The welfare cycle

I was aware of this research but hadn't seen it summarized before;

Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley tested the effect of class on the differences in how parents interact with their young children. They were able to document dramatic differences in the intensity and nature of the verbal stimulation the kids were getting:

* Professional parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for working class parents and only 176 for welfare parents.
* Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two to one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one.
* By the time the children in the study were around three years old, the ones from professional families had average vocabularies of 1,116 words; the working-class ones averaged 749; the welfare kids, 525.

This partly explains why children from welfare homes are far more likely to themselves become beneficiaries. It's very sad.