Lecture 13 - Low income children

Question 1

how much money do families need to meet most basic needs?

Answer 1

2 times greater than federal poverty level

Question 2

National Center for Children in Poverty (education of parents)

Answer 2

26% with parents who have less than high school
35% parents who have hs diploma
39% parents who have some college or more

Question 3

Race and ethnicity breakdown

Answer 3

27% white
30% asian
61% black
63% hispanic

Question 4

Forum on Family and Child statistics, 2006 (single parent homes)

Answer 4

Children in single parent homes more vulnerable to poverty

2004 - children in single parent homes experienced higher poverty rate (42%) than children living in two parent homes (9%)

Question 5

nwlc.org (2011) (jobs)

Answer 5

7.7% of African american and 8.5% of hispanic women worked in jobs that paid at or below minimum wage, compared to 4.3% white men

Black and hispanic women are more likely to be HOH

Married household’s median income was $71, 830 while female HOH earned $32, 597

Question 6

2008 US estimates, facts, figures show

Answer 6

US shifting from manufacturing, industrial society to service-oriented, high-tech society. Blue collar jobs disappearing.

Question 7

Standard of living for those in the bottom 10% is lower in US than any other developed nation except the UK

Answer 7

.

Question 8

Poor families with 3 or more people spend about 1/3 of income on food

Answer 8

.

Question 9

Time Magazine 1/7/11

Answer 9

2012: 37% of jobs will require BA or higher
26% of jobs will require HS Diploma
8.5% of jobs will require less than a hs diploma

Question 10

Blue collar jobs…

Answer 10

are decreasing and adults with low literacy have less options

US offers few jobs such as fishing and farming (like Philippines) that don’t require literacy skills

Question 11

Neuman, 2009

Answer 11

• Perhaps for the first time in its history, American now has a caste-like underclass of unskilled and illiterate persons with no counterpart in the Western world

Question 12

Homeless children…

Answer 12

• lack a fixed, regular, and adequate night time residence

* live in cars, parks, public places, abandoned buildings, bus or train stations

Question 13

Define homelessness:

Answer 13

inability of people to pay for housing; impacted by both income and affordability of available housing (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2012)

Question 14

Rent and income statistics

Answer 14

• the number of low SES households that spent more than half of their income on rent increased by 6% from 2009 to 2010
• average income of working poor increased by less than 1% form 2009 to 2010.
• NOT A SINGLE COUNTY IN THE NATION WHERE A FAMILY WITH AN AVERAGE ANNUAL INCOME OF $9,400 COULD AFFORD FAIR MARKET RENT FOR A 1 BEDROOM UNIT

Question 15

Negative effects of poverty

Answer 15

• homelessness –> irregular attendance in schoo
• lack of food - learning problems, stunted physical growth
• neighborhood problems such as increased exposure to violence, post-traumatic stress disorder, inferior schools, fewer safe places for children to learn, play, explore

Question 16

Hepp, 2011 ASHA leader (neurotoxins)

Answer 16

• low ses have increased exposure to neurotoxicants than middle SES children (cigarette smoke, lead)
• neurotoxicants linked to mental retardation and learning disabilities

Question 17

how much TV per day do some low SES children watch?

Answer 17

11 hours

Question 18

More negative effects

Answer 18

• family stress - depression, fighting, AN
• fewer learning resources - books, child care, libraries
• home and work responsibilities take priority over school
• Fewer extracurricular activities, travel opportunities
• asthma
• lead exposure
• prematurity
• lack of access to health care/dental care

Question 19

Generational poverty

Answer 19

• poverty affects families for 2 generations or more
• welfare style
• lack of planning for future; all about present
• “the world owes me”
• think future is determined by luck and chance
• Why fight?
• why bother with therapy?

Question 20

Situational poverty

Answer 20

• result of particular set of circumstances (foreclosed, medical issue)
• occurs for shorter time
• people have a lot of pride
• may refuse offers of help
• Internal focus - can influence future by making choices now, believe they can shape own fate, open toward intervention

Question 21

Oral-language skills of low ses children

Answer 21

• SES is more critical to a child’s language development than ethnic background
• factor most highly related to SES is the mother’s educational level

Question 22

Nelson, 2010 (SES)

Answer 22

Early communication experiences differ based on family income to such a degree that SES can predict a child’s academic performance during the school age years.

Question 23

Hart & Risley (1995, 2003) Study

Answer 23

Studied children from professional, working-class, and welfare homes

• found that in a full year, children from prof families heard about 4 million utternances, children from welfare families heard about 250,000

Question 24

Hart and Risley extrapolation…

Answer 24

In order for welfare children to gain a vocab equivalent to that of children from working class home, they would need to attend a preschool program for forty hours per week where they heard language at a level used in professional homes.

Question 25

Low ses children…

Answer 25

• low vocab skills
• poorer grammar
• pragmatics problems (rude, demanding)

Question 26

Nelson, 2010 (low ses children talk)

Answer 26

Low ses children more engaged in talk about immediate, daily living concerns (food, clothing)

• negative effect on development of abstract lang

Question 27

Literacy skills of low ses children

Answer 27

• families may be too poor to buy books
• parent’s low education leads to less reading
• reading style affected - lower level language, tell children to pay attention without interrupting, ask basic straightforward questions that don’t require much thought

Question 28

Moran (2010) parenting.com (re books and reading difficulties)

Answer 28

middle class neighborhood child owns an average of 13+ books

Low income communities average one book for every 300 children

• reading difficulties increase odds a child will drop out of school, have a criminal record
• states like CA and IN factor in the # of 3rd graders not reading at grade level when planning future jail construction

Question 29

Considerations in assessment of language skills

Answer 29

• Low ses children get overreferred to special education
• many standardized tests of language skills are biased against low ses students
• there can be grammatical bias
• Test tasks are often decontextualized (tell me everything you can about a bird)

Question 30

At home, many low ses children are not encouraged to take verbal risks. When asked to guess, they shut down.

They also aren’t exposed to “school” or “test type” tasks such as verbal display of knowledge with an unfamiliar adult

Answer 30

,

Question 31

In order to evaluate language skills of low ses, we can use

Answer 31

• portfolio assessment
• information processing skills
• language samples
• dynamic assessment

Question 32

Considerations in language intervention

Answer 32

• reach out to families, by giving them lists of resources
• send books home
• send home shorts DVDs that demonstrate language stimulation techniques

Question 33

Focus on developing…

Answer 33

Pragmatics - solving problems verbally, being polite

Correct grammar - morphology and syntax

Question 34

Lovelace & Stewart (2009) (background knowledge for vocab)

Answer 34

Children from low ses are often limited in experiences needed to build background knowledge for vocab growth because individual choices and experiences provided to these children overall are more limited than for groups with greater economic resources

Question 35

Increasing Executive Functioning skills

Answer 35

• low ses are vulnerable in this area due to environmental and physiological factors
  
  • They often have a lot of chaos in their lives

Question 36

What is Executive functioning?

Answer 36

• problem solving processes that are utilized at the outset of a novel, nonautomatic task
• goal-directed behavior that we engage in to be successful in life
• Thinking about and planning for the future, and considering our choices and their consequences