September will be a milestone month for many parents. It’s not just the month schools open, but the month when baby goes off to kindergarten for the first time, baby no more.
Kindergarten is a challenging class for teachers. Talk about diversity — in they come, some actually able to read, others unable to distinguish a letter from a number.
Some have been read to until the pieces fell into place and they can read basic books themselves. Others have never held a book.
Yet it now appears that readiness for kindergarten can begin long before that date in September when 13 years of formal education begins for most kids.
A fascinating study comes from Providence, R.I., where the municipal government received a $5-million grand prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, beating 300 other cities for best new idea to work with the school system, public libraries and public health.
The study simply aims to help get all parents talking to their babies.
Long-standing research shows that the amount of talk in the home strongly predicts school success — conversation is a building block for lifelong language development.
It may be that kids in Providence won an even bigger prize — greater success in early years, which leads to broader language acquisition and, subsequently, literacy.
In Providence, only one in three children entered school “ready” for kindergarten.
The city already had a network of successful programs in which nurses, mentors, therapists and social workers regularly visit pregnant women, new parents and children in their homes, providing medical attention and advice, therapy, counselling and other services.
Now Providence trains these home visitors to add a new service: creating family conversation.
The “Providence Talks” program is based on research by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley at the University of Kansas. The study indicates that just talking to babies in a normal way can boost their brain power, and that months before babies start to speak, words play an important role in their brain development.
It turns out that a stream of parent-to-child talk — Feel Teddy’s nose! It’s so soft! Cars make noise! Now Mommy is opening the refrigerator! — is very, very important.
Not “baby talk,” just talk.
Researchers were looking for things like the ways in which parents praised their children, what they talked about, whether the conversational tone was positive or negative.
“It wasn’t until we’d collected our data that we realized that the important variable was how much talking the parents were doing,” Risley told an interviewer.
In fact, the disparity was staggering. Some children had heard about 600 words per hour, others 1,200 words per hour, and some as much as 2,100 words. This latter tended to be from families where both parents had achieved higher levels of formal education.
And the disparity mattered: The greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were three, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school.
TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.
Another study from researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute suggested that baby brains can comprehend and communicate remarkably complex thoughts at the age of 12 months.
Do these studies point to a revolutionary way of reducing inequities in school achievement?
Perhaps, but in the meantime, keep talking to babies and toddlers. Turn off the TV once in a while, put away the videogames and just talk to and with your kids.
Who knows — it may not only help them learn, but maybe they’ll even still be talking with you when they are teenagers.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
