Fact File on Families
- According to the U.S. Census data gathered in 2000, of the 262.4 million Americans age 5 and over, 47 million (18 percent) speak a language other than English at home (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2003, p. 1).
- The number of people who spoke a language other than English at home grew by 38 percent in the 1980s and 47 percent in the 1990s. While the population age 5 and over grew by 25 percent from 1980 to 2000, the number who spoke a language other than English at home more than doubled (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2003, p. 2).
- The most common languages spoken at home in the United States are, in descending order, English, Spanish, Chinese, French, and German. In recent years,
- Mandarin Chinese has jumped from the fifth to the second most widely spoken non-English language in the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2003, p. 3).
- Internationally, the United States ranks first in defense expenditures, military technology, the number of millionaires and billionaires, and health technology. However, the United States ranks eighteenth in the percentage of children living in poverty, twenty-third in infant mortality, and last in protecting children against gun violence (Children's Defense Fund, 2004).
- According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. children are 12 times more likely to die from gunfire and 16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than children in all 25 other industrialized countries combined (Children's Defense Fund, 2004).
- In the United States, one in three children will be poor at some time in his or her life, one in eight has no health insurance, one in eight lives in a family receiving food stamps, one in eight has a worker in the family but still is poor, one in thirty-five lives with grandparents or other relatives but neither parent, and one in sixty sees his or her parents divorce (Children's Defense Fund, 2004).
- The District of Columbia has the highest level of child poverty, followed by the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico. The four states with the lowest average poverty rate for children are New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maryland, and Connecticut (Children's Defense Fund, 2004).
- The National Research Council (2001) asked parents to compare their children to peers on activity levels, paying attention, speaking ability, and motor coordination. Parents rated 18 percent of their children as a lot more active, 13 percent as attending less well or much less well, 11 percent as being less articulate, and only 4 percent as being less coordinated physically. Boys were identified twice as often as girls as having deficiencies in the areas of attention and articulation.
- A national survey identified teachers' ability to motivate children to learn as the characteristic most prized by parents, while teachers' respectful care and concern for students was the characteristic most important to children (Boyer, 1995).
- Four types of at-home family activities are consistently associated with increases in school performance: organizing and monitoring the child's time, helping with homework, discussing school matters with the child, and reading with young children (Finn, 1998).
- Preschool children from homes where literacy is supported have an estimated 1,000 to 1,700 hours of informal reading and writing encounters before coming to school, while children without such family support have only 25 hours of such experiences during the preschool years (Adams, 1990). National survey data suggest that children from literacy-rich homes are able to recognize letters and perform better in reading (Denton, West & Walston, 2003).
- Literacy is deeply embedded in family life (Yaden & Paratore, 2003). Families influence literacy development through interpersonal interactions related to literacy, the physical environment and literacy materials in the home, and attitudes toward literacy, which affect emotions and the motivation to become literate (Braunger & Lewis, 1998).
- When family literacy projects conducted in various states included the development of parents' and families' literacy skills along with those of their young children, they were more effective (Swick et al., 1997).
Excerpted From:
Excerpt from Early Childhood Language Arts, by M.R. Jalongo, 2007 edition, p. 27-29.
© 2007, Allyn & Bacon, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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