Using the mantra don’t just do it, talk them through it, Thirty Million Words offers strategies to incorporate conversation into routine activities. “The goal is to add more language and interactions to things they’re already doing, rather than adding more things to their already busy lives,” says Beth Suskind, Dana’s sister-in-law and the project’s codirector and director of innovation and social marketing. It encourages parents to talk with their kids rather than to them. The Thirty Million Words Initiative tracks language development and provides feedback to families on their progress. To help change that course, Suskind, a pediatric cochlear-implant surgeon, founded the University of Chicago Medicine’s Thirty Million Words Initiative in 2009 with the goal of teaching parents and other early-childhood caregivers how to nurture brain development through frequent, high-quality communication. and already know what their life course is.” “These kids we can look at right now, at the age of 2. “We have this lack of school readiness, these kids who don’t even have a chance,” she says. Dana Suskind could not tolerate this obstacle to the long-term potential of poor children. As early as age 3, kids born into poverty face a major disadvantage simply because those in more affluent homes have heard more words-on average, 30 million more-in their young lives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |