Helping Kids Grow

From USA Today - 

"It's the three T's," she says: "Tune in, talk more and take turns."

That's the mantra of the Thirty Million Words initiative, an experimental effort to build young brains with words. The program gets its name from a study published in the 1990s that found children in low-income homes heard 30 million fewer words by age 3 than children in high income homes. They also heard a smaller variety of words and fewer words of encouragement. And those differences in language exposure had an apparent effect: Children from word-poor homes ended up with smaller vocabularies and worse school performance.

~~~~~

"Not having money in your pocket has never made a brain not grow," says Dana Suskind, a University of Chicago surgeon who founded the Thirty Million Words project. But little brains do need words to grow, she says: "In the beginning, the food for the developing brain is language and interaction."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2015/10/18/baby-talk-brain-programs/73808670/