“. . . one way to ‘protect’ young children from developing behavioral problems later on is supporting their oral language development early.
Although this sort of strategy may not appear to address early discipline disparities directly, it is likely to help mitigate the problem. We know that poor children (who are also disproportionately black and brown) start kindergarten already behind; Bornstein and colleagues’ work suggests that by providing extra support for these kids’ oral language development, we would not only be helping them academically, but also we would be “inoculating” them from developing behavioral problems down the road.”
–Esther Quintero, “Not All Discipline Disparities May Be The Result Of Implicit Bias” on Shanker Blog