Why Talking to Babies and Toddlers Matters
1. Infancy is a crucial time for neurological and cognitive development. Verbal
interaction stimulates brain development
that needs to happen in the first three years of life.
“Parent talk is
probably the most valuable resource in our world. No matter the language, the culture, the
nuances of vocabulary, or the socioeconomic status, language is the element
that helps develop the brain to its optimal potential. In the same way, the lack of language is the enemy
of brain development.” (Thirty Million
Words, Building a Child’s Brain, Dana Suskind, M.D., p. 1, 2015.)
“Neurologically,
infancy is a critical period because cortical development is influenced by the
amount of central nervous system activity stimulated by experience.
Behaviorally, infancy is a unique time of helplessness when nearly all of the
children’s experience is mediated by adults in one-to one interactions.” (Meaningful Differences in the Everyday
Experience of Young American Children, Hart and Risley, p. 193)
“A surprisingly simple
dimension of family life [the amount of parent-child interaction per hour] is
profoundly related to children’s cognitive development.” (The Social World of Children Learning to Talk, Hart and Risley, p.
170)
“A large percentage of
our physical brain growth is complete by the time we are four years old. The
ease with which we learn as children and the design of our entire lives are
heavily predicated on what happens in those first years.” (Thirty Million, p. 51)
2. Talking to an infant creates
the brain circuitry that forms a framework for all other learning. Increased
talking puts children on a trajectory to continually learn faster and more
easily.
“Cognitively, experience is sequential: Experiences in
infancy establish habits of seeking, noticing and incorporating new and more
complex experiences, as well as schemas for categorizing and thinking about
experiences.“ (Meaningful Differences, p.
193)
“The data show that
the first 3 years of experience put in place a trajectory of vocabulary growth
and the foundations of analytic and symbolic competencies that will make a
lasting difference to how children perform in later years.” (Social
World, p. 193)
“The brain, unlike
almost all other organs, is unfinished at birth. . . . [T]he
brain is almost entirely dependent on what it encounters on its ride to full
development. . . . Within a few years
after birth, a relatively small blip of time, a brain circuitry that is
remarkably strong or dangerously weak or somewhere in between
will be created, affecting a lifetime of attainment.” (Thirty Million, p. 52)
“Brain development . . . occurs in a
hierarchical fashion, with the basic abilities providing the foundation on
which the more complex ones are built. . .
This is especially critical in language accrual, because language,
during the first three years, in addition to helping build vocabulary and
conversational skills, helps provide a foundation for social, emotional, and
cognitive development.” (Thirty Million,
p. 62)
“Who would have
guessed that Daddy cooing ‘Who loves his honey bunny’ to an infant who is just
beginning to focus could be that important?
But it is; very, very important, as a matter of fact. In tiny
step-by-step increments, the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs,’ the ‘mommy loves you’ and the
‘what a sweetie pie’ are the catalysts quietly connecting the brain’s billions
of neurons to create the complex neural circuitry that will culminate in a
child’s intellectual potential being realized.” (Thirty Million, p. 54.)
3. The amount of talk a child hears is
more important than the subject the parent is talking about, and babies and very
young child should hear many, many thousands of words each day.
“No special ways of
speaking are needed for children learning to talk . . . the most important
aspect of parent talk is its amount. Parents who just talk as they go about
their work expose their children to 1,000 words per hour, and in some families
it is 2,000 words per hour.” (Social World, pp. 192-193)
“Guidance to parents
doesn’t have to encourage parents to talk differently,
just to talk more,” stated Dr. Todd Risley.
“Creating a rich
language environment also does not mean carving out dedicated blocks of time in
an already busy life. The Three Ts [Tune-in, Talk more, Take turns] are
designed to become a natural part of everyday activities, no matter how
mundane. By adding words, a parent or caregiver transforms making the bed or
peeling apples or sweeping the floor into a brain-building experience. Ultimately, these words will be an important
part of enhancing the parent-child relationship as well as the child’s brain.”
(Thirty Million, p. 134.)
4. More talking naturally leads to greater vocabulary use and a wider range of more complex sentences, making the language experience richer.
All parents engage in the “business talk” of family
life with their small children. “Don’t
throw the Cheerios!” “Are you
stinky?” “Mama loves you.” “Where are your shoes?”
When parents go beyond
the business of child rearing at hand, they talk about the world around them,
compare, analyze, talk about relationships of things, and emphasize names,
relationships and recall. (Meaningful
Differences, summary of p. 192)
Talk about all the
non-urgent, unimportant things in the world around the child and you will offer richer language experiences,
advises Risley.
Language is more
nuanced and complicated when it is describing what is happening in the
moment. Parents who use more complicated
sentences, with a greater variety of words have children with greater
vocabulary and IQ scores in later years.
(Meaningful Differences, p.
146)
5. Talking is how we teach and socialize our children.
“The invisible curriculum of child rearing focuses
parent talk on what children need to know: first the basics, the name of all
the things and actions required in order to give and follow directions; the
social routines for polite giving and getting; and finally, preparation for
school by naming colors, counting, and reciting age and name. (Meaningful Differences, p. 98)
6. Talking transmits values.
“Parent talk defines and labels what children should
notice and think about the world, their family and themselves, and suggest how
interesting and important various objects, events and relationships are. Words and sentences, internalized as symbols,
become a means for organizing experience and rationalizing and relating it, as
well as the basis for logical thinking, problem solving and self-control.” (Meaningful Differences, p. 100)
7. Television, radio, music and computers cannot replace personal human interaction with infants and language development.
“Children do learn from television. They pick up words
and songs, and it can give them social referencing.” (Meaningful Differences, page 116, citing research of Huston,
Wright, et al.) Devices, however, lack
the significant and stimulating social interaction, the “language dancing,”
that occurs when parent and child engage in conversation and listen and respond
to each other.
“[W]hy can’t we just
sit them [babies] in front of a television and call it a day? . . . The brain
may be brilliant, but . . . it is a social creature. Taking away the interaction may also
critically limit its ability to learn and retain knowledge. Unlike pitchers
that will hold anything you pour into them, the brain appears to be more like a
sieve without the human interaction.” (Thirty
Million, p. 72)
8. There is a huge difference in family
language experiences and it is creating a huge difference in the abilities of
children as they enter kindergarten.
In talkative families parents are addressing their
children with an average of 2,100 words per hour, as contrasted to other less
talkative families that may only speak 600 to 1200 words per hour. (Meaningful Differences, p. 169) Extrapolating
the numbers, by kindergarten some children have heard 30 million more words
than others. The “word gap,” as it is commonly called, has implications that
are staggering, according to Hart and Risley.
“The amount of family
talk predicted the children’s intellectual accomplishments,” stated Dr. Todd
Risley. He and his partner Betty Hart observed
a group of children in the years while they were learning to talk, and tested them
again at 9 years old. There was a high correlation for IQ and school success at
age 9 to the amount of talking heard between zero and three years of age.
There are common
patterns in which families talk a lot or a little to their babies. Families in economic distress often do not
talk as much to their babies as much as financially secure families do. Families with high education levels often
talk a lot more to their babies. (Meaningful
Differences, pp. 119-134)
Closing the word gap through
parent involvement would be the most cost-effective way to improve education
and children’s lives. Talking to baby is
a choice parents can make that is free, takes no equipment or significant training
and will have enormous impact. Risley
suggests helping parents know how important it is to talk to their baby is one
of the significant things the education community could do, in part because
parents pass on to their children their parenting style. (Meaningful Differences, p. 77) “Even patterns of parenting were already
observable among the children [in the study.]
When we listened to the children, we seemed to hear their parents
speaking; when we watched the children play at parenting their dolls, and we
seemed to see the futures of their own children.” (Meaningful Differences, p. 177)
9.
Parents who also listen, respond, and imitate the sounds their baby
makes develop stronger emotional bonds with their baby.
“Something special happens, though, when this amount
of talk is embedded in conversation.
Beyond encouraging practice and providing language experience,
conversation contributes to the parent-child relationship. . . . The relationship is expressed naturally
in quality features such as the responsiveness, gentle guidance, positive
affect, and language diversity that characterize the extra interactions
undertaken by close friends.” (Social
World, p. 193)
“To children trying out their first words, parent
imitation appeared to be truly the highest form of compliment, a signal that
the parent was listening and in enthusiastic agreement that the child had said
a meaningful word in the adult’s language.” (Meaningful Differences, p. 109)
“Conversation is a
social dance that involves not just talking, but also speaking and listening
with another person.” (Social World,
p. 194)
10. Verbal affirmation is an important
part of high quality language experiences for children.
Hart and Risley observed “powerful dampening
effects on development when relatively more of the children’s interactions
began with a parent-initiated imperative (“Don’t,’ ‘Stop,’ ‘Quit’), that
prohibited what the child was doing. (Meaningful
Differences, p.147) When a
persistent and negative feedback tone was the model for children of how
families worked together, the data showed lowered child accomplishments lasting
still at age 9. (Meaningful Differences,
p. 178)
One of the qualities
of talkative families with children who had larger vocabularies at age 3 was
the number of times parents affirmed the child’s behavior or gave
encouragement. “We saw the daily efforts of these parents to transmit an
educationally advantaged culture to their children through the display of
enriched language; through the amount of talking they did and how informative
they were; and through the frequency of gentle guidance, affirmative
interactions, and responsiveness to their children’s talk.” (Meaningful
Differences, p. 179)
Suskind cites a study
about praise in the first years of life. “The study had shown that by the time
children were 14 months old, parents had already established a “praise style,”
that is for “smartness” versus praise for effort. Five years later, they found that children
who had received a higher proportion of . . . praise for diligence and effort
in the first three years , were much more likely to have a growth mindset
orientation to life at seven to eight years of age. Even more compelling, they found that growth
mindset predicted math and reading achievement from second to fourth grades.
These children . . . were prone to believe that their successes were the result
of hard work and overcoming challenges and that their abilities could improve
with effort.” (Thirty Million, p.
106)
Background on the sources cited:
Meaningful
Differences in the Everyday Experiences in the lives of Young American Children, by Betty Hart, Ph.D. and Todd R. Risley,
Ph.D., 1995, Paul H. Brooks Publishing
The
Social World of Children Learning to Talk, by Betty Hart, Ph.D. and Todd R. Risley,
Ph.D., 1999, Paul H. Brooks Publishing
In 1965, Betty Hart, Ph.D. and Todd R. Risley, Ph.D.,
professors at the University of Kansas, became involved in trying to design a
language rich preschool program for disadvantaged four year old children to
help them succeed in kindergarten. They felt that they could be part of the War
of Poverty by enriching the early education opportunities for America’s
children. Their efforts did not live up to their hopes. By 1982 Hart and Risley
realized something was happening in the lives of young children before they
ever reached preschool. This led Hart and Risley to conduct their landmark 2 ½
year longitudinal study with 42 families, where they observed and recorded 1300
hours of data as they watched what went on in a variety of American families
who were raising their babies. Hart and Risley spent three years observing
babies in a family setting and another three years transcribing the observation
data and years more analyzing their data. By then the babies in the original
study were 9 years old and they were able to conduct follow-up tests that confirmed
their conclusions. Hart and Risley
summarized their research work in 1995 in the book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences in the lives of
Young American Children, and in 1999 in The
Social World of Children Learning to Talk.
Thirty
Million Words, Building a Child’s Brain, by Dana Suskind, M.D., and Beth
Suskind, 2015, Dutton.
Dr. Dana Suskind
became aware of the huge significance of hearing language in brain development
in her work as a cochlear implant surgeon.
She is on the faculty at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, and
is the founder and director of the Thirty Million Word Initiative, which is a
research program studying the critical importance of early language experiences
in the life of a developing child. For
the best language environments for children she suggests the Three Ts: Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns.
Prepared by Diane L. Mangum, September 2015
