WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Obama administration is now telling parents how they should talk with their children with the help of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

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The White House wants parents to talk with their children more, especially low-income parents, according to a fact sheet produced by the administration.

Research shows that kids in lower-income families hear far fewer words that do kids in families with high incomes.  The White House calls that the “word gap.” They also like to use the term “word nutrition” when referring to ways to overcome that gap.

During the first three years of life, the research surrounding this shows lower-income kids hear 30 million fewer words that those coming from well-off households. That’s about 27,000 more words per day. It seems that low-income parents need to verbally interact with their children more than they do now to improve their children’s chances when beginning school.

The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services are working with state and local governments to find ways to get lower-income children to hear more words. One of the ways is through low-cost technologies that will help parents engage in more high-quality verbal interactions. HHS will award up to $300,000 in prize money to groups that develop these technologies. Another idea is to develop a ‘word gap toolkit’ to give parents and teachers additional resources. The National Academy of Sciences is engaged in a $2 million project to study how to support the development of kids who don’t speak English, or who speak two languages.

The state of Georgia has their own program call ‘Talk with Me Baby’ touted by the School of Nursing and the Georgia Department of Health.  It’s a public awareness campaign led by the Marcus Autism Center and funded with $1.5 million from the United Way over three years. It not only targets parents but nurses as well. A curriculum is being developed by a nursing professor to train nurses about the importance of social interaction with babies.

Another is the Too Small to Fail campaign, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation. It has started public campaigns with the purpose of “Educating parent about the importance of talking to one’s own baby.”

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But not so fast. Over the past decade, social workers, home-visiting nurses, doctors and other caregivers to at-risk children have been preaching talk to your baby to help eliminate the ‘word gap.’ But it’s obvious a large gap still exits. It may be because newer research suggests that it is far more than the quantity of words a baby or toddler hears that’s important. It’s the quality of each interaction that makes a difference, as reported by Esther J. Cepeda in an article for The Denver Post. That makes overcoming the word gap much more problematic.

She writes, “No longer will it be enough to push the ‘talk more’ solution. It appears as though attempting to teach parents how to direct speech to their children will be just the start. Now there will have to be forays into the thick weeds of trying to get parents to understand how to see the world through their child’s eyes.”

Cepeda also reports, “At a recent White House event on bridging the word gap, The New York Times reports, Temple University’s Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek presented research that carried some pointed advice: Parents must be very intentional and specific in their speech to infants and toddlers — a tall, and maybe bewildering, order for those who themselves weren’t brought up that way.”

Parental beliefs about the general nature of intelligence have been shown to influence parental behavior during parent-child interactions. So it’s important that parents have a better understanding of baby and toddler abilities and child development. The better that is understood, the better the verbal interactions. So parental training – pushed by the Obama administration – is apparently an essential part in helping narrow the “word gap.”