A Second Look at the 30-Million-Word Gap

In this blog post, I am going to share with you some of the wisdom I gleaned from Dr. Dana Suskind's book, Thirty Million Words, Building a Child's Brain, Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns, published by Dutton Publishing in 2015.  This is a must-read for all of us concerned with the future of our children and grandchildren.

• I've come to realize that one of the reasons that the issue of language and vocabulary development in babies doesn't "stick," could be that when time is the most critical during the birth-to-three age range, it is not as visible as the problem becomes by the time children reach pre-kindergarten or kindergarten.  Currently our educational system is taking action at a time when it is less effective--in preschool or pre-kindergarten.  It is almost too late.  We have known for many years that the brain has the most plasticity during the years from birth to three, but I don't think we had the evidence to prove how significant this really was until the work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley was published in 1995 by Paul H. Brooks Publishing Company, in Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.  Their data collection and analysis continued for well over ten years, and it should have rocked the educational world!  From this data collection and analysis emerged the 30-Million-Word-Gap.  

• What is the 30-Million-Word-Gap anyway?  In their study, Hart and Risley and their associates visited 42 families in their homes once a month for an hour, writing down all the talking that went on between the child and parents, beginning when the child first began to talk at around 1  year old until about 3 years of age.  These families were divided into three groups: welfare, working class, and professional.  They knew when they started that some parents talk to their kids more than others, but they had no idea the extent to which that was true.  As the data mounted over the months, Hart & Risley found that during their first three years, children from poor families heard 30 million fewer words than those in professional families.  This difference permeated all aspects of social growth and intellectual accomplishments.    

Read More