishing negative results is unhelpful, as the accusation of bad faith and the straw man
Well I did say "Probably not malicious or intentionally deceiving" so if anyone's pushing a bad faith interpretation here I'd say it's you.
It literally is not.
My family went through a bankruptcy when I was a kid. We lost the family business. My parents never told me about it, but I knew. The discussions, the fear of coming home to nothing. It's all real.
Tell your kids, explain to them. Use the difficult time to build a closer bond with them instead of leaving them in the dark.
To CONTEXTUALIZE is a whole other ball game.
Observing has special risks when you're a small child and cannot work out yet that everything does not relate to you. There's a lot of bad stuff that can go on that's not the fault of the child, but a young enough child will still conclude 'I did that'.
A later trick that we often fail to master as adults is the cause-effect relationship with emotions. When we're hungry we are more likely to snap at others or be rude. When we're stressed about something we're more likely to start fights/arguments. After a tasty meal, a piece of good news, or even intimacy we are more likely to be agreeable. When questioned in the moment both kids and adults will strongly attribute these feelings to the actions of others or simply fabricate a reason on the spot, completely failing to identify the true source of the feeling. (Pedantic note: emotional states are much more complex than I can describe here so we can obviously come up with counter-examples from specific situations. This also doesn't account for personality disorders, eg narcissism).
I can't make heads nor tails of this sentence but the rest of your comment seems reasonable.
?> The tricky part is that: being able to (observe, absorb or even articulate) is one thing, but to contextualize is a whole other ball game.
This kind of sensitivity and denial around financial difficulties is common but very unhealthy for both the kids and the parent.
Kids won’t hate you for having money troubles. They won’t be annoyed that you can’t buy them {cool thing} if it’s clear why you can’t. If they are, it’s another learning opportunity.
I’m doing okay now, but I share my financial mistakes with my kids when it’s relevant and try to keep conversations open about how these matters impact them now and later in their lives.
My hope is that as they age they’ll see me as a resource for help, someone to guide them through things, to recognize that their finances aren’t something to be afraid of or keep secret.
In my parent’s defence, they wanted to hide our financial situation because it scared them and they didn’t want it to scare and unnerve their kids. The trouble is though that like you said, the kids will know anyway. The lack of insight into what’s happening only makes them feel more insecure and normalizes hiding upsetting things from people you love. Good intentions only get you so far, I guess.
It’s why I am trying hard to find the right balance of communication with my kids. I don’t want them to waste or act spoiled and entitled, but I never want them to think we’re at risk for anything.
It's killing me. I look back and know I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours of doing useless shit when I could have been spending more present time with them. We did quite a few things, travelled a lot, did many little experiments at home and whatnot, but there was so much room for more. Apropos to the article, in 2007 I learned that my partner in the company we co-founded fucked us over with the IRS, in a way that I would have been personally exposed, and it took me about five years to dig us out of it. Those were stressful times, and I'm certain it impacted how present I could be.
Anyway, now that just feels like an excuse. When I was a kid I was so intensely bored that I bugged the hell out of my parents. Kids now have distractions, and they rarely ever came to me to ask me to go do something with them. I don't know why, but ultimately I'm now convinced I misinterpreted it. And it's too late to fix.
If someone truly believes that money isn't important, it just proves their parents shielded them from the ugly side of poverty.
Now I am wondering if this perpetuates a cycle.
It's so much harder to engage with a small hyperactive child's fantasy world when you're scraping the bottom of the barrel, no matter how much you want to.
Well, the data indicate that this is not the case. For households in the bottom two quintiles of income, only 18(!)% of householders work full time in the bottom quintile, and 45% work full time in the next-lowest quintile.
source: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/explaining-income-inequality-...
So legally they'd only show up as working 15-20-35 hours and in fact they'd work 60 hours a week.
At least over here (Poland, EU), people officially unemployed often work under the table, sometimes quite a lot, and they cannot afford the word of it to get to any public agency. Such people are unwilling to talk about it to researchers either.
(We recently had a public census, and it asked a bunch of sensitive questions around topics like employment. Despite the survey repeatedly giving assurances that this is all used for public statistics, and that data will be processed by trained personnel under strict confidentiality regulation, the people I know who are forced to skirt employment/tax rules here and there to survive, were not willing to reveal any indication of it.)
"Job finding office" literally asks you whether you're willing to work "under the table".
I've been asked this question when attempted to find my very first job
Of course there can be a lot of correlating factors that also impacts the difference between wealthy and poor. But I think that anyone who has ever tried going back to living paycheck-to-paycheck after some years of financial safety can tell you just how taxing it is.
I grew up poor, but it wasn’t until I did my masters and for a brief period saw my income cut in half without adjusting my spending, that I ended up in a situation where I realised just how much not having to worry about money even once in a month truly gave me.
I found out later that most men in his village are like that. A lot of feelings are being swallowed in silence and not talked about. A real "word gap". I wonder if it has to do with poverty (it's a poor village) like the article says.
Most emotions seem to just hold you back. Why cry about a situation when you should more likely focus your energy into finding a solution?
For me it's not that emotions are so much "swallowed in silence and not talked about"... it's that they're fundamentally not useful.
If I'm stressed out or sad or etc about something, that's something to be solved, not something to be sad about. Why be sad about something you can either solve or ignore?
To put it another way: You can either solve it or you can't. If you can solve it, do so. If you can't, why put energy/emotion into it?
That's only if you have those emotions to begin with. It's very reasonable to train yourself to not have those emotions and therefore not carry that baggage.
And that doesn't mean being a brick wall. That just means not caring as much. Going with the flow. Being happy regardless. However you want to word it.
But that's just because nothing truly bad happened to me. Or at least, nothing bad enough to make me pity myself. Just that nothing has forced me to put energy/emotion in it, that hurt my ego enough that I'd feel worse about myself.
I think it's naive to believe that something like that could never happen to you, and it happens regularly to people around you. The universe is ruthless and cruel, and we are often helpless in the face of it. Sure some people are stronger, and some are weaker, but everyone could be broken.
Many people value different things. My girlfriend might cry if she thinks a person she met didn't like her. I'd never cry over such a thing, but that's because I don't value myself as a likeable person as much as she does. If she wouldn't cry about it, she'd feel worse as a person and I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't comfort her.
Anyway, to answer the question, because being emotional and sharing those emotions could help them deal with their pain or frustration. It's not good if we've got all these people walking around with their pain and frustration and no healthy outlet.
There are many who romanticize the idea of men crying over small things, and I think that's not healthy or productive. I know many people who will cry when they lose a game in their hobby of choice, for example. That kind of thing is too much IMO.
Instead of learning to have a "healthy outlet" I think people need to learn to control their emotions better.
> I don't value myself as a likeable person as much as she does. If she wouldn't cry about it, she'd feel worse as a person and I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't comfort her.
Isn't that a huge vulnerability, though? Going through life caring so much about people liking you, that you cry every time you think someone doesn't?
IMO it's way better to figure out how to not care as much in this kind of situation, than to accept that crying is a "healthy outlet". Instead of being sad and crying to release your emotions, you could instead learn to be happy regardless.
We need to talk to other people about our problems, bitch, rant, shout, cry, do all sort of emotional things to relieve stress, even if that does objectively nothing to solve our problems.
Even more so since some things just can't be solved. We're not all powerful, at the end of the day.
Not handling emotions is harmful to our mental health (including the rational machinery), to our life expectancy (especially the case for men), and also to our close ones.
That's not completely true. There is an option to not have those negative emotions in the first place.
I tend to find that experiencing negative emotions like sadness heightens my later perception of positive emotions like gratitude.
A lot of people romanticize the idea of men crying over smaller things. For example, someone below said that their SO cries then they even think someone doesn't like them. I've seen people cry when they mess up in their hobby of choice. These things are just not healthy to cry about. They need to control their emotions better than that.
First up I'm not talking about performative emo culture. I'm saying that authentic expression of your true feelings is a key part of being a healthy human being no matter your gender. You don't have to make a scene. Just be honest. I'm also not saying you shouldn't use that energy to work towards a solution. Doing so is good and healthy.
Saying that emotions are fundamentally not useful displays, I believe, a deep lack of understanding of what emotions actually are. They're not some arbitrary human frailty, they're a finely tuned mode selection / behaviour modifier heuristic that is deeply embedded in the psyche of all mammals and (to varying degrees) all life. Emotions are deeply useful and can act as a communication channel between your conscious and subconscious.
In my own experience there's no such thing as "ignoring" emotions in the long term. You might consciously convince yourself that you're doing so but you're still building up an emotional payload based on what's happening to you and that payload will come out in some other, far less controlled way eventually. Certainly it's possible to cultivate some degree of detachment and so be less affected by the world around you but that just alters the balance, it doesn't remove emotions from your life.
To respond to a couple of your comments in posts below:
> There are many who romanticize the idea of men crying over small things, and I think that's not healthy or productive. I know many people who will cry when they lose a game in their hobby of choice, for example. That kind of thing is too much IMO.
My experience differs here and I feel this is a bit of a distraction/strawman. Being able to play games without getting overly emotionally affected by the outcome is a baseline measure of maturity for everyone regardless of gender and we're not talking about party games here. We're talking about, to paraphrase the GP of my post, "My dad [...] doesn't know how to talk intimately or how to reveal emotions." Being emotionally stunted in this way genuinely impacts your ability to live a fulfilling life.
> It's very reasonable to train yourself to not have those emotions and therefore not carry that baggage.
This is not only not reasonable, I don't believe it's even possible for most people. Either you're wired significantly differently to every human I know (which is possible) or you're not "training yourself not to have emotions", you're just in denial.
> There is an option to not have those negative emotions in the first place.
Again, unless you are very, very far from baseline this is not true.
> That's an extreme example that I'm not really referencing here. Of course I feel sad when something extreme happens, like a loved one dies.
This kind of thing is what the original conversation was talking about.
I think the idea was that they were ashamed and did not want to worry me. But it ended up much worse as far as its negative affect on me, because the bankruptcy led to a jarring change in lifestyle for us and breeds distrust between the child-parent relationship.
If/when I'm a parent, I will be much more transparent with my kids about how the family finances work, so they can learn how to manage money responsibly.
If being more terse at the end-of-the-month can be reliably reproduced, what other causitive factor would you propose? And why would it apply to some families but not others? What hints do you have that lead you to the conclusion that poverty and terseness probably share a common cause?
I had a lot more humor a decade ago but nowadays I have no surplus energy to make any jokes and I can barely laugh at anything aside from dark humor.
I only think about two things these days:
1. Securing a decent income (through honest means).
2. Reset of the corrupt economy.
I see the two as intertwined. Everything I think about and do is about these two things. #1 is not possible for me (and many people) without #2.
It's sad that a lot of people are starting to fall in the same category and it's affecting their interactions with family members in such a profoundly negative way.
I am thinking, are children sensing their economic backlog way to sooner than we know ?
Is this something you know, or is it something you think is true? The reason I ask is because there are quite a lot of doctors in my extended family, and they spend a lot of time with their children. That’s obviously very anecdotal, but working long hours and sometimes being called in to perform long acute surgeries doesn’t seem to impact their family lives much.
Part of this is financial. You simply have more time when you pay other people to clean your house, do your laundry and keep your garden and can get restaurant quality take-away delivered when you’re too exhausted to cook. Aside from paying people to do things, you also expend so much less energy when you never worry about money.
Another part could be the kind of people they are. I have ADHD and while I’m well functional and have been for years, I just don’t have enough energy to lead a life that’s on equal grounds with my counterparts in other municipalities, even with medication. As a result I’ve had to balance my work-life and my career so that I only rarely work more than 37 hours in a week (paid lunch and extended travel times included) and when I do work more hours, I make sure to work less as soon as possible so that the total gets to be 37 hours per week over the year. I have absolutely no regrets sacrifice a little of my career (which is of course made easy that it is still a great career despite the sacrifices) to have more energy for my family. It did affect me when I had my first child, which is where only having energy for 1.5 full time jobs first caught up with me, and I was quite depressed I couldn’t lead the life I had planned. Once things “fell into place for me mentally” I’ve never looked back. Here, years later, I’m actively trying to find ways to work even less. The reason I use myself as an example here is because my cousin is a leading surgeon with a doctor wife and 3 children, and he is able to put as much energy into his children as I am without the sacrifices.
Becoming a doctor is extremely taxing in my country, so it goes to reason that the people who come through it are simply people who are fortune in the energy and structure department. Which could likely also helping them to have more energy over all to invest in their children.
This is anecdotal like I said, maybe the doctors in my family are just special, but unless you have some sort of data to back your claim, you might want to be careful about your assumptions.
Totally in my head. No data to back up.
My aha moment :
> Part of this is financial.
That'll often be three languages if both parents are expats. Three languages by the time they start first grade.
They don't just now how to speak extra languages, they can really think in them too, and many times understand nuances and biases that you'd only know if you were a native of a given languages.
In EU countries there most people speak multiple languages that's not a bit deal, but in countries where most people speak a single language, that's also an enormous difference.
And even if you have sometimes same hours as wealthier person you are more exhausted from the crappy job to open mouth at home.
This study was clearly done by wealthy people they need to study this to find out.
Just take them seriously and talk to them.
> It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?
> The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society.
> This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.
https://educationallinguist.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/what-if...
However, I’m not sure how this idea is helpful. We can pretend everything is made up and it’s only power structures that impose reality on people but it’s not helpful. In the end you have to consider society is and will be and you can either participate in it in reality or you can cynically scoff at how it’s all make believe anyways and live miserably.
Bilingualism - while awesome, does not track well with skill development (maths / science) in other areas even in immersion type programs where there is no further language barrier.
Non-standardized varieties of ANY language also are negatively correlated with positive outcomes. So folks speaking pidgen or strong dialects of spanish etc also struggle.
Families - even immigrant families, who go big on the monolingual thing (some parents will not speak to children in other than dominate language) have very positive outcomes - so mono-linqual is not just a white thing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09116...
I think that this is not really news.
The only mention in the article is that the results have been "replicated elsewhere", but didn't say what the methodology of those other papers are.