It’s enough to stress out even the most amicable of co-parents. Your work time, your ex’s work hours, your kid’s extracurricular activities, and more. “It is hard for all of us to change any habit.Do you ever find yourself getting overwhelmed by co-parenting? You’re separated, or you're in the midst of a divorce now, and you’re trying to manage your children as they go back and forth between two separate households. “Part of this is public health communication, but I expect that more direct forms of support will be needed to promote this and help parents change conversational habits,” Gabrieli says. Gabrieli, Rowe, and other researchers are exploring ways to make these findings - and the actionable takeaways about the importance of conversation - accessible to all families. As Gabrieli told the MIT News Office, “It’s almost magical how parental conversation appears to influence the biological growth of the brain.” Conversing often with one’s children is “strikingly helpful” regardless of income and educational background, he says. “We found that the brains of children from lower-income families benefitted from conversational interplay just as much as the brains of children from higher income families,” says Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Importantly, this research finds effects across all socioeconomic levels. “Either way, it seems to be the interaction that best supports children's language skills and the underlying neural development.” Obviously, a ‘conversation’ looks very different with much younger children: with infants, it might be taking turns exchanging giggles or coos with toddlers, it might be repeating and expanding their sentences and with older children, it might be asking ‘who, what, where, and how’ questions. “Even from infancy, we can consider children to be conversational partners. This work suggests how important it is that caregivers “not just talk to your child, but talk with them,” says Romeo. Conversational interplay - a verbal version of the serve-and-return caregiving that helps kids thrive - “involves not only a linguistic exchange, but also a social interaction that we know is crucial to cognitive development as well,” Romeo says. The “conversational turns” are key here, the researchers say. (Authors on the paper include Meredith Rowe of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, whose behavioral work has shown the importance of parent-child interplay Martin West of HGSE, and senior author John Gabrieli of MIT.) The Takeaways Read the MIT News story for a fuller summary of the research. The recordings were analyzed to measure the number of words spoken by each child, the number of words spoken to each child, and the number of conversational turns - back-and-forth exchanges initiated by either adult or child.Ĭomparing those measurements with brain scans of the individual children, the analysis found that differences in the number of conversational turns accounted for differences in brain physiology, as well as for differences in language skills including vocabulary, grammar, and verbal reasoning.
#COMMUNICATI FORMS TO GO BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN CO PARENTS FULL#
Researchers used highly faithful audio recorders - a system called Language Environment Analysis (known as LENA) - to capture every word spoken or heard by 36 4–6 year olds from various socioeconomic backgrounds over two full days.
It really is the quality of language exposure that matters, over and above the quantity of words dumped onto a child.” “And that neural response, in turn, predicted children's language skills. “Specifically, after we equate for socioeconomic status, we find that the sheer number of words spoken by an adult was not related to children's neural processing of language, but that the number of conversational turns was,” says Romeo. The new findings replicate that behavioral research on quality over quantity and extend it by showing the effects in the brain. But recent work has added nuance, showing that it’s not so much the quantity of words children hear as the quality that matters. In the wake of a 1995 study that found a dramatic gap in the number of words heard by high- and low-income children - the so-called 30 million word gap - much attention has been given to efforts to enrich kids’ language exposure. student Rachel Romeo, with coauthors at both of those institutions and the University of Pennsylvania - builds on what researchers have long known about the connections between “home language environment” and children’s cognitive development, literacy and language growth, and verbal ability.
This new work - led by Harvard and MIT Ph.D.
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