- From infancy, parents should look for chances to have conversations with their child — even if it's just responding to coos or gurgles.
- Conversational interplay between caregiver and child is enough to transform the biology of kids' brains. The quality of these exchanges is more important than the quantity of words children hear.
- Conversation drives literacy skills and cognitive development across all socioeconomic levels, regardless parents' income or education. It's a powerful, actionable, and simple tool for all parents to use.
The Brain-Changing Power of Conversation: Interplay between parents and children ignites the brain and boosts its response to language, spurring lasting literacy skills (2018) (Harvard Graduate School of Education)
Description:
For parents, daycare providers, and early educators, new research describes a simple and powerful way to build children’s brains: talk with them, early and often.
A study in Psychological Science shows how conversation — the interplay between a parent or caregiver and a child — ignites the language centers in a child’s brain. It’s the first study to show a relationship between the words children hear at home and the growth of their neural processing capacities — showing, in effect, that how parents talk to their children changes children’s brains.
What Parents and Early Educators Should Know