How you talk to kids affects their intellectual development

I’m currently reading “How will you measure your life” by Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School Professor. Though the title of the book sounds like another self-help book, what sets this book apart is it cites a lot of case studies and scientific research and draws out learnings and correlation to life.

I’m not yet finished reading the book but in the meantime, I wanted to share a very interesting research about how talking to children in the first two and a half years of their lives affects the intellectual capacity of the child. I am not married yet nor a mom but I just thought this is really worth sharing to all the parents out there.

Source: www.freeclipart.com

Based on a research by Todd Risley and Betty Hart, parents speak an average of 1,500 words per hour to their infant children. Talkative parents spoke an average of 2,100 words to their child and parents from less verbal backgrounds spoke only an average of 600 per hour.   If you add that up over the first 30 months, the child of talkative parents heard an estimated 48 million words spoken, compared to the disadvantaged child, who heard only 13 million. The most important time for the children to hear the words, the research suggests, is the first year of life.

The two researchers monitored their subjects as they grew up and found a strong correlation between the number of words the children heard in their first 30 months and their performance on vocabulary and reading comprehension tests as they got older. And it’s not just about the words but “how” the parents spoke to a child which made the most significant effect.

The researchers classified the way parents talk to children into two:

1.  Business language which makes use of straightforward phrases like “Finish your milk”, “Time for a nap”.

2.  Chatty, grown up conversational style (commenting on what the child is doing or what the parent is doing or planning to do) such as “Do you want to wear the blue shirt or red shirt today?”, “Do you think it will rain today?”, “Wouldn’t be nice if …”. 
The researchers concluded the business language had limited effect on cognitive development whereas the conversational style invites the child to think deeply on what is happening around him.  This results to more synaptic pathways in the child’s brain being exercised and refined. Synapses are the junctions in the brain where a signal is transmitted from one never cell to another. The more pathways are created between synapses in the brain, the more efficiently connections are formed, thus, making subsequent thought patterns easier and faster.

Thus, a child who heard 48 million words in the first 3 years won’t just have 3.7 times as many well-lubricated connections in its brain as a child who has heard only 13 million words.

As the author cites, many parents think they can only start focusing on their children’s academic performance when they hit high school. It actually starts in the first 2 1/2 years of the child’s life.