The Early Catastrophe – Welfare family children hear 30 million less words

As readers of this blog know, it has been said that for every dollar spent on Early Childhood Education, seven tax dollars are saved down the line. This number comes from less crime, less welfare, less government assistance in general, etc. As I mentioned by linking to a previous Boston Globe article, until just this week, I never knew exactly why that was the case. For those of you “truth” seekers out there, who like hard data to make their arguments/points, here is the data, and the study that explains it all…

AFT: Publications: American Educator: Spring 2003: The Early Catastrophe
The Importance of Early Years Experience
We learned from the longitudinal data that the problem of skill differences among children at the time of school entry is bigger, more intractable, and more important than we had thought. So much is happening to children during their first three years at home, at a time when they are especially malleable and uniquely dependent on the family for virtually all their experience, that by age 3, an intervention must address not just a lack of knowledge or skill, but an entire general approach to experience.

Cognitively, experience is sequential: Experiences in infancy establish habits of seeking, noticing, and incorporating new and more complex experiences, as well as schemas for categorizing and thinking about experiences. Neurologically, infancy is a critical period because cortical development is influenced by the amount of central nervous system activity stimulated by experience. Behaviorally, infancy is a unique time of helplessness when nearly all of children’s experience is mediated by adults in one-to-one interactions permeated with affect. Once children become independent and can speak for themselves, they gain access to more opportunities for experience. But the amount and diversity of children’s past experience influences which new opportunities for experience they notice and choose.

Estimating, as we did, the magnitude of the differences in children’s cumulative experience before the age of 3 gives an indication of how big the problem is. Estimating the hours of intervention needed to equalize children’s early experience makes clear the enormity of the effort that would be required to change children’s lives. And the longer the effort is put off, the less possible the change becomes. We see why our brief, intense efforts during the War on Poverty did not succeed. But we also see the risk to our nation and its children that makes intervention more urgent than ever.

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