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Foreword
Written by Todd Risley, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Alaska Senior Scientist, Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, University of Kansas, December 2006
In 1995, Betty Hart and I released the findings of a longitudinal research study that we had conducted for over a decade. Our book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Hart & Risely, 1995) described how we learned that the most important ingredient in the recipe for a child's future academic success is the sheer volume of talk that the child's parents have with the childfrom the child's birth until age three.
It was a study rooted in the history of the War on Poverty. We knew long before we conducted our study that children differed greatly in how fast they acquired language skills and subsequently developed academically. We wanted to know why.
We discovered that race and ethnicity has no bearing on a child's academic success. In fact, even disadvantages attributed to socioeconomic status can be overcome. What matters is this: The more parents talk with their child from birth to age three, the more likely their child will excel academically later in life. And that sets the stage for other successes in the child's future.
If a parent only talks a little bit, the conversation is only about business. "Stop that." "Get down from there." "Come here." But when a parent advances the conversation beyond business, the topics automatically change. The words used in conversation change, too. And that makes all the difference later in the child's intellectual life.
As is the case with most academic studies, we encountered certain limitations. The first was that we observed and recorded our 42 participants for only one hour every month. Also, the youngest children in our study were about seven months old, so we could only speculate about language development for children younger than that.