It’s the giving season, and the most intellectually woke gift for that underprivileged infant on your list is the Word Pedometer®. Just attach its voice-activated mic to a bit of clothing and the pedometer counts every word the baby hears. People will want to talk to the baby just so they can watch the the baby’s daily word-count soar. Because according to the manufacturer, hearing lots of words before age five is the key to success in school and later in life—it’s even better than Mozart for developing the infant brain. So increasing the number of words a baby hears will make that baby smarter, especially if they are from a poor or minority family that normally can’t afford extra words.
At least that’s the theory behind what is essentially a Fitbit for Words. But the theory is wrong. It perpetuates the long-discredited belief that economically deprived minorities are also linguistically deprived. Talk is cheap, so give them words, not food stamps, and babies will succeed. Yes, babies need to be talked to, but metering the words they hear won’t make them baby Einsteins.
Since the 1960s, social scientists have claimed that low-income parents speak less to their children, using language that’s less-complicated than the kind used in middle class families. The blunt language of the poor supposedly explained why their children didn’t do as well in school as more privileged children. In addition, since the 1990s, scare headlines have been proclaiming that babies raised in minority households are linguistically impoverished as well, hearing 30 million fewer words than their well-off peers. This much-touted 30 Million Word Deficit is supposed to explain why poor, minority children underperform in school—after all, 30 million is a lot of words to be missing out on. To erase the deficit, parents are told to bombard their kids from birth with words, words, and more words. It doesn’t matter what kind of words: a monosyllable is as good as a polysyllable. A short, concrete term counts the same as an abstract sesquipedalianism.
And the Word Pedometer® is there to help them do just that. It offers all parents, rich and poor alike, the chance to make their babies smarter. It’s simple to use: just set a daily word goal. You can track baby’s word count on the convenient smartphone app. Once you meet the word target, try raising it. See how many words you can say to the baby, then say a few more. You can track high-scoring babies on the app and see how your baby stacks up against the leaderboard. And it’s only $149 (smartphone not included)—surely not too much to spend to ensure that Muffy, along with baby Boris and baby Natasha, luxuriate in a lexically enriched environment.
So what’s not to like? Plenty. It’s one thing to use a baby monitor to see if an infant is awake, or crying. But attaching a listening device directly to your child means someone in the cloud could be creeping on them, monetizing their data, or filing it in some national security database.
On top of that, babies are often so preoccupied with finding their mouth with their hands and feet that they don’t really care about reaching target word counts—the numbers are for their parents. Some of these parents will brag about their baby’s score like it was the SAT, to the chagrin of others who have failed to expose their child to enough words. And surely some ambitious parents will cheat, setting a book-on-tape to replay or simply plunking baby down in front of the TV, just to inflate their word score, because it could be crucial for getting them into Yale or USC.
But the real problem with the Word Pedometer is the junk science behind it. It’s true that language acquisition is a social phenomenon: infants acquire their language through exposure to people using that language. But there’s no proof outside of a single inaccurate and outdated survey that children from lower-income families hear fewer words than those from the middle class, and there’s no proof at all that inner city children are spoken to less frequently, or with less nuance, than their suburban peers.
There just is no 30 million word gap, and even if children in gated communities did hear more words, it would be difficult to prove that hearing those words actually makes babies do better once they get to school. So the Fitbit for Words, billed on one website as an “early education baby wearable”—that tag tells us who the target demographic really is—invades everyone’s privacy from pre-verbal infants to parents, siblings, caregivers, and innocent passers-by, and it is premised on bad data.
Despite these fatal flaws, erasing the non-existent 30 million word gap has become the goal of philanthropic foundations. Providence Talks, in Rhode Island, was an early pilot program soon followed by Brilliant Detroit, in Michigan, and talk-to-the-baby drives in Birmingham, Alabama, Hartford, Connecticut, Louisville, Kentucky, and Virginia Beach, Virginia, to name only some.
To be fair, hearing lots of words won’t harm babies, and certainly exposure to many different words—in a meaningful context—can increase vocabulary along with a baby's sense of well-being. But mandating talk, or worse yet, programming it, setting artificial goals, and using words for the benefit of the mic, not the baby, all evoke the droning, wordless teacher voice in the Charlie Brown cartoons. Because in the rush to up an infant’s word score, it’s easy to forget that language is about expression and communication, not a race to the end of the dictionary.
It turns out that filling in an imaginary word gap will do less for educational success than grappling with a very real gap between rich and poor, which translates into more economic support for schools in areas with a higher tax base, which in turn means more-successful schools in those areas. Love your baby, cuddle your baby, talk to your baby, read to your baby—do all of that every chance you get. But don’t mechanize those interactions to the point where they lose meaning, and don’t add more surveillance technology at a time when privacy has become a rare and precious commodity.
