It’s official. Men are good at something! Just when we women were despairing of getting the lump with the television remote stuck firmly to his hand to do anything helpful or constructive -  research has found that husbands do have a use.

 

Obviously we wives will take some convincing. I personally will be calling for far more research and a double checking of recent research findings.  However, if we are to believe researchers the University of North Carolina’s Child Development Institute and School of Education, husbands can have a positive and greater impact than mothers on their children's language development between ages 2 and 3!

 

The research involved families with two working parents. Researchers video recorded parents and their 2-year-old children in their homes, and the children whose fathers used more diverse vocabularies had greater language development when they were tested one year later. The sophistication of Mum’s vocabulary had little effect.

 

Nadya Panscofar, the author of the study said, "These findings underscore that for two-parent, dual earner families, fathers should be included in all efforts to improve language development and school readiness."

 

Methinks Ms Pansocofar must be unmarried, because all married women know that getting working fathers involved in child care of any kind is the hard part. Getting them to express themselves freely and openly to anyone is nothing short of miraculous!  With working fathers getting them to come home before the infant child is asleep is a difficult enough task!!

All women know that getting any man involved in a meaningful conversation with anyone is a wondrous event.

 

The University of Carolina study also found that high-quality child care during the first three years of life was a factor in better expressive language development, but nursery child care was less a factor than family language. This is consistent with lots of other research which has found that the parents' level of education, and time parents spend communicating with their children has a significant impact on children's language abilities. (Schools may like to take the credit for children who do well linguistically - but numerous studies have shown that it is the type of home and parenting that is the major determinant). 

 

For nearly fifty years we have had empirical evidence that the home and social class of the family are the major determinants of  all educational achievement in every society.  (Children from mud huts do not get into IIT) This is because all education systems are constructed by, have the values, and use the language structures of the upper middle classes. 

 

Numerous researchers including such luminaries as Harold Rosen, Basil Bernstein, and Chomsky have pointed to class differences in the use of language as an impediment to educational achievement for the less wealthy classes. Since 1975 we have evidence that men and women, on average, also tend to use slightly different language styles. The prominent socio-linguist Deborah Tannen argued that men have a report style, aiming to communicate factual information, whereas women have a rapport style, more concerned with building and maintaining relationships.

 

So ladies - all you have to do if you want your child to excel in language use at school, is to find a partner more communicative than the average man, who gets home from work a couple of hours before your toddler is ready for bed, and is prepared to spend that time talking to your little bundle of joy in a manner more like a women than a man….. Good luck!