Status Anxiety: Baby talk can close the attainment gap

You’d be forgiven for thinking it was dreamt up by a Notting Hill yummy mummy. Talk to Your Baby is a national campaign that has just been launched by the National Literary Trust and it’s deadly serious. According to the campaign’s website, ‘Talking to young children helps them become good communicators, which is essential if they are to do well at school and lead happy, fulfilled and successful lives.’

It sounds absolutely barmy — the parenting equivalent of talking to plants — but in fact there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that talking to children under three has an almost magical effect on their cognitive development and transforms them into more intelligent adults.

A recent study by a group of Harvard economists, for instance, found that children who have had a good nursery education earn, on average, $20 per week more than their peers by the time they’re 27. That remains true even if you allow for all the usual factors: socio-economic status, good primary and secondary education, etc.