Moms, dads, or caregivers who mainly talk to their offspring using commands rather than reasoning may get their kids to do what

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问题     Moms, dads, or caregivers who mainly talk to their offspring using commands rather than reasoning may get their kids to do what they want, but they also fail to develop their children’s minds, the research out of the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA suggests.
    The findings have particular significance for minority communities where do-as-I-say exchanges have long predominated over more nuanced (细微的) argument. But they may also resonate with policy works, as Washington debates whether to expand publicly funded preschool programs. Reading, singing, dancing and other activities at the heart of the government’s multi-billion dollar Head Start program may help low income kids aged zero to 5. But a crucial link, these studies suggest, is coaching parents to explain decisions with their children and letting them talk back, at least just a little bit.
    In one of the studies due out early next year in the journal of Developmental Psychology, researchers spent more than a year studying two dozen Mexican-American families, observing real-world mother-child interactions. Of the more than 1,400 exchanges that researchers documented of a mother wanting her child to do something, a mere 8 percent included "reasoning", while just 9 percent included clarification of what the child should be doing instead. By far the biggest category was "direct verbal commands", which accounted for 42 percent of parenting efforts. Other studies have found that white parents deploy reasoning techniques more than a third of the time.
    In a second article, Fuller and colleagues found that parenting by declaration rather than explanation could undermine early childhood advantages within minority cultures. The work, due to be published this week in Maternal and Child Health Journal, tracked cognitive development among 8,000 children born in 2001, and found that Latino babies start life with significant benefits over other groups — including higher birth weights and lower mortality rates (two key factors in predicting brain performance). They also have mothers who eat better, and smoke and drink less than white or black peers, regardless of socioeconomic status. And they enter school with strong social skills and emotional stability. But despite being primed for success at birth, they soon lose ground when it comes to intellectual development: Latino kids fall up to six months behind their white counterparts in basic language and thinking skills by the time they are 2 or 3 years old, the study reports.
    The results, say researchers, hold true even taking into account the poverty and scarce educational opportunities that many Latina mothers face relative to other populations. Among Mexican American mothers, almost three fifths live in households that earn less than $25,000 a year, and less than a third have completed college. Similarly, Mexican American mothers, and mothers of Hispanic descent (西班牙后裔) in general, have higher birth rates than their white counterparts, meaning they care for more children at any one time. But even when compared to white children whose mothers share the same obstacles, Latino children still develop more slowly.
What can be known according to the researchers?

选项 A、Parenting skills are something beyond Latina mothers’ usual education.
B、Parenting skills have nothing to do with minority cultures.
C、Reasoning is more useful than commands.
D、Commands can be more useful somewhere.

答案A

解析 末段首句说,即使考虑拉美父母的贫困程度和教育程度因素,他们与白人父母在教育孩子的方式上仍然有很大差异。可见,教育孩子的技巧不在他们平常所受的教育的范围内,故答案为[A]。由第二段中可知,少数族群家庭中,言听计从式的教育占主导地位,所以教育孩子的技巧应该是与文化有关的。故排除[B]。[C]的说法过于绝对,而[D]在文章未提及。
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