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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

A cynical explanation is that they talk less because on some level they know that talking tends to reveal needs that require money to meet.

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I think if you are worried about money (or stressed in general), you will find it more difficult to engage in the sorts of conversations that are good to have with children.

List of things I have read : - A study that a three year old's vocabulary is the best indicator of success in life - A study that the more time parents spend talking to kids the better their vocabulary is - This study that when money is tight parents talk less to kids

Now I am wondering if this perpetuates a cycle.

Kids develop speech at different speeds, many late speakers have high IQ.

I believe that late speakers with high IQ have generally a large vocabulary, they can speak but don't dare to speak because they feel they don't master the language. Also I wouldn't call many late speakers have high IQ, on the contrary, the majority would have a lower IQ (or at least on the verbal part when tested at 7).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3139938/

Or because they’re working multiple jobs/overtime and do all the chores themselves. Wealthier people have stay at home parents and pay other people to do the housekeeping.

Exactly. They're out of the house more, when they're home they're busy trying to catch up with housework, and they're exhausted.

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.

> Or because they’re working multiple jobs/overtime and do all the chores themselves.

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-...

Not working full-time does not necessarily mean working fewer hours. Working 2 29-hour jobs and commuting between them would be vastly more time and energy consuming, yet would show up as “not working full-time”.

Two 29 hour jobs would result in a 58 hour work week, and thus the worker would be considered to work full-time.

Call it working overtime.

I think it's more likely that a lot of poor people have a main job, frequently with a number of hours that prevents them getting all the benefits of a full time job (think 35 hours instead of 40) and then they work extra, on the side, to be able to make ends meet.

So legally they'd only show up as working 15-20-35 hours and in fact they'd work 60 hours a week.

The referenced dataset is about employment, not jobs. Hours worked in a week would not be affected by how many different employers one has. The distinction is if they work 1 to 34 hours (part-time) or 35 or more hours (full-time).

Does that count all jobs, or just jobs the tax man knows about?

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.)

>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.

"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

I'm eating crackers until my paycheck arrives tomorrow or the next day, and I can say for certain that its a big part of why I talk less right at the moment. The plural of (my) anecdote is not data, of course.

There are a lot of studies that show that being poor in western society is extremely mentally taxing.

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.

how is it, that at the end of the money, there is always so much month left over?

Is that cynical? It seems like a reasonable guess. It was my first thought before even heading to the article or comments

Good point. Even if I sincerely care only about my children, if most of their prospective needs require money to meet, the most effective response to a lack of money is to devote more time to getting money and less time to listening.

This is what infuriates me about all the "I don't care about money, I just wish mum/dad had spent more time with us and less time working" sentiment. Sure, some parents are workaholics at the expense of their kids but I'd wager the vast majority of the time, the parents hate being away from their kids and are only doing it to meet the family's financial needs.

If someone truly believes that money isn't important, it just proves their parents shielded them from the ugly side of poverty.

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