October 25, 2012

Dr. Betty Hart, RIP: Scientifically proved blacks don't talk enough or watch TV enough

From the NYT:
Betty Hart Dies at 85; Studied Disparities in Children’s Vocabulary Growth 
By WILLIAM YARDLEY 
Published: October 25, 2012 
Betty Hart, whose research documenting how poor, working-class and professional parents speak to their young children helped establish the critical role that communicating with babies and toddlers has in their later development, died on Sept. 28 in hospice care in Tucson. She was 85 .... 
Dr. Hart was a graduate student at the University of Kansas in the 1960s when she began trying to help poor preschool children overcome speech and vocabulary deficits. But she and her colleagues later concluded that they had started too late in the children’s lives — that the ones they were trying to help could not simply “catch up” with extra intervention. 
At the time, a prevalent view was that poor children were essentially beyond help, victims of circumstances and genetics. But Dr. Hart and some of her colleagues suspected otherwise and revisited the issue in the early 1980s, beginning research that would continue for a decade. 
“Rather than concede to the unmalleable forces of heredity, we decided that we would undertake research that would allow us to understand the disparate developmental trajectories we saw,” she and her former graduate supervisor, Todd R. Risley, wrote in 1995 in “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,” a book about their findings, which were reported in 1992. “We realized that if we were to understand how and when differences in developmental trajectories began, we needed to see what was happening to children at home at the very beginning of their vocabulary growth.” 
They began a two-and-a-half-year study of 42 families of various socioeconomic levels who had very young children. Starting when the children were between 7 and 9 months old, they recorded every word and utterance spoken to them and by them, as well as every parent-child interaction, over the course of one hour every month. 
It took many more years to transcribe and analyze the data, and the researchers were astonished by what they eventually found. 
“Simply in words heard, the average child on welfare was having half as much experience per hour (616 words per hour) as the average working-class child (1,251 words per hour) and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour),” Drs. Hart and Risley wrote. 
“By age 4, the average child in a welfare family might have 13 million fewer words of cumulative experience than the average child in a working-class family,” they added. 

Isn't there a giant assumption in this famous calculation: that the one hour per month of child-parent interactions that Hart & Risley recorded are representative of the entire month? Don't some of these non-welfare parents have jobs, during which periods they can't be talking to their children?

Let's try the math. Say the average 0 to 4 year old is awake 10 hours per day, or 3,600 hours per year, or 14,400 hours in those four years. If the working class family talks at the child 635 more words per hour than those famously laconic welfare families, then that comes out to a differential of 9,144,000 words, not 13,000,000 words. So the working class family must be talking at their children not just ten hours per day, but more like 14 hours per day, leaving only 10 hours per day for the poor child to sleep (or to talk himself or to watch TV or to play with his blocks or to watch the cat or to daydream).

Shouldn't somebody call Child Protective Services and report all the non-welfare families in the country for child abuse due to incessant chatter?
They also found disparities in tone, in positive and negative feedback, and in other areas — and that the disparities in speech and vocabulary acquisition persisted into school years and affected overall educational development. 

So, parents with big vocabularies tended to have children with big vocabularies. (Also, I would imagine, parental skin tone, height, and hair color tended to correlate with their children's skin tone, height, and hair color.)
“People kept thinking, ‘Oh, we can catch kids up later,’ and her big message was to start young and make sure the environment for young children is really rich in language,” said Dr. Walker, an associate research professor at Kansas who worked with Dr. Hart and followed many of the children into their school years. 

I recommend taking your preschoolers to Tom Stoppard plays. Start with The Real Thing no later than 30 months and work up to Arcadia by at least the fourth birthday. Also, read to them every night from Nabokov. Pnin is an easy start, but they should be finished with Ada by the time they enter kindergarten.
The work has become a touchstone in debates over education policy, including what kind of investments governments should make in early intervention programs. One nonprofit program whose goals are rooted in the findings is Reach Out and Read, which uses pediatric exam rooms to promote literacy for lower-income children beginning at 6 months old. 
Prompted by the success of Reach Out and Read, Dr. Alan L. Mendelsohn, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Bellevue Hospital and New York University Langone Medical Center, pushed intervention even further. He created a program through Bellevue in which lower-income parents visiting doctors are filmed interacting and reading with their children and then given suggestions on how they can expand their speaking and interactions. 
“Hart and Risley’s work really informed for me and many others the idea that maybe you could bridge the gap,” Dr. Mendelsohn said, “or in jargon terms — address the disparities.” ...

I don't see any mention here of experimental research, just tracking of existing differences that are compatible with most combinations of nature and nurture theories.
“Today, much of her research is being applied in many different ways,” said Dr. Andrew Garner, the chairman of a work group on early brain and child development for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I think you could also argue that the current interest in brain development and epigenetics reinforces at almost a molecular level what she had identified 20 years ago.”

Epigenetics!

One obvious but little mentioned implication of this popular line of thought is: White professional mothers who hire semi-literate nannies who have smaller vocabularies in English than in Spanish and smaller vocabularies in Spanish than in Mayan to raise their children for them while they put in the hours to make partner or get tenure are dooming their offspring to only getting into State U. You see, by not personally speaking to their small children for much of the day using their high level vocabularies, Hart & Risley's logic says their kids are in big, big trouble.

And, indeed, many white mothers behave exactly as if this were true.

For example, one of my early bosses in the marketing research business was Kathie, a hard-charging, funny, foul-mouthed MBA who let nothing stand in the way of our team making the numbers. Then I heard a rumor that she and her boyfriend, an MBA at a big corporation, were going to take a little time off from each other. Then she started going to the gym at lunchtime, lost ten pounds, and then showed up one Monday morning wearing an engagement ring and a big smile: her ex-boyfriend was now going to be her husband. Marriage and a baby ensued, but she was right back on the job a month after giving birth. Then she got pregnant again, and came back to the job a couple of months after giving birth. But within a week of her return, she announced she was permanently retiring to be a housewife. Management tried hard to talk her into part-time work or taking just a couple of years off or whatever she wanted, but she was adamant that she was done with working: she was a full-time mom from now on.

Of course, Kathie's trajectory was feasible because her husband was making good money. But, her emotions are common.

Of course, this pro stay-at-home-mom implication of the Hart & Risley conventional wisdom is not played up in the press, which is largely run by women who are not stay-at-home-moms and who frequently feel guilty about it if they do have children or resent those women who are mothers, and thus try to put them down by emphasizing how glamorous and politically important it is to be a working woman.

What does the research say on stay-at-home mothers vs working mothers in terms of children's cognitive development? I haven't looked in a long time, but my recollection was that it's inherently uncertain because nobody can run a controlled experiment. Mothers are constantly adapting to what they think is best for their children (e.g., Kathie), trying to optimize a variety of factors that differs for each family and, indeed, for each child.

That moms refuse to follow experimental methodologies when it comes to their own kids is bad for science, but good for children.

37 comments:

alonzo portfolio said...

I wonder if she ever met this black guy I used to play basketball with. One time he said to another black guy, "Where I'm from we only talk for a little while - then we start to hit!"

Bostonian said...

The description of her "Meaningful Differences" book on Amazon notes that the 3-year old children of professionals had better vocabularies than the *parents* of the welfare families. Here is an excerpt.

"This study of ordinary families and how they talk to their very young children is no ordinary study at all. Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain well behind their more economically advantaged peers years later in school. Their painstaking study began by recording each month - for 2-1/2 years - one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. Rare is a database of this quality. "Remarkable," says Assistant Secretary of Education Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, of the findings: By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families."

Enoch Powell said...

You can't fix stupid, but you can certainly bankrupt your country and have your entire life and career based on a lie if you try.

Carol said...

What, watching Sesame Street didn't help at all?

Anonymous said...

"Epigenetics!"

so they are making it up by watching too much?

OT

Countrywide's hustle program:

http://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-americas-hustle-program-2012-10

the good prosecutor also makes an appearance here:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Preet-v-Rajat-An-Indian-American-saga/articleshow/16959255.cms

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/10/25/nyc-police-officer-arrested-for-alleged-cannibal-plot/

Anonymous said...

I Mean, If I Lose To Mitt Romney, I'll Probably Kill Myself

By Barack Obama

Well, here we are. Less than two weeks left in my reelection bid, and the race is locked in a dead heat. Though I assumed it would be a somewhat close election, I guess I’d be lying if I said I thought that with 14 days to go I’d be in such a vulnerable position. Because, when it comes down to it, my opponent is Mitt Romney. I’m not exactly running against Dwight D. Eisenhower or Abraham Lincoln or even George H.W. Bush here, you know? I’m running against Mitt Romney—a guy who has made so many conflicting statements on so many different issues that the thought of losing to someone like that leaves me severely depressed, and makes me question if I’ve maybe wasted my entire life. Truth be told, if I do lose on Nov. 6, I think the odds are pretty good that I’ll kill myself.

Yeah, I’ll definitely commit suicide if I lose the presidency to Mitt Romney.

I think that would be the best, and even the healthiest, thing for me both personally and professionally. The prospect of welcoming President-elect Romney to the White House, or watching Mitt Romney take the oath of office, or continuing my life as a president, husband, and father who lost the most important position in the entire world to the guy who ran the Salt Lake City Olympics just doesn’t seem very appealing to me. In fact, it makes me wish I were dead.

The question is: Do I even deserve to live if I can’t beat Mitt Romney? And I don’t think I do, really. That’s why I’ll more than likely be packing a little gun with me on election night. Because the sooner I can end it all, the less pain I’ll feel.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-mean-if-i-lose-to-mitt-romney-ill-probably-kill,30092

Anonymous said...

A few days ago I spent a day riding along with a cable technician in a poor, black area. Based on my (admittedly very limited) sample, I'd say the TV-to-book ratio of the average poor, black household is about 3 to 0. It was striking enough that now I want to ride along through a poor white area, a wealthy black area, and a wealthy white area for comparison.

Anonymous said...

"By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families."

sheeeeeiiit

Anonymous said...

"The whole thing brings me back to my favorite book on education, Meaningful Differences, by Hart and Risley...

Did you get that one amazing sentence, about how the vocabularies of the three year olds in the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families? When the kids then get to kindergarten, the poor kids have vocabularies of about 2,000 words. Pretty good, huh? Well, not when you compare that to the vocabularies of the professionals’ kids — they go to kindergarten with 20,000 words at their disposal.

That makes me sick to my stomach. Then it makes my blood boil. And after that, I roll up my sleeves and determine that MY students will have as many rich experiences and conversations as possible. I do all I can to talk to them and listen to them and teach them about conversations, questions, answers, and discussion. The inequality they face as a result of their families’ economic circumstances just gives me more reason to do everything I can to get them ready for kindergarten on an even ground with the more advantaged kids they will meet there.

So please keep in mind that I do not teach in the suburbs. I don’t teach rich kids. My view of preschool is shaped by my experiences in my urban district. If I were to teach the kids of college-educated parents, I might have a different view entirely.

Although, knowing how opinionated and stubborn I am, maybe not!"


The word-count looks suspicious, more than the boiling enthusiasm the lady displays.

http://kiri8.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/meaningful-differences/

alexis said...

" "Where I'm from we only talk for a little while - then we start to hit!""

Literally, metaphorically, or both?

Mitch said...

"What does the research say on stay-at-home mothers vs working mothers in terms of children's cognitive development?"

I was raising my son through the late 80s/early 90s, when the mommy wars were at their peak, and the research consistently showed that there was no significant difference between the kids of moms who stayed home and moms who worked. I mean, if staying at home were the best thing for the kid, welfare moms would be raising nuclear scientists.

And of course, they then controlled for education and husband's income.

Anyway, the fact that the research consistently showed no huge difference one way or the other pretty much led to the research dying out. And then, all that talk went pretty much out the window after the first recession in the early oughts, when many of those women who had stayed home in the 90s were now struggling with husbands who were out of work--or who had gotten divorced--and the ramifications of taking 10 years off. Turns out that "financial security" is a way of examining what's best for the child that all those researchers had forgotten about.

These days, most women know that staying home is a luxury that far too many of them take even though they can't afford it, but the odds in favor of hubby losing his job or getting divorced are long enough that they take the risk.

Anonymous said...

If you do the math, she is assuming that children under the age of 4 converse with their parents for 14 hours/day , or every waking minute.

Don't poor children (actually all American children) spent lots of time in front of the TV where they talk up a storm? Why hasn't the gap disappeared or at least diminished now that the poor get to hear rich people yapping nonstop?

hbd chick said...

"Epigenetics!"

i still wanna know what the genetics underlying epigenetics are....

sunbeam said...

Were her kids Stanford matierial?

If not,who cares, one way or the the other.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

We didn't start on Tom Stoppard until middle school, and we stuck to the one-acts at first: After Magritte, The Real Inspector Hound. We did have them take roles to read though, rather than just passive reception.

If I had to do over again, I would have gone with Wodehouse instead.

beowulf said...

Steve, while reading the DC Circuit's Texas voter ID decision, I came across a reference to a fascinating company whose business model you should hijack.

Because Texas does not track voters by race, Dr. Ansolabehere cross-referenced his no-match list [TX voters w/o photo ID] with a database provided by Catalist, LLC. A private vendor specializing in voter registration data, Catalist attempts to determine voters’ race by applying a predictive algorithm that uses “name dictionaries and residential area information.”

As Dr. Ansolabehere explains in his expert report:
"A name dictionary would identify someone named Greg Jones as 60% likely to be Whitebased on the frequency with which that name is used in the population. Someone named Greg Bernard Jones who lives in an area that is 31% Black has an 83% probability of being Black. The combination of name information and local area information, then,sharpens the algorithm for identifying race considerably."

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/voter_id_texas_ruling.php

Anonymous said...

oh brother, just talking a lot more to someone who is predestined to be an 85 IQ might make them come out as an 89 IQ at age 6, sliding down to an 87 at age 10 & if they're lucky an 86 from 12 on. woo-hoo. this is like if i call on the dumb kids a lot more in stats class they will magically become smarter. it's pie in the sky. so talk more to your beagle, it will make him as smart as a lab. riiight. genetics > environment of else breeding animals wouldn't work. duh!

Anonymous said...

When the kids then get to kindergarten, the poor kids have vocabularies of about 2,000 words. Pretty good, huh? Well, not when you compare that to the vocabularies of the professionals’ kids — they go to kindergarten with 20,000 words at their disposal.


LOL pretty much every kid I know has professional parents and none of those kids had a 20,000 word vocabulary in kindergarten.


Based on previous research, Nation and Waring (1997) estimate that the receptive vocabulary size of a university-educated native English speaker is around 20,000 base words, while Goulden, Nation, and Read's (1990) intervention indicates that the receptive vocabulary size range of college-educated native English speakers is 13,200 - 20,700 base words (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990), with an average of 17,200 base words.


http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.html

Whiskey said...

Meanwhile back at the ranch ...

Doubtless plenty of South Korean and Chinese labs are figuring out ways to boost IQ through DNA manipulation. Already there is ample suspicion that athletic performance is being boosted by DNA manipulation (its been done in labs with mice).

What if there was a DNA procedure (involving say a virus as carrier for DNA alteration) that would on average raise IQ by say, 20 points? Who would take it? Would it be black market (certainly)? Would the whole market for DNA manipulation be as big as say, the global market for heroin and cocaine and marijuana and methamphetimine combined? My guess is yes.

Mike in Boston said...

I actually know a bit about language acquisition and, political correctness aside, cumulative experience in language acquisition deserves a little more credit than it is getting here.

If you do the math, she is assuming that children under the age of 4 converse with their parents for 14 hours/day , or every waking minute.

True. But if one assumes that she is referring to the larger difference between welfare and professional families, the 13 million word deficit translates to about seven and three-quarters hours a day. Certainly my two-year-old talks to me or her mom nearly nonstop for all the waking hours when she's not playing by herself, adding up to at least eight hours a day, so I have no problem believing that figure.

Don't poor children (actually all American children) spent lots of time in front of the TV where they talk up a storm? Why hasn't the gap disappeared or at least diminished now that the poor get to hear rich people yapping nonstop?

Passive interaction does nothing for first language acquisition.
Otherwise you could leave your infant in front of Chinese cable TV for a year and he would end up speaking Mandarin. Nope, it just doesn't work that way. That's why videos for babies are a rip-off if you are buying them for education. (If you are buying them to get mom a few minutes' peace, of course, they are a great deal.)

Studies have shown that once a language has been acquired, TV can expand vocabulary-- but does so at a much slower rate than actual conversation.

On a less serious note, I have gotta believe that anybody who reads their toddler Pnin will end up spending eighteen years with a kid who's either nasty, depressed, or both. Go for Dostoevsky instead of Nabokov. Of course you'll have to read a little faster since the books are longer but, hey, more words per hour.

Of course, I'm not being serious here: just droning on and on without engaging the kid is just as passive as sitting him in front of the TV, and will have just as little effect on his language learning. But still: ugh, Pnin, what a mean-spirited book.

ben tillman said...

When the kids then get to kindergarten, the poor kids have vocabularies of about 2,000 words. Pretty good, huh? Well, not when you compare that to the vocabularies of the professionals’ kids — they go to kindergarten with 20,000 words at their disposal.

Preposterous.

Anonymous said...

As Steve is fond of pointing out, the children of Chinese immigrants end up knowing lots of English words (at the high end of the scale) but no one is speaking English to them at home.

Anonymous said...

I suspect that nannies will be going out of favor now.

Glaivester said...

That moms refuse to follow experimental methodologies when it comes to their own kids is bad for science, but good for children.

We think. We can't prove it, though.

Ex Submarine Officer said...

Studies have shown that once a language has been acquired, TV can expand vocabulary-- but does so at a much slower rate than actual conversation.

This jibes with my experience. My wife is Japanese and pretty much only spoke Japanese to our son here in the U.S. from the time he was born.

That starts laying the groundwork, but it is not nearly enough for real fluency. For starters, he doesn't hear how males or anyone other than his middle age/middle class mom talks.

In addition to mom, he had yearly family trips to Japan for a couple of weeks each year and skyping w/relatives in Japan.

Nice, but still not enough. Our silver bullet was the tube. For his whole time here in the U.S., he only watched Japanese language TV, didn't even know our TV could speak English, he was astonished to find this out when he was 5 or so.

When he was six, we moved to Japan and enrolled him in 1st grade a few weeks later when the school year started. At this point, he certainly was fluent, but distinctly preferred to lead with English and in Japanese he had a bit of a hesitancy that he didn't have in English.

Nonetheless, he had absolutely no language difficulties from day one in Japanese schools. But without the TV, I really feel things would have been much harder.

First time in my life I found TV useful for something.

Beyond that, raising a bilingual kid, being a monolingual myself, has been a fascinating experience. Like at what age he realized that this stuff he was speaking was really two languages, that Dad is just faking it in Japanese (4th birthday, I remember it distinctly, it was sort of embarassing), and so forth.

Vocabulary acquisition is interesting. When he doesn't know a word in either language, he may have to be to told it several times, sort of reinforcing a new concept.

But when he knows a word in one language, you usually only have to tell him the word in the other language once, like there is an empty slot there waiting to be filled.

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile back at the ranch ...

Doubtless plenty of South Korean and Chinese labs are figuring out ways to boost IQ through DNA manipulation. Already there is ample suspicion that athletic performance is being boosted by DNA manipulation (its been done in labs with mice).


Whiskey,

The virus approach to genetic modification is imperfect and risky (see the case of Jesse Gelsinger at Penn a few years ago). Intelligence is likely to be a trait influenced by many genes spread across the genome, none of which individually has a large effect. As of today, none of those genes is even known with certainty. Widespread and meaningful genetic engineering in humans is not as close as you think, unless you are referring to pre-implantation embryo selection.

Steve Sailer said...

Nobody has a 20,000 word vocabulary when they enter kindergarten. Remember that vocab test I linked to? The maximum was 45,000 words and I just barely crept over 40,000, and I'm old.

20,000 words is about what an average college grad parent has as a vocabulary, and no way have they come close to transmitting it to their child by age 5. Kids aren't interested in Daddy teaching them what "amortization" means.

Simon in London said...

"What does the research say on stay-at-home mothers vs working mothers in terms of children's cognitive development?"

I'm pretty sure no one has tried to measure this, just as no one has actually tried to measure what effect chatty vs taciturn mothers have on their offspring once you strip out Socio-Economic Status.

What little research we do have seems to indicate that the importance of environment declines with age, and the importance of heredity increases with age. So the best guess would seem to be that the children of professional working mothers start off disadvantaged but catch up later.

BrokenSymmetry said...

" Carol said...
What, watching Sesame Street didn't help at all?"

"Anonymous said...
As Steve is fond of pointing out, the children of Chinese immigrants end up knowing lots of English words (at the high end of the scale) but no one is speaking English to them at home."

Terence Tao (2006 Field medalist, 760 Math SAT...at 8!) picked up numbers and letters from Sesame Street as a two year old in Australia.

Anonymous said...

The anthropologist Mary Douglas did some interesting work on this sort of thing back in the day, and since I wrote a few papers about it in the mid-80's, I assume that Douglas's work pre-dates Hart's.

Douglas was concerned with class more than race, and her comparison of working-class child/parent language interaction with bourgeois or professional-class child/parent interaction seemed, IIRC, to indicate that it wasn't the amount of time spent talking or the kind of words that mattered, it was the substance of what was being said.

A working-class mother was much more likely to reprimand her child by simply saying "Stop that!" or "Don't do that!" When the child inevitably asks why?, the response is something like "Because I'm your mother and I said so."

The professional-class mother is much more likely to explain the reason why the disapproved behavior is wrong, etc etc.

She produced some research showing that these authoritarian models vs. explanatory/empathetic models had a noticeable impact on certain types of cognitive development, etc.

But it was a long time ago and I wasn't even an anthropology major, I came to the research through a sideways process, so I can't remember all the details, nor was I able to check it against the rest of the normative literature. Thought it was interesting, though.

Anonymous said...


Vocabulary acquisition is interesting. When he doesn't know a word in either language, he may have to be to told it several times, sort of reinforcing a new concept.


Interesting story about the TV ... however, does he read a lot in either or both languages.

I would expect him to pick up new vocabulary from reading, although, especially in English, not necessarily how to pronounce the words correctly.

As someone else who has bi-racial children (no, not black, there are other races out there), and who is expending effort to learn the other language while neither child really has, the are a whole host of difficulties, including pronunciation, that can get in the way.

Gene Berman said...

Just possibly, ol' Hillary was onto such parental vocabulary deficits, persuading her, that, therefore, "it takes a village."

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

I suspect that nannies will be going out of favor now."

Any word on the ethnicity of the murdering nanny?

MaMu1977 said...

@Anonymous 5:30PM

It depends on the content. There's a world of difference between C.S.I., The Young And The Restless and a Young Boosie (yes, this is a real name) video marathon.

Pat Boyle said...

My experience with welfare homes is getting kinda old by now. But I suspect it is still relevant.

I was always impressed with how many televisons that welfare recipients had. They weren't very good TVs, but there were a lot of them. I had a family on my caseload that had seven - every room had a TV. The idea that welfare families don't have TVs is like the myth that they don't have cars.

I just checked craigslist. I found 651 TVs for sale for under $25. Many are available for $10 or less.

Anonymous said...

"Nobody has a 20,000 word vocabulary when they enter kindergarten."

I don't know if I'd say "nobody," but it's pretty darned unlikely.

When I entered kindergarten (at 5 years 2 months), I had already been reading for more than two years and tested at the 8th grade level. People didn't believe it was possible; some told my mom I must have cheated somehow. They put me in third-grade reading because they figured if I went any higher the size difference between me and the other kids would be disturbing (for me or for them? Not sure).

And yet I doubt even I had a 20,000-word vocabulary entering kindergarten. To say that the children of professionals, many of whom wouldn't even be reading yet, are familiar with that many words on average, just seems ludicrous.

Anonymous said...

It's interesting that Janice Harding, the mother of Jonathan and Reginald, the perpetrators of the "Wichita Horror" said her sons grew up without warmth and intimacy. "I'm not a huggy, kissy person," she admitted. The family celebrated no holidays. This was after the men had been convicted of torturing, raping, and killing several white people in hopes that the two would not get the death penalty. This was supposed to be a mitigating circumstance....but again, as Steve Sailer says, ask an Episcopalian about being huggy and kissy and figure out how many murderers have been spawned from the lack of emotion in those homes.