Speech and social development in isolation.
There are three categories of milestones that child doctors track in well-baby visits. The motor milestones are walking, standing, sitting, and running. Then there are the fine motor skills of holding pencils, coloring, two-finger, and three-finger grips. Finally, there are the social milestones of smiling, playing, and speaking. An essential component of social development is speech.
Babies learn to talk by hearing adults talk. I am an introvert, and I generally find it difficult to speak. In typical situations, children meet enough outsiders to listen to an adequate number of conversations and develop proper speech. In socially isolated, covid times, play school-age children are not getting sufficient exposure to adult speech. Apart from other education deficits during the pandemic, this one needs its own focus.
I was trying to Google an approximate amount of words that young children should hear daily (yes, I need to set goals to speak). I ran into the controversial “30 million words by three years” paper by Betty Hart and Todd Risley. It concluded that children heard a significantly lower number (30 million) of words in families of lower socio-economic strata by the time they were three. The study had faults in its design, and it has generated much heat and justified controversy. A subsequent study by Gilkerson et al. found that this conclusion was incorrect, and the word gap is at least ten times lower. The word gap among social strata could not be more than 4 million words by four years of age with appropriate methodology.
However, the controversy gave me a ballpark figure to target when speaking to my toddlers. It turns out children under three need to hear at least 6 to 7 thousand words per day from each parent. People use about 100–120 words in a minute of continuous speech. Broken down, this means the child should be hearing AT LEAST two 30 minute speeches from each parent per day. Preferably more. I realized that I have been relatively negligent in my parenting when it comes to talking with my children. Thankfully other people have picked up my slack. It is a difficult feeling to process when I consider that preschools have stayed open quite irregularly throughout the pandemic. I need to talk more with my children. Sigh.
Did I tell you I am a woman of few words?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Aaron Burden from Unsplash.