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Early Nurturing – The Key to Kids’ Listening Skills?

My older daughter is a big David Sedaris fan. During a family road trip she read Sedaris’ essay, “Six to Eight Black Men,” from the back seat. We just roared. This is a seriously funny story.

How had we come to be a family that listens to essays at 75 miles an hour?

All right. This post was motivated by some interesting news I heard this week: Children’s publishers are now interested in picture books of only 500-700 words. How can this be right? I wondered. The woman leading our chapter meeting of SCBWI (Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illusrators) said it’s a trend, and then in the same breath mentioned attention span.

What about Dr. Seuss classics like Green Eggs and Ham, and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, by Virginal Lee Burton? How about the Babar books by Laurent de Brunhoff? My kids’ lives are all the richer for them. And the Tale of Peter Rabbit and the Corduroy stories by Don Freeman – and all the authors we loved as kids?

They’re just not publishing material like that anymore, she said.

This makes me really sad.

I recently read  an article about the affect of parenting styles on language acquision, titled Reseach Overview: Parent-Child Communication is Important from Birth, by Dr. Cathy Hamer, policy and communities manager, National Literacy Trust, published in Perspective, journal of the UK’s National Childbirth Trust (NTC), March 2012.

In short, the article says that when parents communicate with their baby from birth, gently responding to  crying, cooing and babbling and engaging in their baby’s play, they can have a direct impact on the child’s rate of language acquisition,  vocabulary, and later reading scores scores.

One interesting concept presented is that of  “contingency.” “Contingency is the extent to which the intended recipient is fully sensitive and responsive towards receiving a form of communication from another person,” the article states.

Contingency is not only necessary for the formation of healthy attachment, but for linguistic development. In an American study of sixty-two mothers and babies, researchers detailed and analyzed the pairs’ interactions between six and twenty-four months. “The nature of the baby’s attachment predicted his or her temperament and behaviour as a toddler, and interaction with the mother at 24 months.”

Other studies underscore the importance of contingent responses from a mother to her child, showing that the quality of the mother’s response “helps babies gain an understanding of the rules of conversation and a sense of self during the first year of life.”

What is storytelling if not expanded conversation?

When a baby says “bah bah bah,” and the parent returns “bah bah baby, pretty baby,” the parent is extending the interaction. Such communication can only help expand a child’s attention span. And this happens due to the brain being stimulated, increasing neurological connections.

What happens when no one answers a baby’s “bah bah bah?” Or worse yet, when the baby is crying and no gentle caregiver comes to soothe him?

Developments in the field of epigenetics have revealed a motherload of information on the subject of toxic stress and its effect on the developing brain. When babies’ crying is ignored they cannot balance their stress regulatory system. In a hyper-aroused state – crying or anxious because their needs are not met – a baby cannot attend normally to his environment, take in and properly process information. Over time, this toxic stress negatively impacts children’s cognitive thinking skills and can affect behavior.

Nurturing parenting responses, on the other hand, have the opposite effect. The structures for attention are built when parents nurture and pay attention to their children. How else can we expect them to access these skills later on if they had no roots in infancy and early childhood?

It’s rather silly to expect children to be good listeners if we haven’t been listening to them all along.

Too bad. David Sedaris is one awesome storyteller. FGG

Listen to David Sedaris, Live at Carnegie Hall, including his hilarious essay, “Six to Eight Black Men,” by clicking on this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYdpte1W0vk.

https://familyfieldguide.com/.

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