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.
You only have to look at how well middle-class children do at school compared with children from low-income families to see just how important the formative years are. Two educationalists at the University of Durham have just published a book about academies and one of their findings is that the attainment of middle-class children doesn’t vary much according to what school they go to. They tend to do well even in poorly performing schools.
Common sense suggests it’s because their parents are more likely to take an interest in their education, but while that may be true, it’s pushiness during the very early years that makes the difference. Middle-class children are a year ahead of disadvantaged children by the age of five and they remain in front throughout their school careers.
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