This IS GOLD

Hi Everyone, I’m Cami.

I believe there is value in building skills like gaining A LARGER VOCABULARY

AND

LEARNING TO ASK BETTER QUESTIONS

if you are someone that is dealing with a cancer diagnosis or a chronic illness.

There is so much to learn with in each individual story, and so I am here to share some of mine!!

Here is the more of the quote that I sourced in my youtube video.

“Risley and Hart’s research followed the children they studied as they progressed through school. The number of words spoken to a child had a strong correlation between the number of words that they heard in their first thirty months and their performance on vocabulary and reading comprehension tests as they got older.

when parents engage in face-to-face conversation with the child—speaking in fully adult, sophisticated language as if the child could be a part of the chatty, grown-up conversation—the impact on cognitive development was enormous. These richer interactions they called”language dancing.” Language dancing is being chatty, thinking aloud, and commenting on what the child is doing and what the parent is doing or planning to do. “Do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red shirt today?” “Do you think it will rain today?” “Do you remember the time I put your bottle in the oven by mistake?” and soon. Language dancing involves talking to the child about “what if, ” and “do you remember,” and “wouldn’t it be nice if”—questions that invite the child to think deeply about what is happening around him. And it has a profound effect long before a parent might actually expect a child to understand what is being asked.” ¹

The whole excerpt that explains the research behind the word “language dancing”, as follows:

“There’s significant research emerging that demonstrates just how important the earliest months of life are to the development of intellectual capacity. As recounted in our book Disrupting Class, two researchers, Todd Risley and Betty Hart, studied the effects of how parents talk to a child during the first tow and half years of life. After meticulously observing and recording all of the interactions between parent and child, they noticed that on average, paretns speak 1500 words per hour to their infant children . “Talkative” (often college-educated) parents spoke 2,100 words to ehir child, on average. By contrast, partents from less verbal (and often less-educated) backgrrounds spoke only 600 perhour, on average. If you add that up over the first thirty months, the child of “talkative” parents heard an estimated 48 million words sponken, compared to the disadvantaged child, who heard only 13 million. The most important time for the children to hear the words, the research suggestes, is the first year of life.

“Risley and Hart’s research followed the children they studied as they progressed through school. The number of words spoken to a child had a strong correlation between the number of words that they heard in their first thirty months and their performance on vocabulary and reading comprehension tests as they got older.

“And it didn’t matter that just any words were spoken to a child—the way a parent spoke to a child had a significant effects. The researchers observed two different types of conversations between parents and infants. One type they dubbed “business language” —such as, “Time for a nap,” “lets’s go for a rede, ” and Finish your milk.” Such conversations were simple and direct, not rich and complex. Risley and Hart concluded that these types of conversations had limited effect on cognitive development.

“In contrast, when parents engage in face-to-face conversation with the child—speaking in fully adult, sophisticated language as if the child could be a part of the chatty, grown-up conversation—the impact on cognitive development was enormous. These richer interactions they called”language dancing.” Language dancing is being chatty, thinking aloud, and commenting on what the child is doing and what the parent is doing or planning to do. “Do you want to wear the blue shirt or the red shirt today?” “Do you think it will rain today?” “Do you remember the time I put your bottle in the oven by mistake?” and soon. Language dancing involves talking to the child about “what if, ” and “do you remember,” and “wouldn’t it be nice if”—questions that invite the child to think deeply about what is happening areound him. And it has a profound effect long before a parent might actually expect a child to understand what is being asked.

“In short, when a parent engages in a extra talk, many, many more of the synaptic pathways in the child’s brain are exercised and refined. Synapses are the junctions in the brain where a signal is transmitted from one nerve cell to another. In simple terms, the more pathways that are created between synapses in the brain, the more efficiently connections are formed. This makes the subsequent patterns of thought easier and faster. This matters. A child who has heard 48 million words in the first three years won’t just have 3.7 times as many well-lubricated connections in tis brain as a child who has heard only 13 million words. The effect on the brain cells is exponential. Each brain cell can be connected to hundreds of other cells by as many as ten thousand synapses. That means children who have been exposed to extra talk have an almost incalculable cognitive advantage.

“What’s more, Risley and Hart’s research suggests that “language dancing” is the key to this cognitive advantage—not income, ethnicity, or parents’ education. In other words, summarized Risley and Hart, “some working-poor people talked a lot to their kids and their kids did really well. Some affluent businesspeople talked very little to their kids and their kids did very poorly….All the variation in outcomes was taken up by the amount of talking, in the family, to the babies before age three.” A child who enters school with a strong vocabulary and strong cognitive abilities is likely to do well in school early on and continues to do well in the longer term.” ²

After reading some of this, what are your thoughts?

I believe that we are never to old to learn to be a better inquirer. It may be scary, because it leads to vulnerability, but you are brave.

Lots of love!

1. [↩]
2. Christensen, Clayton M., Allworth, James and Dillon, Karen, How Will You Measure Your Life? Harper Collins Books 2012, pg. 94-97[↩]