3세 이전에...

자녀 양육을 위하여 기억할 만한 내용이라 생각되어 올려둡니다.

By:Emily Badger The Washington Post, Published on Tue Dec 29 2015

Dana Suskind, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Chicago, performs cochlear implant surgeries every Tuesday on children as young as 7 months old who were born deaf. When she activates the tiny device in their inner ears for the first time, often to the startled ｅxpression of the children and tears from their parents, she celebrates each child’s “hearing birthday.”

This is the moment, Suskind once believed, when she set each child on the path to understanding words, then speaking them, then reading them, then thriving. Perform the surgeries early enough and you can give children the ability to hear while their malleable brains are still developing, feeding off the language around them.

Several years ago, though, Suskind realized some children who had received the surgery continued to struggle anyway. She describes in her new book, “Thirty Million Words,” one little girl from a poor family who could still barely speak by the third grade. “When I looked at her lovely face,” Suskind writes, “it was hard to say whether I was seeing the tragedy of deafness or the tragedy of poverty.”

Studies show that children in poor families are spoken to less often. By the time they’re 3, according to one famous estimate, they have heard 30 million fewer cumulative words than kids who come from wealthier homes. They can suffer, like children born without hearing, from what Suskind calls the lifelong effects of silence.

That discovery has made the surgeon, who has the patient temperament of someone who works with small kids, a devout advocate for poor children. Now she researches what they hear at home and how that language influences their brain development. And her work is behind a series of efforts in different corners of the U.S. to translate this emerging science into public programs that might actually change how low-income parents talk to their kids.

“Sometimes I look back and I think: ‘Gosh, how did I get here? I’m a surgeon — I’m not supposed to be doing this,’ ” Suskind says. “I look at children in such a different way,” she adds. “You can almost look into their eyes and see neural connections happening.”

Her Thirty Million Words initiative (and her book) takes its name from a small but seminal study conducted in the 1980s by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley. They spent more than 1,300 hours observing parents and their children in 42 families of varying incomes, and they uncovered a startling word gap: The average child from a “professional” family heard 2,153 words per hour; the average child from a family on welfare heard 616.

Over a child’s first few years, Hart and Risley concluded that the gap could add up to 30 million words. The pattern is not just about reading but about talk of all kinds. Researchers now know that early exposure to language like this helps build a child’s brain, and it predicts later reading skills. Young children not immersed in words fall behind before they enter pre-kindergarten.

The recorder tucks into specially designed vests that the children wear. It then plugs into software that can automatically do what Hart and Risley did by hand, counting the words a child hears, as well as the conversational turns with parents that matter, too. After each recording, parents are given charts tracking their progress.

“It’s the same as wearing a Fitbit or doing Weight Watchers and tracking your results,” says Courtney Hawkins, the executive director of the program, Providence Talks. “We know if you want to change behaviour, you have to know how you’re doing over time.”

This fall, Providence released initial results from the pilot. Among the 120 families that completed at least four coaching sessions, children heard on average an additional 1,191 words a day. And the progress was larger for children who started further behind.

Rosa Aldana, a 40-year-old mother of three in Providence, believes she can already see some change in her 3-year-old daughter, Geovana, who’s doing recordings now. A second child, Geovana was slow to speak and prone to letting her sister talk for her. “She went almost two years without saying much,” Aldana says. “Now, it’s like sometimes I have to say, ‘Keep quiet for a little bit.’ ”

The city is planning an aggressive expansion to 2,500 families over the next two years, some who will receive home visits, others group coaching. The city doesn’t know yet whether families maintain their progress after the coaching and recording stops. And the program’s ultimate success won’t be measured in word counts, anyway.

“The next question is kindergarten readiness,” Hawkins says. Then you want to know whether third-grade reading levels improve. “We’re going to have to trust the science,” Hawkins says, “because we know the results are so far off.”