As published in the My View section of the editorial page
in the Deseret News on April 1, 2014.
in the Deseret News on April 1, 2014.
Preschool isn’t enough. Talk to your baby.
I support preschool. I’ve taught preschool for 16 years
and believe that a good preschool experience enriches children’s lives and
helps prepare them for later success. But it is not enough.
If we are serious about helping every child do well in
school, and in life, we have to start at the beginning.
Research on children and what helps them succeed in
school shows that parents have a crucial role long before the school years
begin.
In 1995, Betty Hart, Ph.D., and Todd Risley, Ph. D., of
the University of Kansas, published their research in the book "Meaningful
Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children." Hart
and Risley worked for years with intervention preschool programs trying to
learn what prepared children for long-term success in school. They saw children
respond to preschool with some real success, but over time they noticed it
didn’t do as much as they hoped. The researchers realized they needed to look
deeper into language development in the very earliest years in children’s
lives.
Hart and Risley discovered there was a huge disparity in
the conversational interaction between parents and babies or young children in
different homes, all of them stable, functioning families. The children who
heard more words did far better in school than the children who did not, and
those children on the low end never made up the deficit. Preschool did good
things, but it was not enough to overcome what the parents didn’t do.
More research has emerged since Hart and Risley’s study.
On Feb. 16, KSL published an article, “More talking, longer sentences help
babies' brains,” which reported
research that reaffirms the critical role parents play. According to the
article, Stanford University psychology professor Anne Fernald said, “You're
building intelligence through language.”
All parents want their babies to grow up healthy, happy
and smart. But parenting skills are not always intuitive. It is not obvious to
everyone that it is important for parents to talk to their babies before they
can utter a word. Some families are naturally talkative; some aren’t. Some families
are under a great deal of stress and chatting with the baby just doesn’t
register as urgent. But it is urgent.
Offering at-risk children an opportunity for preschool
will provide some wonderful benefits for those children. But it won’t be enough
if parents don’t understand their role, too.
Talking to babies stimulates brain development, gives
children vocabulary that enables them to learn more, and creates an emotional
bond with the parents who talk to them. Talking to your baby is simple, free
and fun and requires no equipment. But parents need to know about it — and most
don’t. They need to know that no school program of any kind can replace the
important foundation in language development that parents can give.
How to make parents aware of their important role is the
next significant step. No one way will reach every parent. Classes for parents
offered at preschools, prenatal education, classes in community centers and
libraries, and information disseminated through health care providers or
churches all could be options.
Harvard professor Clayton Christensen suggested in his
book "Disrupting Class" that the concept of talking to babies should
be taught in high schools to reach future parents. Providence, R.I., recently
began a citywide initiative, Providence Talks, to teach parents their role in getting
children off to a good start. Initial feedback is that caregivers who are aware of the need already
talk 50 percent more to their children.
Everyone wants the best for babies, and I believe if
parents know what to do and how to do it, they will respond. If we are serious
about helping every child do well in school, parents need to be part of the
solution from the beginning.
As published on familyshare.com
Not all words are equal
How to talk to your baby
Babies cry when they are hungry so you
feed them.
Diapers get wet and then you change them.
Small children get cranky when they are
tired so you put them to bed.
But how do you know what you’re supposed
to say to a baby that hasn’t yet learned to say a word?
The research keeps piling up about the
enormous significance of parents talking to their small children.
- Parents who talk a lot to
their babies stimulate brain development. Talking a lot to babies and very
young children increases their intellectual capacity.
- The words a baby hears, even
long before he or she can talk, develop crucial language skills.
- Children who hear lots of
words in their earliest years have a larger vocabulary by age three, which
is associated with better reading skills at age nine, and those children
are on an accelerated trajectory to have greater school success for the
rest of their lives.
- Talking to babies and very
young children creates an important sense of worth and value in the child,
in addition to strengthening the parent-child bond.
Talking to babies doesn’t always come
naturally to new parents. Not everyone is talkative. Some families have very
different cultures in how they respond to babies. And some families are
under a great deal of stress and it doesn’t always feel urgent to talk to the
baby. But it is urgent, and it is simple and free. Parents just
need to know that it matters a great deal that they talk to their babies, and
talk a lot. And it matters how they talk, and what the parents have to say.
How much talking in enough? Ideally
a child will hear 45 million words spoken to them from family members by the
age of three. However, that doesn’t mean
you can say “Don’t throw Cheerios” 15 million times and expect the best.
All spoken words do not create equally positive results.
Researchers Betty Hart, Ph. D. , and Todd
Risley, Ph.D., spent 13 years observing and analyzing children as they learned
to talk, and they published their findings in two books, Meaningful
Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Children in 1995, and The
Social World of Children Learning to Talk in 1999. Gleaned from these books
are some significant insights on how
parents can have higher quality interactions with their babies and young
children:
1. Talk about the unimportant, non-urgent things.
If you are a parent, words like “Are you
stinky?” and “Where’s your shoes?” will leap out of your mouth without
even a thought. Of course almost all parents talk about the important
things in the everyday business of life.
Ironically, it’s when parents talk about
all the unimportant, non-urgent things that they do more to stimulate baby
brain cells and develop language skills in their child. Talking about
daily routines tends to be the same kinds of words every time. The researchers found when parents talked
about the little things around them they used a richer vocabulary and more
complex sentences. Hart and Risley
called this “extra talk” and reported
that it was one of the most significant elements of language development.
“Look at the rain outside. Did you know rain is water that comes from
the clouds? I like rain it makes puddles
for the birds and it waters my flowers.”
As parents talk about the non-urgent
things, they point out to their child interesting things to notice, name or
remember and help both their intellectual and emotional learning. More extra
talk by parents means more words learned
by baby which actually increases the capacity for learning still more.
2. Play and share daily life.
Parents are more likely to share extra
talk when they play with their child or share everyday experiences. Doing
a puzzle together, or the toddler looking for socks while the parent folds the
laundry creates opportunities for talking. When parents talk to their
baby or child as they go about their daily activities they expose the child to
more than 1,000 words every hour, and in some families it will be 2,000 words
in an hour.
Talking is also part of sociality and
creating a bond that leads to even more talking. Young children can learn
words from television or radio music, but it doesn’t have the same positive
impact that personal interaction has.
3. Share language dancing.
Hart and Risley coined the phrase
“language dancing” to describe the back and forth nature of a parent and child
talking. You say a few words, and the baby smiles and babbles a bit, and you
smile and talk some more. Listening and looking are an important part of
conversations with a young child. Babies grow and their conversations
should grow with them, with parents listening, responding and talking as
partners in a conversation.
The researchers noticed that imitation
appears to truly be the highest compliment to a baby, and a sign that the
parent is listening and that the child has said something meaningful in the
adult’s language.
4. Ask Questions.
The parents who talked the most to
children were the parents who asked the most questions. When parents
asked more questions, the children also asked more questions. More questions
stimulate more conversation and explanation and more valuable extra talk.
5. Be kind.
Observers in the homes of the children in
the Hart and Risley study noticed that the interactions seemed to be of a
higher quality when parents tried to be nice and used kind words. All parents need to say “no” and prohibit
some behaviors, but some parents observed were better at being both nice in
their words and strict with their rules. Most parents avoid directly
telling their child that he or she was “bad,” but some are better at offering
alternative choices, counting to three while waiting for a young child to make
a better choice, or calmly enforcing consequences.
Children absorb the warmth, emotional tone
and enthusiasm of what is being said to them as much as they hear the sounds
and patterns of the words. Positive tones have a powerful effect so that
the human voice becomes pleasant to remember and worth listening to.
Very young children also need lots of
affirmation. In the study the children with the largest vocabularies not only
had heard more words, they had heard many more positive, affirming words from
their parents. These children got more like encouragement that they are on the
right track. “Yes, it is juice,” or “That’s right, it is hot,” and “Good job,
you found your shoes.”
6. Understand the curriculum.
Researchers Hart and Risley listed the
“invisible curriculum of child rearing” that children need to know, and parents
with children who did well in later years taught them these things:
a. the names of all things
b. actions required to give and follow
directions (“help” and “stop”)
c. social routines for polite giving and
getting (“say please”)
d. school preparation such as naming
colors, counting, reciting name and age
Learning the names of things gives
children the opportunity to learn more about everything. Furthermore,
parents lay the foundation for more complex learning when they teach about
categories, concepts, and relationships. For example:
“Which truck is
bigger?” can teach the relationship between large and small.
“Do we have more
oranges or more pears?” helps teach the concept of more or less.
“Let’s count how many
toys have wheels,” creates an understanding of categories.
7. Pass on what matters.
It’s hard for a parent to talk very long
without passing on social values and expectations. Talk more and your
child will know more about what you think matters.
“That’s his truck.
You need to give it back.”
“Don’t eat that, it’s
dirty.”
“The milk spilled.
It was an accident. Help me wipe it up.”
Significantly, when
you talk more to your child, they understand that they matter.
Diane L. Mangum is a
preschool teacher, mother of 6 and grandmother to 16.
