Just to be clear, we'll be talking here about class, folk psychology, and my high school math teacher. But as ever, I've buried the lead. Now for some recap, before we get on to the good stuff --
In the last post, we found that the behavior exhibited in the classic cookie task is more strongly linked to vocabulary development than it is to cognitive control. This suggests that what's dictating behavior in the task can't simply be explained by appeal to the child's particular cognitive architecture. Rather, how long children hold out appears to be largely a function of their verbal skills. One conclusion we might draw from this is that how children perform in the task is related to their ability to verbally strategize.
As Mischel et al. write:
Many [of the most successful] children generated their own diversions: they talked quietly to themselves, sang, created games with their hands and feet... Their attempts to delay gratification seemed to be facilitated... by self-directed efforts to reduce their frustration during the delay period by selectively directing their attention and thoughts away from the rewards. (Mischel, Shoda & Rodriguez, 1989, p. 935)
While not all of these diversions are "verbal" in nature, it is easy to imagine how conceptualizing and implementing these types of strategies could be plausibly linked to verbal ability. Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that greater verbal prowess would facilitate more sophisticated (and more effective) distraction strategies, which would then result in greater delay times.
Of course, as my high school statistics teacher, Mrs. Grande, would be quick to point out – correlation does not imply causation. Simply because vocabulary and delay are highly correlated doesn't mean that verbal ability is necessarily what's driving delay in the task (though that is certainly a very plausible explanation, and one I would hedge my bets on).
For the moment, however, let's entertain a subtly different possibility : that vocabulary is a kind of cultural index, which is a measure of a child's environment. The possibility then, is that it is the particulars of that environment that is driving both the vocabulary scores and the delay times, in tandem.
Why make this suggestion? To begin to answer that, let's take a peak at what Walter Mischel has written about the cultural dimensions of self control.
"At the opposite extreme is the person who predominantly prefers immediate gratification and declines the alternative of waiting or working for larger, delayed goals. Correlated with this is a greater concern with the immediate present than with the future, and greater impulsivity. Socioculturally, this pattern is correlated with membership in the lower socioeconomic classes, with membership in cultures in which achievement orientation is low, and with indices of lesser social and cognitive competence." (Mischel, 1974)
In previous research, Mischel has found that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to perform worse than upperclass children on tests of delay of gratification. Given that he's also found that the time children spend delaying in the cookie task is predictive of a suite of life outcomes – including everything from their later social well-being to their academic achievement and professional advancement – he makes a logical leap: Might social classes diverge, he asks, based on our ability to exercise self-control?
It's critical that I note that Mischel is not a biological determinist on this [1]. He is not suggesting that people who live in poverty are all simply indolent and stupid, or that they are somehow morally suspect. To the contrary, Mischel tends to remove all moral weight or judgment from his discussions of self control, and in much of his work, characterizes control as a largely learned behavior. If he makes generalizations on the basis of class (which he does), I believe this derives more from his training as a scientist, and less from any particular political attitudes or leanings. He is simply looking to make sense of trends in human behaviors, and uses "delay of gratification" as a prism through which to understand them.
In any case, the question Mischel poses become doubly interesting in light of Ramscar and Tran's findings. As detailed above, and in earlier posts, their results indicate that “self control” behavior in the cookie task is strongly tied up with verbal ability. Indeed, they found that vocabulary is a better predictor of delay times than age or cognitive control.
What I haven't mentioned yet – and what may surprise you – is what predicts vocabulary.
As it turns out, one of the best predictors of how many words a toddler knows is socioeconomic status.
Why? The problem arises from a major learning gap: on the whole, children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to be exposed to far less language than their wealthier counterparts. A classic longitudinal study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley (1995) found that disadvantaged children hear far fewer word-types and far fewer words spoken overall, and receive less feedback and guidance in their production from their parents. To be clear: children from welfare families hear on the order of thousands fewer words per day than children from professional families, leading to what Hart and Risley term a “meaningful difference” over time. While it is difficult to quantify the impact this impoverished input has on learning, many researchers believe the effect to be massive. Just to give you an idea – by the age of three, children from professional families actually have larger recorded vocabularies than the parents of the welfare families.
Further, there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that early childhood language development influences the course of subsequent learning, and is highly predictive of later cognitive and linguistic competence. Developmental psychologists Virginia Marchman and Anne Fernald have found, for example, that a child’s aptitude for learning new words is predicated on her early exposure to language. The implication is troubling: how much a child learns early on shapes how well she’s able to learn later. This then leads to a vicious cycle: children of parents with impoverished vocabularies are at high risk of growing up to become parents of children with impoverished vocabularies.
The issue is not insignificant. How many words a child knows is not simply a rootless number, with little bearing on subsequent education and achievement. Many psychologists believe that vocabulary is a core marker of general intelligence, and performance on vocabulary inventories and indices is highly correlated with IQ scores. Taken together, these findings paint a bleak picture in which a child’s intelligence – her capacity for subsequent learning – even her ability to distract herself in the cookie task – all may be intimately bound up with her early experience with language.
It is easy to imagine why this would be so. Take a student promoted to the next grade level who has failed to master some of the foundational materials of the previous year. In all likelihood, she will simply slip further and further behind as she progresses. It is next to impossible, for instance, to try to teach a child algebra, when she lacks a firm footing in arithmetic, or to initiate a child into the workings of double-dutch, if she can’t already skip rope. If we understand that language – which is our most fundamental tool with which we grasp to the world – underpins much of our subsequent learning, then it becomes clear how devastating the effects of falling behind before preschool must be.
All of which raises a rather subversive possibility.
If you recall, I first raised the idea (hypothesis 1) that verbal ability may be driving children’s ability to effectively strategize – and thereby delay – in the cookie task. If this is the case, then it suggests that what Mischel’s experiments have been tapping into all these years, is how early language attainment charts the course of what is to come. Language is our primary mode of operating within and engaging with the world, and as such, touches everything we do and everything we understand [2]. It may be that the cookie task, as an indirect measure of verbal ability, is telling us something about how children employ that skill to their benefit. And it may be that that ability – to effectively navigate the world through language – is what is predicting everything else.
This does not, of course, rule out the possibility that the task measures a form of “self control.” It does, however, shift the emphasis, from one of impulse control (prefrontal functioning), to one of verbal strategy and practice. And it suggests that no, classes do not diverge on the basis of some cognitive ability; rather, they diverge on the basis of language -- which is just another way of saying, they divide by social advantage [3].
But then, of course, there remains that pesky second possibility (hypothesis 2) : that whatever the task is measuring, is a measure of culture and environment, which is then reflected in both the vocabulary scores and the practice of “self control.” In other words, it may be that having a large vocabulary at age three tends to go hand in hand with having parents who value industriousness and temperance, who diet rigorously and exercise strenously, and who model delay of gratification at every turn, such that their children – seeing this – are both scholarly and disciplined by age three (and of course, all too cookie-avoidant).
Indeed, this may be the case, and perhaps it is tempting to characterize the socioeconomic divide in this way. But I find something suspect about supposing that the ‘toiling’ poor are somehow less able to exercise self-control than the often ‘indolent’ rich. Certainly there are the archetypes of the industrious, self-made millionaire, and the slothful welfare recipient to consider. But what of the advantages and disadvantages that fate has bestowed on our children? A child from a wealthier family will, in all likelihood, be exposed to far more language, go to far better schools, benefit from the support of tutors, never have to decide between supporting her family and continuing her schooling, and so on, and so forth. Such that, at every point in her life, she is blessed with a comparative advantage, whose benefits will simply multiply as she advances.
Is it really the case that a child who has to drop out of school to support her family is failing to exercise “self control”?
My point is: it may be true that certain cultures within American society place more value on education – for example – or the merits of “an honest day’s work.” But it's not hard to see why people from lower-income neighborhoods might be hard-pressed to value education, given the state of their local drop-out factories, or why one might be tempted to engage in below-the-board activities, when there simply is no better recourse. From this perspective, we can see that how low-SES families navigate the world may be far more indicative of the constraints the world has placed on them, than of their ability (or no) to control their own behavior [4].
When we then consider Ramscar & Tran's finding -- that behavior in the cookie task isn't a good mirror of good cognitive function -- it seems that the already tenuous link between class and "self control" begins to come apart at the seams.
But then again, it depends what we mean by control, doesn’t it?
Do we mean: Valuing education or quitting smoking? Waiting to get pregnant or avoiding drugs? Studying hard or running through the pain? Waiting on the cookie or holding one's tongue? We collapse all of these behaviors into one broad heading: "self control." But it's far from clear that they all take the same determinants. Whether we engage or not in these behaviors may be the product of our cultural value systems; the workings (or failings) of our neural architectures; the strategies we have learned to engage with our lives; or the idiosyncrasies of our highly particular personalities. By mixing science with self control, we've walked into a hornet's nest, a word trap, what the philosophers would call a bit of 'folk psychology.'
But now that we know -- what do we do?
[This is the fourth in a series of posts on delay of gratification that is to be continued. Access #1, #2, and #3.]
The Daily Fact Check
[1] Let me be clear: Mischel frequently acknowledges the contribution of learning. "...an early family environment in which self-imposed delay is encouraged and modeled may nurture other types of behavior that facilitates the acquisition of social and cognitive skills, study habits, or attitudes which may be associated with obtaining higher scores...It also seems reasonable...that children will have a distinct advantage beginning early in life if they use effective self-regulatory strategies to reduce frustration in situations in which self-imposed delay is required to attain desired goals." (Mischel, Shoda & Rodriguez, 1989, p. 936)
[2] If you're wondering where I stand on the Whorfian question, I can begin by saying: in the current linguistic clime, I'm not sure it's well posed...
[3] I want to be careful here not to set up Mischel as a straw man. Mischel is as careful a thinker as he is an experimentalist, and some of the broad strokes I've used to characterize the question he posed don't do justice to the subtleties with which he considers them. Nevertheless, I feel like this is a critical question to address, given that how we interpret and understand human behavior may shape everything from our politics to our day to day interactions with our fellow man. If you're hankering for some more on Mischel, Jonah Lehrer, darling of the science writing world and a, er, graduate of my high school, has a wonderful piece --that no doubt, you've already read-- in the New Yorker.
[4] For a fascinating (and provocative) application of this idea to social behavior and economics, you may be interested in Karelis' “The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor.” Listen to him talk shop on NPR.
Get Some
Hurtado N, Marchman VA, & Fernald A (2008). Does input influence uptake? Links between maternal talk, processing speed and vocabulary size in Spanish-learning children. Developmental science, 11 (6), 313-9 PMID: 19046145
Marchman VA, & Fernald A (2008). Speed of word recognition and vocabulary knowledge in infancy predict cognitive and language outcomes in later childhood. Developmental science, 11 (3) PMID: 18466367
Hoff, E. (2003). The Specificity of Environmental Influence: Socioeconomic Status Affects Early Vocabulary Development Via Maternal Speech Child Development, 74 (5), 1368-1378 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8624.00612
Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M., & et al, . (1991). Early vocabulary growth: Relation to language input and gender. Developmental Psychology, 27 (2), 236-248 DOI: 10.1037//0012-1649.27.2.236
Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. (1989). Delay of gratification in children Science, 244 (4907), 933-938 DOI: 10.1126/science.2658056
SES and self-control are correlated, but in exploring one of the potential causal relationships, let's not forget the very complex package that is SES. Lower SES is associated with poorer diet, poor sleep, higher levels of chronic stress and disruption ranging from insecurity about jobs, where you will live, conflicts among family members, higher rates of abuse, drug exposure, exposure to pollution, etc. etc.
How many of the above factors do you believe might be linked to the ability to self-regulate?
You're right, tbell1, that low SES is confounded with a dozen different variables. The question, I suppose, is - from a theoretical perspective - which variables ought to be implicated in cognitive control or delay of gratification? If I had to guess: sleep and diet are probably implicated.
Though I don't think we can rule out language development yet. Would be interesting to know if, after a language intervention in low SES children, cognitive control increases.
But remember, from what we know, cognitive control *isn't* what the cookie task tests. So we're not getting any differences in neural functioning between high SES and low SES (though that might exist too -- I'm not sure if there have been DCCS-comparisons between groups). What we're getting is differences in how long they hold out in the cookie task -- which appears to be predicted by verbal ability. I'm still hesitant to call that "self control," because if it's not cognitive control, than it's not what we normally take self control to be in the first place.
Of course, as @Jason and @tbell1 mention, there may be myriad other factors that play a role in shaping task performance. What's notable -- by the way -- is that the study that Ramscar & Tran did was not a cross-SES comparison. In all likelihood, all the children in the Ramscar & Tran study were high SES, since they were recruited from around the Stanford area (this goes back to Bora's comment on an earlier post about how we only test 'WEIRD' people). But anyway, at least in this study, it seems unlikely that we were dealing with a host of other variables.
To be fair: one of the reasons for looking at verbal ability in conjunction with delay time, is that we can often predict which kids will be at ceiling in our tests, simply by watching how much their parents interact with and talk to them. Even though almost everyone who comes through our lab is relatively high-SES, there's a great deal of variability in how the parents interact with their children. And that seems to be predicting performance in a lot of the studies we run.
(I almost feel like we should videotape pre-test interactions with the parents, and have a blind-coder make predictions about subsequent test-scores... I really think it would work)
In a perfect study (given enough grant$$), we would control not only for things like SES, but also diet, sleep, amount the parent talked to their child, and so on. It might be that we could get a decent measure simply from doing the pre-experiment videotaping.
Getting the parent interaction would make great information for studies. Inconsistent parenting would influence the results if the child has learned that promises are not guaranteed both for the child that knows mom will give them a second cookie anyway or the child who feels they won't get a second cookie no matter what. Both of those children would have less interest in holding out based on what they have learned about adult behavior.
Also, recognizing an authoritarian parenting style can help explain a child's reaction to the cookie test. Some kids are not accustomed to having a choices in their life. I also wonder how much a child would hear the "If you" before the "don't eat it now" and hold out longer because they believe they have been told what to do.
Many factors. But you are straining too hard to avoid the genetic contribution. Genes are correlated to IQ and IQ is correlated to SES. It's nature and nurture.
Quite disturbingly, if these three-year-olds are already disadvantaged, on average they're never realistically going to catch up with higher SES children. For at best---and almost certainly this is not going to be the case---their environment would become as good as the high SES children. But they are already behind...
Perhaps this is why so many of the head start programs regress. They stave off further losses, but then when the booster programs end, the delta continues its increase.
Ultimately, there is little likelihood of bringing low SES children's environment to the level of high SES children's, though bad influences can be mitigated and good influence can be provided. Go too far in efforts at "leveling" and everyone will suffer.
@Mike Thanks for bringing this up... This is actually something I would like to write on in upcoming weeks. I think there is a fairly widespread assumption that, as you said, "genes are correlated to IQ." Having read much of the literature on the topic, however, I remain skeptical that that correlation is anywhere near as strong as it gets reported. I don't want to say that genes are nothing. I do want to say "they're not nearly as much as most people think." I think that -- unlike height, for example -- much of the variation between individuals that you see in vocabulary and intellect can be explained by way of environment.
It's clear also, from your second statement, that the stance people take on this issue actually makes a difference in their social outlook. As I said in the "Daily Fact Check," the reason these questions are important, is because our understanding of the science behind them may shape not only our politics, but our day to day interactions with other human beings. I think it's critical that people be clearly informed about what the science does or does not support. And it's my sense that the IQ literature has simply not been done justice.
"I don’t want to say that genes are nothing."
As far as IQ there is no evidence that there is a "genetic" difference between social classes.
If there is (and I would like to know about it as I have also read the literature) please cite it, Mike. Saying the kids are 'already behind' before environment is considered is completely unsubstantiated and contributes to bias.
This is as offensive as saying black children have lower IQ's (for genetic reasons) OR Jews and Asians have higher IQ's.
And say we "discover" somehow (how??) that there is a genetic - not epigenetic/environmental - difference (as Gregory Cochran and others would hypothesize)....exactly how would this affect our politics or policies?? I would love to hear this spelled out. As in exactly what were James Watson's plans for the low IQ Africans??
I wonder if there's another mediator - how is the nutrition of the low SES children? I'm thinking in particular of some work of Roy Baumeister that shows persistence on tasks and relation to blood glucose levels.
(As an aside, Baumeister's lofty folk-psychological explanation I don't buy, because there's someone else pursuing the same question in comparative studies using dogs.)
@Tybo I do think the way we study "self control" has a folk psychological dimension to it. Which is to say: we have this colloquial way of talking about self-control that covers quite a broad range of behaviors, and treats them all as if they were governed by the same underlying (cognitive) mechanism. But, in all likelihood, they're not. Doing careful science requires that we try to disentangle the normative, cognitive, linguistic (etc) dimensions of self-control, to look at what factors are producing which behaviors.
Whether or not scientists are also studying self-control in dogs is besides the point, because I'm not saying that "self control" - or self-controlling behaviors - don't exist. What I'm saying is that we have a muddied way of talking about it (aka. a "folk psychological" way of talking about it).
Hope that clarifies the reference!
Tybo: would love the reference from the dog literature. Excellent blogger fodder for the other blog!
http://www.fcoe.net/ela/pdf/Vocabulary/Narrowing%20Vocab%20Gap%20KK%20KF%201.pdf
I think the comparison should be between low ses adults and privileged third graders, not three year olds. The link above isn't the one where I saw this point made originally, but it compares third graders and twelfth graders, so that's probably close enough.
There's also this note:
"The insidious achievement gap becomes evident far earlier than most realize. Language development among children of professional parents begins to take off as early as 18 months, and at the same time begins to flatline among children of low-income parents. By the time an average child whose parents are on welfare reaches age 4, she has heard 32 million fewer words than a child of professional parents, according to a seminal study published in 1995 by University of Kansas researchers. Without intervention, that language gulf only expands over time. Few children who enter kindergarten far behind more advantaged peers are able to catch up. "
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=literacy_begins_at_birth
I think that kids without sufficient vocabulary end up frustrated by not really understanding what their teachers are saying, what the world is asking of them, or how things connect to each other. The move beyond the literal into the figurative is likely what gives us so many more words. Subtle differences in meanings among words, shadings of sarcasm and so on are harder to deal with. Spend any time with a two year old who screams for lack of words to speak, and you can see how words and the command of words is likely central to our navigating the world successfully.
There are probably some easy policy solutions like daily story hours at community centers, a push for wordier tv shows, and some doctor's office/clinic pregnancy training about talking to your baby. Even if the vocabulary passed on is of "lower quality" at least the quantity might help. It takes a long time and a lot of talking to get those 32 million words in by age 4.
@ed.policy Thanks for fleshing out the information provided in the post! I also really like your suggestions -- particularly the bit about wordier TV shows. From what I understand, the reason that TV is not a good source of verbal information for children, is because most programs use the same "stock" language (very high frequency words and phrases, and repetitively), so that children who are getting a lot of their verbal input from TV aren't actually being exposed to a wide range of language. The great thing about TV is that it has such broad reach and doesn't require personnel / training / or even much financial investment. It simply requires that writers of child-directed shows (cartoons and so on) slightly rethink their approach.
In theory, TV would be a fantastic way to introduce vocabulary to children. I mean -- just think of what *reading* Shakespeare is like, compared to seeing the plays performed (or watching a film version). When I read the plays, I typically need to read an annotated version, because there are so many words and references that go right over my head. But when I see the plays performed by able actors, who understand what they're communicating, it's easy for me to grasp what's going on. If children were introduced to new words in the context of shows they enjoyed -- where the meaning of the words was made clear in the context of the story line -- it would be much more effective than trying to teach them definitions by rote.
More men picking up responsibility in parenting - i.e. spending significant amounts of time with their children - could make a big difference to children's vocabularies. Surely the vocabulary and lexicogrammatical resources of two adults, versus that of one, is much richer and more varied.
I see nothing at all surprising in the 'finding' given here. Social science findings often reaffirm or echo what common sense observations tell us.
Secondly we have confirmation for this phenomena in a different way. 'Delayed gratification' in the form of 'saving for later instead of spending for now' is at the heart of the Protestant ethic and the capitalist revolution.
Actually, "common sense" rarely tells you much about our behavior or the way our minds work, and this is likely a *feature* - and not a bug - of the system. I'd recommend checking out The Invisible Gorilla.
@Shalom I'm not sure I agree with Jason on this one. I think there *can* be much wisdom to common sense. There's a great book that Michael --who I work with-- had me read, called "Man and the Natural World" by Keith Thomas. I highly, highly recommend it. While the book is more broadly a free-ranging examination of how British attitudes toward the environment have changed over the last several hundred years, several chapters focus on how a great deal of folk wisdom about plants and animals was lost as a result of the 'new botany' -- in which plants and animals were reclassified with Latin names according to their features and possible family relation to each other. Prior to this, they had been categorized by their practical and social utility and had been given names that reflected their use in society --for example, they may have been used for medicinal purposes or for make-up, as spices for a stew or as aphrodisiacs. Once reclassified 'scientifically,' much of this practical knowledge was lost.
Science looks at human behavior and mind from a particular vantage point. But I think it is quite possible that the knowledge produced through science can stand alongside (or complement) popular wisdom. In some cases, it may debunk folk notions or popular psychology; but that need not always be the case. From what I can tell, the 'scientific' study of linguistics over the past fifty years has expended much effort telling people their intuitions are wrong. In much of the work I do, we've found that actually, it's the linguists who are probably wrong.
Oh, thanks for your response!
My "real" thought is actually that we should consider doubling the amount of time kids spend in kindergarten and first grade in some completely non-stigmatizing way if it's possible.
When a language poor kid gets to kindergarten and simply doesn't know what the teacher is saying, it's down hill from there. And since I've just had the horrific experience of finding out that a kid I've known since kindergarten was shot dead not super far from where I live, this issue has become far more real to me.
You can really see the problems as early as kindergarten when the kids are restless and the teachers are not creative in their responses because there is already a curriculum to get through and the teaching is mostly uni-directional.
A two year kindergarten and a two year first grade sequence is a lot of time during which to expose kids to some of those 32 million missing words. And if the emphasis is less on performance early and more on creative uses of language in bi- and multi-directional situations, it could just be a great school experience. Think of all the times a teacher tells the kids to shut up. Well, in fact it's the opposite we need at that age. They need to talk -- a lot!
*****
And one cross-cultural question -- I have read that English produces more dyslexics than other languages do because it is such a weirdly spelled mess of a mix of sources. Spanish, I think I have read, is much more phonetic and so causes a lot fewer reading problems.
Is there an analogue with languages and vocabulary? French, say, has many fewer words than does English. So do French speaking kids display the same kinds of language problems that English speaking kids do?
If you know anything about this at all, I'd be interested!
Thanks for this whole blog space, by the way! It's a really nice resource!
I'll take the question about dyslexia (since its what I research): the prevalence of dyslexia is roughly equivalent across languages. The main differences are in where you find the deficit. In more shallow orthographies (such as Dutch) where pronunciation is highly regular and predictable, the main deficit is in fluency. In a deep orthography, like English, you add a phonological deficit on top of the fluency deficit.
What about languages with logographic writing systems? Is there something similar to dyslexia in Chinese speakers, and how is it manifested?
There is dyslexia in logographic languages like Chinese, though it has a slightly different neurobiological pattern. Whether or not the primary deficit is phonological is still being debated in the literature. I will definitely be doing some posts about reading and dyslexia, so I'm glad there's some interest!
Forgive my ignorance, but the common wisdom (for what that's worth!) about dyslexia refers to problems with switching the order of letters around, eg., "top" becomes read as "pot". Since there aren't alphabetic symbols available in logographic writing to get switched around, what does the disorder look like? What would a first grade teacher in China notice about a student that would be a first clue that her student may be dyslexic? Would the student switch around the order of morphemes? If I'm totally wrong about the whole letter-switching-around thing, say so.
This "common wisdom" is actually not the case. The main deficit is phonological. A breakdown in the ability to match the visual properties of a word with the auditory sound structure of that word. Sounds like a series on reading and dyslexia is *definitely* in order. Look for it in September.
Jason,
Thanks for the response. That makes more sense than my half-remembered reading from some years back.
Maybe your hypothesis #2 could have a more subtle version, call it hypothesis #2b. It may not be a matter of parents "who model delay of gratification at every turn", but rather parents who have the time and inclination to reinforce these behaviors in their children. I find it easy to imagine two parents (or one) who work long hours in low-wage jobs, and all the stress and responsibility it entails, having the capacity to consistently exhibit "industriousness and temperance", but *not* having the time or energy to be as thoughtful about reinforcing these behaviors in their children, as compared with prosperous parents.
However, it seems likely to me that vocabulary, behaviors indicative of a high degree of "self-control", and later social status could each derive independently from the parents' social status. A privileged child from high social status parents does not need to achieve much independently of his or her parents' influence in order to stay in the same class into which he or she was born.
Regarding your post, one though I have, based on observations (and personal experience with raising two kids....)
During high stress moments, whiny children are very difficult to deal with and the two quickest responses are to yell (which increases the whining) or to shove something at them to quiet them quickly.
Watch stressed out moms toting kids on public transit and you will see many examples of whiny kids being handed juice bottles to suck on, and snack foods to munch on to keep them quiet. Whining on the train is not fun, and the only thing worse is whining on a bus.
This food shoving leads to dental decay, weight issues, an association between food and comfort, and isn't the least bit verbal. The SES issue would probably cut down on the number of pediatrician visits and the pediatrician is less likely perhaps to say "No juice ever" or to reinforce verbal responses instead as the food and drink relieve stress to the point that it honestly could be cutting down on more violent responses.
This sense is totally observational, not at all scientific, is probably deserving of a fair amount of actual research before it's anything other than my own personal transit experiences in a big city.
****
By the way, I'm really looking forward to the dyslexia series!
This series is interesting, it brings back memories of teaching kindergarteners with edible manipulatives. A few of the kids that had the hardest time waiting until the math lesson was over were some of the low SES ones but that was a hunger issue more than self-control.
I wonder if higher SES children had more exposure to language in the home about future events helping them focus on the second cookie to come. Did anyone ask the tested kids afterward about their choice to eat or not? What the children themselves had to say about their strategy (if they recognized having one) would be valuable.
@Birthday Princess That's a really interesting suggestion and one that would definitely be worth pursuing (though it wasn't in the last set of experiments). However, I'm not sure that the kids could necessarily tell you what they were doing; not all strategies are consciously chosen. I do think it would have been worthwhile to get some kind of measure of how parent interaction at home correlated with vocab correlated with delay times. That kind of study would be tricky to set up, but certainly worth doing!