Talk Time ~ introduction
New research shows that the most important thing you can do to ensure your child’s success in life is read and TALK to them, every single day.
And this habit should start at birth!
- Click here to scroll through all the Talk Time articles
In fact, proactively talking to your newborn or infant every day literally hardwires their brains for learning. They learn how to listen, comprehend and pay attention, as well as so many other wonderful things. This is NOT something that can be learned from a TV. It is most effective when done by a parent. (Click here for rules, tips and tricks when doing Talk Time with your child).
There is a lot of interest in early childhood development out there, from teaching your infants sign language, to exposing them to music, beats and sounds in the womb, and more! However, this one activity – just talking to your child every day – is by far and away the most important and productive.
Of course, the more diverse the conversation, the more new concepts and vocabulary you expose your child to.
This can be challenging for many mothers (and fathers), though, simply because our lives tend to be so repetitive.
“Talk Time” provides you with daily prompts to help you have at least one new topic to talk to your infant about, every single day! Along with the prompt/topic, we give you questions, ideas and vocabulary words each day to ensure that you have a lot of great content to expose your young ones to.
So what are you going to talk to your child about today?
Research:
“A rather stunning body of research is emerging that suggests that starting these reforms at kindergarten, let alone in elementary, middle, or high school, is far too late. 98% of education spending occurs after the basic intellectual capacities of children have been mostly determined.”
“This particular strand of research is teaching us that a significant portion of a person’s intellectual capacity is determined in his or her first 36 months.”
“Children of talkative college-educated parents [hear] their parents speak 48 million words” by the time they are 3 years old. “In contrast, children in welfare families had heard 13 million words. Interestingly, the most powerful of these words… seemed to be those that were spoken in the first year of life – when there was no visible evidence that the child could understand what the parents were saying.”
Researchers have “found a powerful, direct correlation between the number of words the child had heard and the size of the child’s vocabulary…” as well as with the child’s IQ.
“There is a strong and well-documented correlation between the breadth of vocabulary and performance on examinations for reading comprehension.”
(all quotes from the book, “Disrupting Class”, by Clayton Christensen.)