"Closing the Achievement Gap With Baby Talk"

It has been proven that children will succeed better in school and in life if they're talked to more at a young age. A graduate student by the name of Betty Hart, who works at a preschool decided to do an experiment following and analyzing 40 different families of all different ethnic backgrounds and economic situations. They followed these families for the first three years of their children's lives. The experiment started in 1983 and every month, trained observers went and recorded the families who were willing to participate.These observers catalog every bit of conversation the families had. The tapes took 10 years to decipher and duplicate to be fed into a computer for analysis. It turned out that the quality of the speech was not the major factor, but it was the quantity. "According to their research, the average child in a welfare home heard about 600 words an hour while a child in a professional home heard 2,100." With this information, programs have sprung up all over the country created to teach low-income parents how to talk to their children from birth. They provide coaching sessions when the mothers aren't sent to the pediatrician, recorded playing with their children, and told how to improve this. A researcher at the Brookings institute by the name of Russ Whitehurst says, "If that's not followed with good stimulation in school with continued positive parent interactions, if that experience is not built on, it's not likely to have an enduring effect,"

While reading/listening to this article, I learned a lot about parenting and talking to children. I always believed that what was said to a child mattered more than how much is said to a child. I also didn't know that this talking should start right after birth. Most people use "baby talk" when talking to infants. I would live to be a part of one of the programs, teaching mothers how to talk to their baby and contributing to a baby's success in life. This whole article was very interesting to me and I would love to learn more about it.

A link to the website is on my link list as "Baby Talk :)"
Also, my picture wouldn't work. I did try to put one up though. :(