Baby U

I heard a fascinating story yesterday on This American Life (podcast) about Geoffrey Canada, the founder of The Harlem Children's Zone. Canada started to Think Big, which is what the edition of TAL was all about. He wanted to solve big problems in a big way - getting kids out of poverty, keeping black boys from fast-tracking into the prison system and getting Harlem kids prepared for adulthood. It's truly extraordinary what Canada realized and how easy it could be to make a significant change. According to him, the most important difference between poor parents and well-to-do parents was the sheer number of words an affluent child hears. The amount of language and the quality of that language (encouraging and positive) is a deciding factor.

So, he began programs that are succeeding and showing amazing results teaching parents in Harlem things that suburban parents just know: namely that coporal punishment doesn't work, reading to your children is very important, building them up is crucial. It's interesting that in wealthy neighborhoods there is a strong sort of peer pressure to be a good parent. And there are very strong taboos about doing certain things that these poor parents were still free to do - 'popping' their kids, insulting them and running them down, yelling all the time, not going to pre-school - things that in my neighborhood we feel an intense pressure from our community to avoid. There would be a lot of gossip about me and kids wouldn't come for play dates if I were the kind of parent I heard about in this episode of This American Life. Very interesting.

www.thislife.org