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Researchers have cracked the code on child brain development. The key? Early verbal engagement. Put simply, words make your child smarter. Sounds crazy, right? It’s not.Think of it as learning a really weird foreign language. No matter how hard you study, you’ll never be able to speak it fluently. As an adult, no amount of effort can unlock your brain. You’re too old.But for an infant or toddler? It’s a different story entirely.When you were a baby, every time your parents spoke to you, thousands of neural connections formed in your brain. These connections were based upon what you heard, what you saw, and what you felt. Over time, the more they spoke, the faster you became at understanding what your parents spoke about.Eventually you started speaking back to them, making even easier for your parents to carry a conversation with you and leading them to speak more.This whole process continued, but eventually the rate at which new connections formed in your brain started to slow down.By the time you started kindergarten, your brain’s growth slowed from a flood to a trickle. Your school teachers may have taught you grammar and multiplication tables, but they couldn’t do much to make your brain run any faster.30+ years of research has shown how singularly powerful words are. The cascading effects are phenomenal, and the benefits last a lifetime. They’re like a miracle drug that turns babies into smart people, only words are free, have no side negative effects, and don’t taste all that bad.Sources:Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Risley. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Baltimore: P.H. Brookes, 1995. Print.Fernald, Anne, Virginia A. Marchman, and Adriana Weisleder. "SES Differences in Language Processing Skill and Vocabulary Are Evident at 18 Months." Developmental Science 16.2 (2013): 234-48. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 2013. Web.Suskind, Dana. Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain: Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns. N.p.: Dutton, 2015. Print.

We start from the wrong end.Most energy is put it into treating people who are already suffering.We should be teaching parents, teachers and really anyone that will listen about attachment (how people connect and develop - this is largely formed by the age of 18 months- 2 years), emotional literacy and expression (what emotions are for and how to tolerate them), authoritative parenting (setting limits in a kind way without cruelty or punishing), trauma and empathy (understanding and relating to others). Adults inflict their own unresolved trauma onto children and other relationships.With a better foundation, it will be clearer and easier to see which problems need to be focussed on.We’re going round mopping up the water from the leaky pipes without considering turning the water off.

It was a general “parents’ group” for the school, not a specific “criticize the teachers” group. But that’s what 75% of the posts were. The feed was like:Don’t forget to sign your kid’s forms. - Posted by Betty.Mrs. Smith never gave my kid the form. - Posted by Steve.Mrs. Smith sucks. She never hands out any forms. - Posted by Dave.Mrs. Smith needs to retire already. - Posted by Rachel.And so on…I don’t think that the parents realized we saw all of the posts. Or they didn’t care.It was a combination of humorous and sad for the teachers. Some posts were so hilariously wrong that we printed them and put them in the teachers’ lounge. When we were sad about a post, we were not sad for ourselves, but sad for the kids whose parents were so completely oblivious as to what their child was actually like during the day, how they were manipulating their parents, etc… It’s tough to see a child going down a bad path in life, mostly because their parents can’t also see it, or don’t want to see it.Every single time a parent claimed that a teacher never gave their child something, we’d stand by the child as they searched their locker and backpack. It was always in there. The teacher did give it back; the kid just stuffed it somewhere and forgot.Every single time a parent claimed that a teacher didn’t teach something, the teacher would point out that the child in question was the only one who doesn’t remember the lesson, and, not coincidentally, the one who was talking through the whole lesson.I did once confront a parent who complained that I was having the students re-read a book that they’d read the year before with another teacher. The parent was criticizing my choice and how I was “wasting her son’s class time.” So I emailed the parent with a screen shot of the post, and a long explanation that was, basically, it’s a short book that only took two days to read, we’re reading it at a deeper level, connecting it to something new we’d learned and looking at the bigger context in which it was written, and, despite him reading it a second time, he still failed the final test on it, so maybe he never really read it the first time.She thanked me for my explanation and deleted the post. No apologies, though.