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pleasant, enjoyable, or neutral. In the working-class homes, there were also more “attaboys” than prohibitions, though the ratio was smaller. But in the families on welfare, children heard two “noes” or “don’ts” for every positive expression. Their verbal experience overall was much more punitive.
    During my earliest childhood, my family did not receive what was then called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (or welfare as we knew it before President Clinton). But we did do so after the divorce. Moreover, my mother had dropped out of high school in ninth grade. And so her educational background made our home more similar to the welfare group linguistically. MH’s relatives—her mother and sisters Dot, Eva, and Louise, who also helped raise us—shared the same disrupted and scanty education. After the divorce, when she returned to Florida, my mother was overwhelmed, with so many children to support. She worked long hours, and so just having the time to do more than discipline us if we got out of hand was almost impossible. My father also faded out of my life as I grew toward adolescence and beyond.
    Hence, unlike those growing up in more privileged families, we were brushed back more than we were praised. That may have ultimately helped me to thrive in the critical, skeptical world of science—but at first, it probably didn’t do much for my linguistic development.
    Even more stunning was the difference Hart and Risley found in the total number of unique words directed at the poorest children. On average, the professionals’ children heard 2,153 different words each hour spoken to them, while the children of welfare parents heard only 616. Before they’d even spent a second in a classroom, the children of professionals had heard 30 million more words than the children on welfare and had many times more positive verbal interactions with adults. Several other studies confirm these findings in terms of the impact of parental education, style of communication with children, and vocabulary on early language learning and readiness for school. 1 Less conspicuous factors like children’s exposure to a broad or limited vocabulary and to varying amounts of linguistic encouragement and discouragement can do far more than obvious scapegoats like drugs to influence their futures.
    There is little doubt that I was affected early on by my mother’s lack of formal education and the limited vocabulary that was used in my home and by most of the people around me. They couldn’t teach me what they didn’t know. Nonetheless, I did learn many critical skills from them, among them the ability to listen, to patiently observe, and to be aware of myself. I learned to read other people, to pay attention to body language, tone of voice—all types of nonverbal cues. Data from recent studies show that children from working-class backgrounds like mine have greater empathy: they are both better able to read other people’s emotions and more likely to respond kindly to them. 2
    As we’ll see throughout this book, what look like disadvantages from one perspective may be advantages from another—and ways of knowing and responding may be advantageous and adaptive in one environment and disadvantageous and disruptive in another. Much of my life has been spent trying to negotiate the different reactions and requirements of the world I came from and the one I live in now. Over time, I had to become fluent in several different languages, including the often-nonverbal vernacular of my home and the street, mainstream English, and the highly technical language of neuroscience.
    It wasn’t long, however, before I began to appreciate what mainstream language could do for me. My awareness of what I was missing rose gradually, from an initial sense that the teachers were almost speaking a foreign tongue when I started school to a flickering awakening to the possibilities that a greater vocabulary and education more generally might offer