The widening education gap between the rich and the poor is not news to those who work in education, many of whom have been struggling to close the gap beginning the day poor children enter kindergarten or preschool. But one unlikely soldier has joined the fight: a pediatric surgeon who wants to get started way before kindergarten. She wants to start closing the gap the day babies are born.
When Dr. Dana Suskind began doing cochlear implants on infants at the University of Chicago—a cutting-edge surgical technique that allows once-deaf babies to hear—in her follow-ups with families she noticed a stark difference in how the now-hearing children acquired language. Once they could hear, some children’s language skills thrived and grew, while others languished. Why this was so began to nag at her. What was causing some children to leap ahead in their language skills?
The difference turned out to be the words children heard from their parents and caregivers, millions of them. Baby talk, explaining and describing, asking questions even when they weren’t going to get an answer — adults “using their words” is the thing that some parents and caregivers do thousands of time a day that builds a baby’s brain.
While auditing a graduate-level course on child language development at the University of Chicago, Suskind heard about the groundbreaking Hart and Risley study on the differences in how parents from different income levels interacted with their children. After painstakingly following around families and recording how often they talked to their children, Hart and Risley found that the children of professional parents heard approximately 11 million words in a year, while children from poor welfare families heard only 3 million. Extrapolated over time, Hart and Risley surmised that, by the time poor children turned 4, they had heard 30 million fewer words than their richer counterparts.
There was a direct correlation between the children who’d heard a lot of parent talk and how prepared they were to learn once they arrived at school. Hart and Risley wrote, “With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies [grew] and the higher the children’s IQ test scores at age 3 and later.”
For Suskind, a lightbulb went on.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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