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Not All Talk is Equal: How to talk to your baby

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    There is a profound difference in how children turn out based on how much their parents talk to them, according to researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley.   Ideally, a baby will hear 30 million words from family members by the age of three.   However, that doesn’t mean you can say “Don’t throw Cheerios” ten million times and expect the best.   All spoken words do not create equally positive results.     Betty Hart and Todd Risley spent 13 years observing and analyzing children and their families as they learned to talk.   They published their findings in two books, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Children in 1995, and The Social World of Children Learning to Talk in 1999.     In their books, Hart and Risley have some valuable insights on how parents can have higher quality interactions with their babies and young children: 1.   Talk about the unimportant things.     Of course parents will talk to...
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What about reading? Should I talk to my kids or read to my kids?

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Reading to your children is a wonderful way to facilitate extra talking to children, especially if the words in the book become the jumping off point for more conversation. Books open up a new window to peek out of and look at other people and places.   An author may have a new voice that can share ideas mom or dad may not have thought about, and use new vocabulary words.   Some combinations of words are just fun to say and hear.   Good illustrations or photographs can zero in on a concept   and facilitate understanding. A good story should entertain both child and parent, and be a happy shared experience.   As a preschool teacher of many years, and grandmother to 16 children, I’ve read a lot of books to children and I have a few suggestions. ·        Start when they are very little.   Even infants enjoy looking at picture books, and it gives mom and dad fun things to point to and talk about.   Books soon become associate...
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Love the One You're With

      Some people fear global warming.      Others worry about the economy.      Me, I worry about isolationism.      Not the kind of isolationism that my high school history teacher talked about. I worry about people living in this ever more connected world, and yet becoming more and more distant because of gadgets that isolate them.      My grandmother grew up with in a home where the family read books like Peck's Bad Boys in the evenings together.      In my father’s childhood, when the family wanted music, they all played band instruments together around the piano.      In my childhood, my family took rides to the canyon or long road trips with five kids playing games together in the back of a station wagon.   For lunch, we opened the tailgate and made sandwiches and mom plugged the baby bottle warmer into the cigarette lighter.   ...
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