Word: parenting
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Previous studies have shown that wealthier, educated parents talk to their young children more, using more complex vocabulary and syntax, than parents of lesser means. And these differences may help explain why richer kids start school with richer vocabularies. But what goes on before children can talk, during that phase - familiar to any parent - when communication takes the form of pointing, waving, grabbing and other kinds of baby sign language? Do well-off parents also gesture more to their kids...
Researchers were interested less in the number of gestures a child or parent made than in their variety - for example, pointing at a doll 10 times would count as only one gesture, but pointing at a doll and then a bed might count as two. During the 90-minute session, 14-month-olds from well-off families used an average of 24 meaningfully different gestures, researchers found, while children from lower-income families used an average of just...
Here's how: at 14 months of age, pointing toward an object is the way most kids use gestures. If a parent responds to that gesture by verbally identifying the object - by saying, "That's a doll," for example - children get a head start on growing their nascent vocabularies. "That's a teachable moment, and mothers are teaching the kids the word for an object," says Goldin-Meadow. She also believes that lively gesturing (like clapping) could allow kids to better understand new concepts (like happiness) simply by giving them a visceral way to express them...
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...what is it about her choices - the how, the who and the why - that gets people so riled up? Remember that for an instant, there was celebration and wonder at the news of healthy octuplets. But it vanished quickly once we learned that the mother was already the single parent of six, living with her own mother, who had to file for bankruptcy last year. First, she seemed to have violated some unspoken rule we have about fertility treatments, the miracle technologies that nuzzle up against so many ethical lines. We can create embryos in a dish, pick...