And the kids who start behind can stay behind once they get to school, contributing to a growing achievement gap between poor and better off students. Specifically, 30 million fewer words by the age of 3. She is part of a project called the Thirty Million Words Initiative, developed at the University of Chicago after researchers found that children in poor households often hear fewer words spoken to them than youngsters in more comfortable families. He's why Saenz is here: to help Banks talk to her son, to build the little boy's brain. In Courtney Banks' apartment in Chicago's Kenwood neighborhood, Michelle Saenz opens a laptop.īanks' youngest child, 18-month-old son, Rasean Wright, squirms and flops on his mother's lap. Mommy loves you so much, then, when it’s successful, the startled expression of the child followed by a smile, laughter, or even crying.Pediatric surgeon and author Dana Suskind It is a very dramatic moment, and it is invariably followed by, Honey, Honey, do you hear Mommy. The true hearing birthday is the moment the cochlear device is activated. It is not just that my experience with Zach and Michelle made me aware of the limits of technology, but it also made me acknowledge a force that impacts the arcs of all our lives. The impact of this force is that it makes us realize the limits of technology. The slow start of my cochlear implant program allowed me to see the problems that existed in the children, and how important individual experience can be ignored when large sample sizes are used. The University of Chicago is an island of inequality in a sea of inequality on Chicago’s South Side.

From cerebral palsy to strokes, from spinal cord injuries to football-related head trauma, making better rather than correcting tends to be the medical dictum. The brain and neural structures in the human body are generally unforgiving. It was developed in the 1990s, and its significance was increased when it coincided with the development of a neurologic miracle, the universal newborn screening. The cochlear implant is a surgical procedure that allows deaf people to hear.

The author is a pediatric cochlear implant surgeon, and he wrote the book on parent talk because he believes that parent talk is the key to helping children hear with a cochlear implant. Without it, children can suffer the lifelong effects of silence. Parent talk is the most important resource for developing a child’s brain. Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 1 Insights on Dana Suskind's Thirty Million Words

Thirty million words book