Can We Cure the Socioeconomic Gap?

As I finished rising the dishes after dinner, my sister brought up one of the topics of an article she read yesterday in the magazine The New Yorker she recently subscribed to.  The article focuses on the research finding that states richer parents talk more to their children than the poorer parents. When it comes to writings on child development, I am head over heel with the subject and cannot get enough of them. The excitement started to build up and the eager to put my hand on the article and flip through the pages (despite how lengthy my sister said the article was) were apparent in my rushing to finish cleaning the dishes.

In the article "The Talking Cure," the author Margaret Talbot discusses about the program called Providence Talks which focuses on teaching parents to communicate with their children more often in Providence, Rhode Island.  The program's main motivation is based on the research of two child psychologists Betty Hart and Tod Risley in the nineteen-eighties; the research compared how parents of different social classes talked with their children and it found that richer parents verbalized more words to their children than their counterpart, poorer parents. Hart and Risley found low-income parents are more corrective and critical toward their children while the higher-income parents asked more questions including ones they know the answer to and their purpose was to instill thinking to their children.  The higher-income children reap the benefits of doing well in academics and in their professional life later on while the lower-income children do not.

The question is can we accept Hart and Risley's findings? Does it reflect the general population? Or there are too many flaws in the study to generalize the poor and the better-off children that way?

In my current field of work, I work with families from all socioeconomic backgrounds.  Though my main group of clients is the low-income family, nonetheless, now and then a middle-class and upper-class individuals would come in and request for government assistance--though as a temporary cushion they say. Many of the children in the low-income families did well in school; I had a family coming in making less than $1000 monthly and their child is attending Stanford University majoring in biology; not to mention, a young lady in her mid-20s came to my office and she was attending UC Berkeley. Though these high achieving children may be one of a kind but they are proof that socioeconomic status cannot triumph hard work and efforts.

 "Socioeconomic status is not a destiny" is my stand. I don't accept the fact that poorer children and better-off children are destined to be a certain way base on what the article says. I do not believe the poorer children will know less vocabularies than the better-off children; I do not accept that the poorer children will have a low rate of academic and professional success than the wealthier children. Our socioeconomic status does not determine who we will become and what we will do in life. Though we definitely have to be aware of its impact on we future, we cannot let it be a hindrance to our goals and dreams.