Bridging The Gap

Recently, I was riding home from a road trip and listening to an episode of the Code Switch podcast from National Public Radio titled Word Up. They stated a quote that really stuck with me, 'Children born into poverty will have heard 30 million fewer words than children born into a working class family by the age of 3.' Let that sink in. That is an amazing gap to say the least. So this means that underprivileged children are already at a severe disadvantage than others just based off of exposure to language. So the question is, how do we begin to break this horrible trend? Because this gap will only grow and create an 'odds against them' statistic. We can’t begin to give every underprivileged family money and expect that to fix everything, but we can give our time and wisdom to try to level up this word deprivation and teach them that they can beat the odds against them and still be a great success story.