Milk, cookies and thou

Even in a country of 300 million, pretty much everyone knows that C is for Cookie.

One of my closest friends used to say during our college days that instead of spending all our time arguing about the things that separate us, humans should remember that we have waaaay more in common with each other than differences. Like we all have two hands, two eyes, two feet....

I used to respond with well yeah, since everyone has those things in common we just take it as a given and thus the remaining .1% of difference becomes the 100% field and we go from there.

But it's still worth mentioning that what divides us is really just .1%; by and large the human experience is communal. We all spend most of our days eating and sleeping and working and talking within close proximity of each other if not always with each other. What's different are matters of degree, not kind.

And in pop culture, it's funny how much of our shaping childhood human experiences derive from furry puppets (with an assist from animated figures). Sesame Street, The Electric Company, The Muppet Show, Mister Roger's Neighborhood, Schoolhouse Rock--snippets of amazingly vivid memories set to the soundtrack of our youth, all brought back by the MOYT.

Below are some of my favorites. Warning: You will have these tunes stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

C is for Cookie (Sesame Street)

Somewhere in a (healthier) parallel universe millions of kids revere a Carrot Monster.

Grover the Waiter: Big Hamburger (Sesame Street)

Do they show this in waiter school?!

Orange sings 'Carmen' (Sesame Street)

I remember this one! I wonder how many opera singers were first inspired by Orange.

Yip Yips meet the telephone (Sesame Street)

If this doesn't make you laugh out loud, you're not human.

No Left Turn (Sesame Street)

Funnily, I remember the lines no left turn/no right turn/what, do I do? as being more central to the song. I guess that's a common thing of childhood, what you see as the crux of something often turns out to be just in passing.

Billy, Lick a Lolly (Electric Company)

It's fun just watching them dance in this one. I loved the Electric Company, and like everyone else am puzzled as to why it isn't as ubiquitous as Sesame Street.

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly (Schoolhouse Rock)

I'm surprised there aren't more kids named 'Lolly.'

Only a Bill (Schoolhouse Rock)

[insert joke about George Bush here]

Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla (Schoolhouse Rock)

It's got an amazingly catchy melody.

Interplanetary Janet

Another incredibly catchy melody; it's amazing how talented these children's songwriters were.

Watching these again, I'm also struck at how much they teach. Both overtly and subtly. There was an interesting NYTimes magazine piece this weekend, What It Takes to Make a Student, where the appopriately-named Paul Tough took a look at how some charters schools are succeeding in educating poor, minority students (actually just black and Hispanic, Asian American didn't make a single appearance in the long piece; which is typical since they'd have upset all of Tough's pat conclusions).

It seems obvious to me that what matters is making sure kids first have values conducive to learning; and then you apply lots of hard work in the classroom, good teachers and teaching methods, and the appropriate curriculumn. All underscored--if possible--by supportive parents. Spending money on anything else is at best just feel-good pablum, at worst corruption.

The article means well, but is just a lot of twaddle about driven white people trying to rescue these poor benighted children by teaching them the things their parents failed to, the same things that middle-class white parents are presumed to pass on to their offspring.

The key paragraphs in the article are these:

There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.

What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.

Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.

These findings have been out there for years; it's why every time I see a ridiculous parent on the subway, I want to hand them a card that tells them no matter how badly off they think they are, just talk to your kids without anger or cursing and things will be okay.

It's funny how the Times doesn't pick up on the other key part of this research, which is all the bells and whistles harried well-off parents shove at their kids are not only ineffective, but are not as effective as what a lot of good poor and minority parents give their kids for free. Although at a cost.

What the article doesn't mention is middle class and rich parents, who really have no excuse, often are the ones who actually fail to spend this quality time with their kids because they're too busy getting ahead in their careers or doing things like turning Halloween into an adult holiday.

It's the well-off families who schedule themselves into oblivion, who out of selfishness outsource to nannies and babysitters and therapists their parental duties. Where's the scolding New York Times magazine piece on that?

I guess it's just so much more natural for the journalists at the times and their ilk to associate poor parenting with poverty. When in reality, poor families often have no choice--they live in smaller homes, and have less leisure time options, so by default parents spend lots of time with their kids.

Often that time is toxic; but at least it's time, and changing their attitude may be easier than getting suburbanites to change their schedules.

Sure, well-off kids score better on tests--they're not hungry on test days, and are shielded from the other dysfunctions that come with poverty. But compare white American kids to foreign kids at similar socio-economic levels, and you'll see nobody should be holding up these suburban test scores as the gold standard.

Maybe everyone just needs to watch more PBS, less MTV. I mean, if parents can't be there for their kids, they might be surprised at how good of a job Cookie Monster can do.