Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

In families where parents have professional occupations, those parents used “more words and more different words of all kinds, more multiclause sentences, more past and future verb tenses.” Such parents “also gave their children more affirmative feedback and responded to them more often each hour they were together.” Moreover, they gave less “negative feedback to their children per hour” than other parents.16 The ratio of affirmative words to negative words was six to one in families where the parents had professional occupations. By contrast, in families on welfare, negative or discouraging words outnumbered positive or encouraging words by more than two to one.17 Negative responses included such words as “Don’t,” “Stop,” “Quit” and “Shut up.”