30 Million Words and Counting...

Being exposed to Words - the right words, the most expressive words, just a very large number of words - can make the difference between success and failure in American life. It turns out that many highly privileged children hear as many as 30 million more words by the time they are 3 than do children from poor or underprivileged environments. Furthermore, this much higher volume of words can lead to a greatly increased chance of their doing well in school, being well adjusted, and even enjoying a higher level of self-esteem.

Whether these exact numbers are right or not, we know that some children hear and use many more words than other children in their early years and that this discrepancy can spell the difference between school success and failure. It is therefore incumbent upon those of us who want to equalize the beneficial effects of early childhood development to explore options for increasing word exposure and word use for all children. 

One promising way to do this is through parental education. The Harlem Children's Zone has been holding Baby Colleges for many years now in which parents are given training and practice in interacting with their children more intimately and creatively. The focus of this practice is on conversations in which parents are guided in learning how to draw out their children through questions, by making personal statements, and by encouraging enthusiastic exchanges regarding the world around them. The more parents can get their children to observe and think about and act upon the larger world, the more their children will develop the language skills they need to do well in school and in life. 

Dana Suskind, a researcher at the University of Chicago, is now engaged in a series of research projects to see if the 30 million word gap between high SES children and low SES children can be bridged through ambitious interventions involving intensive, supervised practice between parents and their children. Parents are first and foremost taught that learning happens from birth and that language development, in particular, is a key part of early learning. Parents are also coached to engage in prolonged conversations that go in creative and unanticipated directions. That means offering more personal testimony about what one is seeing, doing, or thinking, asking children about what they are experiencing, and encouraging them to make connections between the past and the present. This also means that when parents and children are reading together, they don't just report the words in a story in a straight, linear fashion. They talk about the story, explore where it seems to be going, consider more deeply what it might mean, and investigate how the pictures in the story add to what the words are telling them. Such reading should also provide opportunities to reflect on stories and to share personal experiences that relate to the words that are found there.

In this research, parents and children together are engaged in absorbing everything around them, finding a variety of ways to talk about how it feels to take all this information in, and to relate it to what they think they already know. There is a very real sense here in which parents in this model of interaction are romancing their children, wooing them, seducing them to engage in this beautiful and mysterious process of confronting a rich, disorienting, and multifaceted world.

At first, at least, there is something a little unnatural about engaging our children so extensively. Sometimes adults don't feel like talking or don't want to make still another effort to describe at length what they're thinking and what they're experiencing, but given the high stakes, parents, in most cases, don't really have that option. In this case, talk is anything but cheap. It may be the single most valuable thing we can do to develop children's minds and boost their self-esteem. If this turns out to be true, what a small price to pay for making a large step toward ensuring their well-being and happiness.