How 30 million words can fuel your child’s brain

Around 10 years ago, Dana Suskind, a paediatric neurosurgeon and cochlear implant specialist at the University of Chicago, began noticing enormous differences among infants born deaf and then fitted with cochlear devices that allowed them to hear.

Despite a shared starting point, they achieved different levels of success in connecting sounds with words and concepts, and learning to speak. She found that for some children the struggle was still hard, years after the implantation whilst to others success came readily. This puzzled her.

She began studying the effect of language on the developing infant brain and found huge quantitative and qualitative differences in the language environment of lower income and higher income infants, including a gap of 30 million words spoken over the first three years. Variations, of course, occur across both groups.

In her book, 30 Million Words, released 18 months ago, Suskind talks about the heart and lungs being fully developed when babies are born, but the brain is completely dependent on what it encounters as it develops, and especially in the first three years. Language input, parent talk and interaction are key catalysts for creating neural connections in children’s brains

For Suskind, the research was galvanising and she founded the 30 Million Words Initiative in 2009, which now has a great online presence. Her simple three T’s of communication: tune in, talk more and take turns can be quickly and easily understood and adopted.

At birth, a baby’s brain contains 100 billion neurons, roughly as many nerve cells as there are stars in the Milky Way, and almost all the neurons the brain will ever have. Connections between these form at an exponentially rising rate in the first years of life and it is the pattern of these connections that determines how well the brain works and what it learns.

By the time a child is three there will be about 1000 trillion connections in his/her brain, and that child’s experiences will continuously determine which connections are strengthened and which are pruned.

As with Suskind’s findings, research suggests that a dispiriting number of children don’t get the kind of brain fuelling communication that can shape the trajectory of their lives. This disparity occurs well before a child is three, even at the tender age of 18 months, and probably the differentiation commences at birth. The problem seems to be cumulative; by the time the children are two there can be a six month disparity in the language processing skills and vocabulary between the two groups.

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