Should it take five million dollars to encourage parents in Providence, RI, to talk to their babies? According to this article in the NY Times, the city won a Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge competition prize to spend $5m on investing in the development of parenting skills among its most marginalized populations. At first read, I thought it sounded like an interesting program. It's widely agreed that the child-rearing from the age of birth to three years old is critical to child development and it's good to see money going towards a good cause.
The more I read, however, the more hare-brained the scheme in question seemed. Providence already does invest in services for poor families such as nurses and social workers and free parenting classes, but the goal of this program is to encourage parents to talk to their babies. The scheme is called Providence Talks and as part of it, babies in eligible homes will be equipped with recording devices that monitor the auditory environment around them, counting new words they are exposed to, excluding background input such TV or music. As the NY Times puts it:
"Now Providence will train [city] home visitors to add a new service: creating family conversation. [...] The visitors will show poor families with very young children how to use the recorders, and ask them to record one 16-hour day each month. Every month they will return to share information about the results and specific strategies for talking more: how do you tell your baby about your day? What’s the best way to read to your toddler? They will also talk about community resources, like read-aloud day at the library. And they will work with the family to set goals for next month."
Something about this scheme is unsettling to me. Partly it's the 1984 feel that it has. Recording devices in homes? Recording family conversations and 'setting goals? Fox News would have a field day with this. I can see the headline now: 'ObamaTalk: using recording devices to control how you talk to your kids - in the privacy of your own home!!!!' I'm surprised it hasn't been picked up by Republicans already as an example of public-spending-gone-mad.
As a parent, however, there is something more unsettling about the idea that poor parents need to be told how to speak to their children and that they need to be recorded doing so. I can see how such a scheme would be a social scientist's dream come true. You get to collect hours and hours of recorded data on your subjects for free and then follow up on the development of those subjects over years. It's the stuff of PhD dreams. It is a volunteer program, of course, so anyone participating will be doing so willingly. Nonetheless, there is something faintly patronizing about it all.
Do poor parents need to literally have words put in their mouths by social scientists from the city authorities? If they want to encourage talk between parents and babies, then surely it can happen organically in the subjects' own homes, structured in a way that suits them and that reflects the cultures and languages that the families value, not the social scientist's idea of what constitutes valuable culture or language. By all means, include current research on the importance of talking to babies in parenting classes and offer peer support but it is surely overbearing to intrude on parents' time with their children in such a paternalistic way. It's also assuming that the parents need to have goals set for them and to be managed, like helpless objects of a study, instead of responsible adults trying to do what's best for their baby. Already by labeling a home as poor or ignorant enough to warrant intervention on this level - you're so poor and ignorant, you can't even figure out how to talk to your baby properly so let the nice lady from Social Services help you with that! - the scheme is categorizing children from an early age. That might work for a social study but it can't be good for the participants.
Talking to your baby may be powerful in building cognitive skills but it's hard to see how this scheme will benefit the parents and babies involved any more than some simple parenting classes (that probably cost less than $5m).
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